Defending Main Street’s Portland ads: the filings, the Google record, the counts and the limits

Companion to the editorial. The FEC filing for the committee’s Maine buy, the Google Ads Transparency Center record for the creative the Intercept cites with its full ZIP-code list, the coverage table, the desk’s arithmetic and the limits. Government and Google figures are as those records print them; counts, ratios and time conversions are the desk’s and are labelled.

What was read, and when

Everything below was collected on 12 October 2026 (Eastern; source timestamps are UTC unless a line says otherwise). The Intercept article was published at 12:49 p.m. Eastern (16:49:14 UTC) and modified at 2:04:53 p.m. Eastern (18:04:53 UTC) with a correction to its time-zone count. The desk read the Google creative page through a scraper at about 18:03 UTC, through Google’s machine-readable record (observed 18:05:26 UTC), and in a browser with the full location list opened at about 18:11 UTC. The three agreed. At 19:40:30 UTC (3:40 p.m. Eastern) the machine-readable record again listed the same 195 postal-code IDs, dates and ranges, and OpenFEC listed no committee filing after the 8 October Form 24.

The FEC record

The committee

The Maine line (Form 24 48-hour notice, filing FEC-2018243, signed 8 October 2026)

Links: HTML viewer, Schedule E; PDF image 202610089908577465. The form has no field for a media market, station or platform. The committee’s filings list shows no filing dated after 8 October; the desk saw no amendment.

Receipts from the Republican Main Street Partnership

Senate-office independent expenditures by the committee, all cycles on file in OpenFEC

A query for Susan M. Collins (S6ME00159) as candidate, committee C00540203, returned 0 rows. A query on candidate office state ME returned the single Jackson row above. Marshall, Husted, Young and Capito are four of the nine senators on the Partnership’s members page, which also lists Collins. These are statements about one database; they do not show that the committee never acted for Collins.

Other filers opposing Jackson in the same days

In the newest 100 of 263 OpenFEC Schedule E rows carrying Jackson’s candidate ID (S6ME00464), 99 are dated 24 September to 9 October 2026. Seven filer IDs report oppose in those rows (C00946921, C00571703, C00879510, C00961342, C00922294, C90018904, C00894709) and eight report support. This committee’s ID does not appear in that query; its Jackson line was found by a query on committee and state.

Context only: earlier Oregon and Washington lines

The committee’s 2024 filings include television, digital and mail expenditures in Oregon and Washington House races through the same two vendors: opposing Janelle Bynum (OR), $120,000 and $16,314.48 on 13 September, $250,603.44 on 23 September and $50,000 on 11 October; supporting Andrea Townsend (OR), $30,000 on 24 October; opposing Jerrod Sessler (WA), $100,000 on 11 October and $50,000 of mail on 2 October; and supporting Dan Newhouse (WA), $100,000 on 15 July. They are listed because a reader may ask. The desk draws no inference from them about the 2026 buy.

The Google Ads Transparency Center record

Advertiser: Defending Main Street Superpac Inc, advertiser ID AR11247976533077262337, EIN 46-1657237, “Advertiser has verified their identity.” The page says of its targeting section: “This information reflects who this advertiser was trying to reach and where. Political advertisers are restricted to selecting demographics for this ad by age, gender, and general location (postal code-level).”

Sum of the four ranges: $93,000 to $109,000; 4.5 million to 5.35 million times shown. Earlier entries for the advertiser date from September 2022 (three creatives, each under $5,000). Google’s location resolver labelled sampled IDs in the four lists Maine, Ohio, Kentucky and Colorado; no list contains a ZIP code beginning 97, 98 or 99. Google’s help page says “Location targeting is based on a variety of signals, including users’ settings, devices, and behavior on our platform, and is Google’s best effort to serve ads to users who meet your location settings” and describes a setting (“Presence or Interest”) that can reach people who “have shown an interest in your targeted locations”. The creative’s page does not say which setting the campaign used.

The 195 ZIP codes listed for the 8 to 11 October creative (sorted)

03901, 03902, 03903, 03904, 03905, 03906, 03907, 03908, 03909, 04001, 04002, 04003, 04005, 04008, 04009, 04010, 04011, 04015, 04017, 04019, 04020, 04021, 04022, 04024, 04027, 04029, 04030, 04032, 04037, 04038, 04039, 04040, 04041, 04042, 04043, 04046, 04047, 04048, 04049, 04050, 04051, 04055, 04061, 04062, 04064, 04066, 04068, 04069, 04071, 04072, 04073, 04074, 04076, 04079, 04083, 04084, 04085, 04086, 04087, 04088, 04090, 04091, 04092, 04093, 04095, 04096, 04097, 04101, 04102, 04103, 04105, 04106, 04107, 04108, 04110, 04210, 04216, 04217, 04219, 04220, 04221, 04222, 04224, 04226, 04231, 04236, 04237, 04238, 04239, 04240, 04250, 04252, 04253, 04254, 04255, 04256, 04257, 04258, 04259, 04260, 04261, 04263, 04265, 04268, 04270, 04274, 04276, 04280, 04281, 04282, 04284, 04285, 04287, 04289, 04290, 04292, 04294, 04330, 04342, 04344, 04345, 04346, 04348, 04350, 04351, 04352, 04353, 04355, 04357, 04358, 04359, 04360, 04363, 04364, 04530, 04535, 04537, 04538, 04539, 04541, 04543, 04544, 04547, 04548, 04551, 04553, 04554, 04555, 04556, 04558, 04562, 04563, 04564, 04568, 04571, 04572, 04573, 04574, 04576, 04578, 04579, 04645, 04658, 04841, 04843, 04847, 04851, 04852, 04853, 04854, 04856, 04858, 04859, 04861, 04862, 04863, 04864, 04901, 04917, 04918, 04927, 04936, 04938, 04947, 04955, 04956, 04963, 04964, 04966, 04970, 04982, 04983, 04984, 04988, 04989

Eight begin 041: 04101, 04102, 04103, 04105, 04106, 04107, 04108, 04110. Wikipedia’s entry for Portland, Maine lists the ZIP codes 04101–04104, 04108–04109, 04112, 04116 and 04122–04124; four of the eight (04101, 04102, 04103, 04108) fall inside that set.

Coverage table

At a recheck at 3:39 to 3:55 p.m. Eastern the desk found Newsweek (stamp 19:15:02, no zone stated), MS NOW (2:06 p.m. EDT, modified 19:38:02 UTC), the Washington Examiner (3:01 p.m. ET), the Bangor Daily News (19:20:19 UTC) and The New Republic (headline and summary only; not read in full), all after the Intercept and NBC. The committee’s statement appears in Newsweek, MS NOW and the Washington Examiner; the Bangor Daily News relays NBC’s reporting of a Cross Screen Media admission and refund and of CEO Sarah Chamberlain’s remarks. The Collins campaign had not responded when MS NOW published. The desk contacted no one. Reddit is not used.

The rules, in the FEC’s words

“Coordinated means made in cooperation, consultation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate, a candidate’s authorized committee or their agents, or a political party committee or its agents.” “Political committees that make independent expenditures must disclose them on Schedule E of their regular FEC report and also as required on 24-hour and 48-hour reports.” Source: FEC, making independent expenditures. Nothing in the record the desk reviewed says the committee’s Maine buy was coordinated with a candidate, and the Intercept does not allege it.

Arithmetic

Links

• The Intercept
• NBC News
• Google Ads Transparency Center, the 8 to 11 October creative
• Google Ads Transparency Center, the advertiser
• Google Ads Help, geographic location targeting
• FEC, committee C00540203
• FEC Form 24, Schedule E
• Republican Main Street Partnership, Defending Main Street
• Republican Main Street Partnership, members
• Defending Main Street
• Lillian Belle on X
• @waprog on X
• Wikipedia, Portland, Maine

What the desk could not verify or reach

• Where Google delivered the ad. The Transparency Center publishes the locations an advertiser selected and a US-wide impression range, and no delivery breakdown. The desk has no data on impressions in Portland, Oregon or anywhere else.
• The page’s history. The desk has no snapshot of the creative’s page from before 18:03 UTC, cannot see its edit history, and does not know whether the Intercept read a different state of it. The Intercept’s and the Washington Examiner’s description (ZIP codes in Oregon and Washington) is not what the page showed the desk at 2:03 to 2:15 p.m. or at 3:40 p.m. Eastern; Newsweek reports the ad was set to the correct region by Monday afternoon, which is consistent with a corrected page but is not a statement that the page changed.
• The body of the NBC News article. Only the headline, summary line and first sentence were readable, so the identity of NBC’s buyer, the source of the admission and the refund amount are unknown to the desk.
• Any statement made to the desk; it contacted no one. The committee’s and the vendor’s statements are as printed by Newsweek, MS NOW, the Washington Examiner and the Bangor Daily News (for NBC). The relation between Cross Screen Media, named by the Bangor Daily News, and Strategic Media Placement Inc., the FEC payee, is unknown to the desk.
• The FCC public inspection files. The public search interface (publicfiles.fcc.gov) returned “No Facility Found” for WCSH, WMTW, WGME, KGW, KATU and KPTV in every form the desk tried, so no station political file for the Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon markets was read. A Google video ad would not appear in a station file in any case; the $946,500 line’s “Streaming/TV/Cable” purpose leaves open other placements the desk could not check.
• The text of the ad itself. The desk did not play the creative; the Intercept quotes the line “Maine can’t afford Troy Jackson and all his taxes,” and the desk has not verified it.
• Whether the phrase the Intercept quotes from the committee (“most effective independent expenditure organization supporting the governing wing of the Republican Party”) appears on a page the desk could fetch. The committee’s own site and the Partnership’s page use the words “one of the nation’s most effective independent-expenditure organizations”.
• What “long” in “long associated with” rests on. OpenFEC holds no committee expenditure for Collins; the desk did not search other sources of association.