Troy Jackson, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, speaks during a demonstration outside of a federal immigration office after a man was fatally shot by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, on July 14, in Scarborough, Maine.Ryan Murphy/Getty Images
A state whose economic and cultural identity is rooted in commercial fishing and forest products seems about to replace a firebrand oyster farmer with a firebrand logger as its Democratic senatorial candidate.
This increasingly likely midsummer substitution, prompted by the collapse of the campaign of Graham Platner amid charges of sexual misconduct, reflects the character of Maine’s traditional economy − and affirms the character of the Democratic campaign against Republican Sen. Susan Collins. The party appears to be on the verge of sending Troy Jackson, a leader of the 1998 loggers’ blockade to protest the hiring of lower-paid Canadian workers, into battle in perhaps the most watched Senate race of the season.
The fatal shooting of a motorist by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent last week may have transformed the state’s leftist drift into a mainstream consensus.
Mr. Jackson, 58, had a strong showing in the 16 county nominating committees held across the state over the weekend. He acquired much of the support held only weeks ago by Mr. Platner, whom Mr. Jackson had endorsed. Both had the support of democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who earlier this year backed Mr. Jackson in his unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic nomination for Governor.
Though Mr. Jackson possesses more traditional political experience than Mr. Platner − he was president of the state Senate for six years, until late 2024, and spent six years in the state House of Representatives − his platform is consistent with the new-model Democrats of a progressive stripe: end military aid to Israel, abolish ICE, boost taxes on billionaires, institute a Canadian-style health care system, support LGBTQ rights.
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Like Prime Minister Mark Carney, Mr. Jackson is from a remote outpost: Born in the border town of Fort Kent, connected by bridge to New Brunswick, he now lives in the town of Allagash, population 234 − about a tenth the size of Mr. Carney’s hometown of Fort Smith, N.W.T.
“He’s not especially articulate, not quick on his feet and not a good debater,” G. Calvin Mackenzie, an emeritus political scientist at Colby College in Waterville, Me., and co-author of the 2008 book The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s, said in an interview. “But his heart’s in the right place for most Mainers. He’s authentic. He looks like your neighbour. And hatred for Donald Trump in Maine is just overwhelming − and Susan Collins is caught up in that.”
His nomination isn’t inevitable, however. There’s a debate Thursday, and the final decision will be made in a special convention Saturday, just ahead of the July 27 deadline for picking a replacement for Mr. Platner.
Maine has emerged as an unlikely battlefield in a brutal internecine struggle among Democrats over the party’s profile for the remainder of the Trump years and into the post-Trump era, a parallel to the struggle a decade ago in the GOP between establishment Republicans and the new, rebellious vanguard now known by the MAGA shorthand Mr. Trump made famous − then made powerful.
In Maine, as elsewhere, rebellious Democrats impatient that the party and its leaders − especially Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who was warned, explicitly and forcefully, to stay out of the selection of a new Senate nominee here − haven’t adjusted more aggressively and effectively to the new environment created by the Trump ascendancy.
They’ve called for a fresh approach with a distinct leftward leaning. This has occurred while traditional Democrats have warned that even former Vice-President Kamala Harris − who won Maine statewide by seven percentage points in 2024, yet lost the northern district by nine points − was too progressive in the battle for voters in the middle and for independents, who increasingly hold the balance of power in American politics.
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All this is occurring as Maine seems to be completing a process of political transformation as dramatic as the one that swept the South in recent decades, only in the opposite direction.
The state voted Democratic just once in the 27 presidential elections between 1856 and 1960, and then only because William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote in 1912. But it has gone Democratic in the past nine presidential elections, though each of the three times Mr. Trump has run he won a single electoral vote as a result of Maine’s peculiar system of distributing election results.
However, Maine generally alternates between Republican and Democratic governors, and perhaps its best-known modern senators include two Republicans (Margaret Chase Smith and Bill Cohen) and two Democrats (Edmund Muskie and George Mitchell), along with one Independent (Angus King, a senator and formerly a Governor).
Mr. Jackson is more in the combative mould of Thomas Brackett Reed, the late 19th-century House speaker from Maine known for his dictum that “the best system is to have one party govern and the other party watch,” than the contemplative mode of Maine’s Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the revered Union hero of the Battle of Gettysburg, a polymath professor, state Governor and Bowdoin College president.
Though Mr. Jackson, who was removed by police from the woods in the loggers’ blockade, is dressed in a blue suit over a blue check shirt and red tie in his official state Senate presidential portrait, in his introductory Senate campaign video he appears in a blue T-shirt emblazoned with the word “SOLIDARITY.”