The Democratic Party’s hopes for taking back control of the US Senate may soon rest with a gruff fifth-generation logger from the North Maine Woods.
Troy Jackson, a former state legislator and self-described “working-class fighter” from Allagash — a small town on the US-Canada border with a population of just 237 — is poised to be named Maine’s Democratic nominee for the Senate.
His nomination at a convention on Saturday will cap a tumultuous two and a half weeks for the Democratic Party in the state, where earlier this month populist oysterman Graham Platner was forced to abandon his own Senate bid in the face of sexual assault allegations.
But Jackson’s nomination will also fire the starting gun on a mad-dash effort by the Democrats to defeat longtime Republican senator Susan Collins, a well-funded incumbent with a record of winning tough races by appealing to independent voters.
The party’s leaders see Maine — a relatively poor state that has trended Democratic in recent years but continued to elect Republican senators — as a must-win if they are to take back control of the Senate from Donald Trump and the Republicans.
“Democrats in Maine have been hungry for this populist, shake-things-up, go-after-the-establishment type of candidate,” said Mark Brewer, chair of the political science department at the University of Maine. “Is that going to be enough to beat Collins in November?”
But the New York Times poll raised alarm bells among Democrats, showing Collins had more than a 20-point advantage among likely voters without a university degree, a crucial voting bloc that Democrats have struggled to win over in the Trump era.
A longtime supporter of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, Jackson, 58, has already pitched himself as a bona fide champion of the working class. His campaign sells T-shirts with slogans including “Johnny Cash of the Allagash” and “Not Safe for Scabs”, a reference to Jackson’s longstanding support for labour unions.
He got his start in politics in 1998, when he led a blockade along the US-Canada border protesting corporate landowners hiring Canadian workers.
“Power does not give working people anything out of the goodness of its heart. Sometimes you have to make the people in charge so uncomfortable that they can’t ignore you anymore,” Jackson told backers at a rally last weekend, as it became clear that he had racked up enough support to be Platner’s replacement.
That message resonates with Democrats like state legislator Nina Milliken, who initially endorsed Platner but quickly moved to rally support for Jackson when he dropped out.
“I don’t think either party right now is doing well by working-class people,” said Milliken, who represents Blue Hill, a progressive enclave on Maine’s coast, in the state legislature.
“It is the responsibility of the Democratic Party to hear the voices of people across this country who are begging at this point for a different type of politics, and who are frankly jumping ship from the Democratic Party because they are not receiving what they need,” she added.
The Maine AFL-CIO, a federation of labour unions with a combined membership of 40,000, has vowed to mobilise its political machine to turn out support for Jackson in November.
“There are a lot of union members who would give Troy the shirt off their back because he has always done the same for them,” said Matt Schlobohm, the group’s executive director.
“People are very hungry for a politics that addresses the core concerns of working people,” Schlobohm added. “People are feeling squeezed six ways to Sunday by the rising costs of housing and healthcare and childcare and groceries, and are deeply frustrated by a political system that does not have workers’ interests at heart.”
Marcia Myers, chair of the Democratic Party in Hancock County, which includes Blue Hill and Platner’s hometown of Sullivan, said Jackson was the candidate “most closely aligned” with Platner’s progressive policy agenda, such as Medicare for All, taxing billionaires, abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and cutting off military aid to Israel.
But Myers noted Jackson had a “very different” style to Platner, a charismatic public speaker who had held more than 80 town halls across the state by the time he abandoned his campaign. Jackson has not held a public event since Sunday.
“Jackson will not have the personal baggage that Platner had,” said Charlie Cook, a non-partisan political analyst who now lives in Maine. “But at the same time, he does not have a tenth of the candidate abilities that Platner had.”
Jackson supporters are quick to point out that the former state legislator has a record of winning as a progressive in a traditionally conservative rural part of the state. While Trump has never won Maine statewide, Jackson hails from Aroostook County, a place that voted overwhelmingly for the president in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
Republican critics argue Jackson’s positions are too far outside the mainstream to appeal to swing voters. “The Democrat Party has been taken over by socialists, and they have lost their identity,” said Valerie Moon, chair of the Hancock County Republicans.
“They took a trust-fund kid and tried to make him look like a fisherman,” she added, in reference to Platner, whose campaign was embarrassed by reports that the candidate’s father gave him $200,000 to buy a house. “Troy Jackson is whatever he thinks can get him votes.”
Some Democrats in Maine say they feel burned by the Platner saga and need to be convinced that Jackson — who earlier in his career supported far more conservative social policies, including a nationwide ban on abortions, wider gun access and a ban on same-sex marriage — deserves their support.
“There is a bridge to be had, and I think Graham Platner was creating that bridge,” said one Democratic voter in Blue Hill, who declined to give her name for fear of what she described as retribution from local Republicans.
“Troy Jackson, 10 minutes ago he was against gay marriage and pro-life for Christ’s sake,” the voter added.
By contrast, an ill-fated campaign by Jackson for governor of Maine raised just over $1mn and ended with roughly $150,000 on hand, though Jackson now says he has raised an additional $1mn since he launched his Senate bid earlier this month.
The Platner campaign had roughly $1.8mn cash on hand at the end of June, according to the latest filings, and it remains unclear whether any of that money will be transferred to Jackson’s effort.
Collins supporters point out that money cannot buy an election victory. Six years ago, she won re-election by more than eight points even as her Democratic challenger outspent her by more than a two-to-one margin.
Her allies nevertheless insist that her bipartisan credentials and long record of delivering results for Maine — including as chair of the powerful Senate appropriations committee, funnelling hundreds of millions of federal dollars back to the cash-strapped state — will allow her to win once again in November.
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Bob Tyrer, a longtime friend of Collins who ran her first US Senate campaign in 1996, said most Maine voters were not ideological and would ultimately reward the senator for her independent streak, including a long record of distancing herself from Trump.
Collins has said she did not vote for the president in 2024 and wrote in the name of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley on her ballot instead.
“There is a much greater degree of practical centrists and people who make their political decisions based on how someone has been performing over a long period of time,” said Tyrer.
Brewer, the University of Maine professor, agreed.
“The key to victory in this race in November is going to lie with voters in the centre,” he said. “It is hard to see a progressive, far-left policy campaign doing that.”
Additional reporting by Ian Hodgson in Washington