How Troy Jackson went from wildcat attacker to Democratic Senate candidate.
Troy Jackson, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate for Maine, speaks at the Maine Democratic Party’s special state convention in Bangor, Maine, July 25, 2026.
(Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Banchor, Melder— As delegates to the Maine Democratic Party’s special nominating convention Saturday morning filed into a convention center in the former “lumber capital of the world,” a covered truck sponsored by Teamsters Local 340 pulled up to the sidewalk. It flew “Troy Jackson for Senate” flags from the hood, and the trucker inside raised his fist to kick out attendees. Inside, a handful of union officials compared notes on the fifth-generation logger and former state Senate President Troy Jackson. improbable rise from second runner-up in the gubernatorial primary to emergency Senate candidate. Jake Teitelbaum, treasurer of the Maine Service Employees Association, a union that represents state employees, told me: “Maybe some of the other candidates could mobilize money quickly, but Troy had a connection to the workplace. And we mobilize people.”
Jackson’s political career began in the late 1990s when he joined 14 fellow loggers in a wildcat strike in northern Maine. It’s no surprise that during his two decades as a state legislator from Augusta, his support for the labor movement was unwavering. Those enduring ties are part of why Jackson was able to outwit his rivals to secure enough delegates to turn Saturday’s convention into a coronation ceremony.
As the assembled delegates waited to be seated in the room where her nomination would be made official, some gathered around a television playing clips of Susan Collins expressing concern over the Trump administration’s many outrages, then picked up signs reading “Retire Susan” on one side and “No more worries” on the other. Everyone who wasn’t already carrying SEIU or UAW gifts found themselves donning a blue or yellow Troy Jackson shirt to show party unity.
One exception was BJ McCollister, one of Jackson’s top campaign strategists, who stood near the television in a blue suit, his eyes watering. McCollister said he had barely slept in days, but it didn’t bother him. “I’ve been working in Maine politics for 15 years,” he said, “and I’ve never seen anything this energetic in the last week.” McCollister told me that more than 1,000 volunteers jumped into action as soon as Graham Platner dropped out of the Senate race, allowing Jackson’s hastily launched campaign to contact tens of thousands of Mainers before the vote. the county meetings where his victory was assured. When I asked what it would take to maintain this level of energy through the general election, McCollister cited union support: “Troy has always stood up for them and now they’re standing up for him.” »
McCollister excused himself as delegates began to make their way to the convention hall to find their seats. In a rush, I found Cynthia Phinney, the president of the Maine AFL-CIO. “We’ve had so many successes in the Legislature that Troy has been key to,” Phinney enthused, ticking off a few on one hand: raising the prevailing wage for workers on state-funded construction projects, ensuring apprenticeship programs recruit women and minorities, and combating wage theft. Phinney was particularly complimentary of Jackson’s willingness to fight with Gov. Janet Mills to mandate union labor on major projects, a years-long fight that culminated in 2023 when Mills vetoed project work agreements for the offshore wind industry. “Labor standards are one of the things that many people are the first to give in to when it comes time to compromise,” Phinney said. “Troy doesn’t back down on these things. They are fundamental to any project he supports.”
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If Troy Jackson can defeat Susan Collins in November, he will immediately become one of the most influential voices in the labor movement in Washington. With that in mind, I interviewed prominent Maine organizers as well as Jackson’s colleagues in Augusta before Saturday’s convention to get a better sense of exactly how his commitment to unions has manifested itself over the years in a place not typically associated with the labor movement.
“It’s a rural state,” said Beth Edmonds, who led the Maine Senate when Jackson was first elected in 2008. To her, Jackson’s career proves that labor is not synonymous with the urban working class. “When you organize a union here,” she said, “you do it in a much smaller, more local way. But I think that’s what more and more people are asking for as the economy continues to separate people with enormous wealth from the rest of us.” Jackson embodies this broadening of the movement. “Troy represents those who have been in the field for a long time,” Edmonds said. “I think it’s going to speak to a lot of people.”
The first time that a photo de Jackson made headlines in 1998, he stood between two fellow lumberjacks dressed in flat-brimmed Chicago Bulls flannel shirts, all staring down Maine State Police officers amid the blockade of a border crossing with Quebec. The blockade was one of many implemented over decades to prevent logging companies in the northern tip of Maine from hiring Canadian loggers. Because these workers benefited from health care subsidized by the Quebec government, companies had long sought them out to avoid paying for the benefits that American loggers demanded.
Jackson once said Maine Beacon about how his father’s life had been similarly upended a generation earlier, when his bosses had reclassified his status within the company. “One day he’s an employee, and the next day he’s an entrepreneur,” Jackson said. “I mean, it just happened.” By the late 1990s, loggers like Jackson had plenty of reason to believe that people in a profession that had been the backbone of Maine’s economy for two centuries were being left behind.
As the 1998 blockade brought national attention to the plight of loggers, Jackson realized that they would have to embrace systemic change if they hoped for better employment conditions. It remains a founding event in his life. On Saturday, Jackson recalled the episode. “This fight opened my eyes,” he told the crowd of delegates during his victory speech. “I went from someone who didn’t want to step out of line – who was told not to step out of line – to the point where I now understand that you to have stand out because the people in power keep us there. “The workers,” he continues, “are not powerless. We are only made for feel powerless when we are alone, and that is what they are trying to do: divide us. And that’s why I entered public life.
Jackson was elected to the House of Representatives in 2002, representing the district surrounding his hometown of Allagash in Aroostook County, and then was elected to the state Senate in 2008. Although much has been made of his early conservative views on social issues (Jackson initially opposed abortion and same-sex marriage, before becoming a champion of women’s and LGBTQ reproductive rights as Senate president), no one never doubted his unwavering commitment to work. In 2019 he sponsored and succeeded legislation this allowed loggers to finally engage in collective negotiations with logging companies.
“Troy has been a staunch working-class progressive from day one,” said Betsy Sweet, a longtime activist known for running heated primaries against centrist Democrats like Mills and Sara Gideon, Collins’ most recent challenger. While domestic observers have criticized Jackson’s halting pace in his speeches and his approach to politics, Sweet believes those qualities are exactly why he has so much credibility with the working class. “He’s different. He’s not polite. He doesn’t have a consultant to tell him what to do,” she said. “He kind of follows his instincts, but he understands.” You don’t have to be a stunning speaker to touch people if you have “this visceral feeling of injustice. It’s innate. It’s in the fabric of who he is.”
A case in point is how Jackson supported an effort to unionize nurses at Maine Medical Center, the state’s largest hospital, in 2021. In an op-ed for the Portland Press HeraldJackson recounted undergoing a heart procedure at Maine Med while pandemic protocols were still in full effect. “Like most Mainers who have been hospitalized during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Jackson wrote, “I was completely alone.” He described how it was the nurses at the hospital who “calmed my anxiety, answered my questions and got me back on my feet.”
“After everything these nurses have done for me,” he continued, “the least I can do is be there for them when they need me. »
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Beyond his rhetorical support for the organizing drive, Kelli Brennan, a nurse at Maine Med, told me that Jackson had proven to be a major ally to their union in Augusta. The first time she met Jackson was at a lobbying event hosted by the Maine AFL-CIO, when she and other nurses visited the Senate chamber. “He made sure we all had a place to sit, pulled up a chair, and then he let us participate in a roundtable discussion about our issues,” Brennan said. At the time, their main priority was to pass a bill that would create a nurse-to-patient ratio in Maine hospitals. “He knew our bill might have some areas that would be difficult to get other people to compromise on, but that didn’t stop him from supporting us,” Brennan said. (Jackson managed to guide the invoice by the Senate, although it failed to gain approval in the State House.)
Portland State Senator Jill Duson was also impressed by Jackson’s approachability. While their districts — the state’s largest city and least populous county — seem diametrically opposed to each other, Duson said, “I found him to be very open to hearing our concerns and providing helpful advice on how we might approach legislators in other communities.” » This included a bill that would have helped the team The Portland minor league baseball team, the Sea Dogs, to renovate their stadium — an issue that is sure to draw resistance from the rest of the state. For Jackson, the key was to highlight how including labor protections for construction workers renovating the stadium could set a precedent for future projects. “Troy was instrumental,” Duson said, asserting “that this was not a Portland bill. That the Sea Dogs’ success was a statewide success – and we actually got it passed!”
Now, Jackson is ready to get into fights much bigger than haggling over labor deals on the AA ballpark project. Reflecting on Jackson’s emergence as a national champion of the working class, Sweet told me, “I think there are people in Washington right now who are panicking. They thought they could put it back in the bottle.” Having chaired Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in Maine in 2016, Jackson would undoubtedly join the Vermont senator among the most progressive lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Jackson said that if elected, he would not support Chuck Schumer’s leadership bid, push to abolish ICE and refuse to approve sending any military funding to Israel.
After delegates made Jackson’s nomination official Saturday, organizers played a song by another favorite son of rural New England, Noah Kahan. The roughly 700 attendees stood, waving “Retire Susan” signs in front of an American flag that covered the entirety of one wall, while Kahan’s bright guitar and telling lyrics – “Forgive my Nordic attitude / Oh, I was raised in the cold” – briefly filled the room. Just as quickly, as Jackson took the stage, chants of “Troy! Troy! Troy!” » drowned out the music, his crooked smile widening as he recognized the cheers.
After relieving himself Thanks, Jackson turned to the subject at hand. “Susan Collins keeps telling us everything is fine,” he said, to boos and at least one delegate shouting, “That’s bullshit!” Jackson pointed out that Collins had been in the Senate since he and the other loggers were organizing their border blockade. “I was just trying to figure out how to continue to take care of my family,” Jackson said. “Thirty years later, Susan Collins is still in Washington.”
“They act like we’re idiots,” Jackson said, stopping to raise his hands in disbelief. “But we all have eyes. We can see what’s happening. We can see our paychecks and the bills we have. We know we’re being screwed, and we also know who’s to blame. I’m running to change that.”
Kyle Paoletta Kyle Paoletta is a contributing writer to Columbia Journalism Review and the author of American Oasis: Finding the Future in Southwest Citiest.
