This weekend, Maine Democrats showed overwhelmingly that they believe the former logger and longtime state senator can unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Troy Jackson
(Aren LeBrun/cc) ELlsworth, Melder—More than 500 Mainers gathered in a middle school cafeteria Saturday morning. Party officials, activists and voters were meeting to choose the 23 delegates Hancock County would send to a nominating convention after Graham Platner withdrew from the race eight days earlier, following a credible rape accusation. Platner grew up a short drive away and his mother runs a store in town, so his presence loomed over the proceedings. Many attendees still wore “Platner for Senate” shirts, and someone had addressed him and his wife with an oversized sheet of paper, with dozens of supporters leaving notes such as “Your message stands” and “Be proud of what you started.” A note that could only have been written in Downeast Maine read: “Graham, you are the leaven that made this dough rise! We could not bake the bread without your power.”
As soon as the state Democratic Party announced the rules for Platner’s replacement, the race shifted to who could fill the void he left behind. Given how many people were activated by Platner’s campaign, most progressives here were clear-eyed in their belief that the only way to beat Susan Collins — who triumphed over establishment figure after establishment figure over the course of five elections — was to find a candidate who could make an equally compelling argument for supporting the working class and destroying corrupt systems of power.
Standing at a picnic table outside, a delegate candidate from Blue Hill named Carole Beal told me, “I voted for a movement, not a man.” » For her, the choice was clear: Troy Jackson, a former logger and longtime state senator from North Woods, was Platner’s closest political partner and seemed to have the ability to connect with disengaged Mainers in the same way that Platner did. “We want to see a senator in suspenders and LL Bean boots…”
Before Beal could finish his thought, a bagpiper dressed in a red tartan suit began playing a tune, indicating that we should follow him inside the school gymnasium for the vote. I walked through groups of enthusiastic voters sipping Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and found a delegate candidate named Jana Robinson, who had hung a billboard on her back with a photo of Jackson and his two main rivals: Nirav Shah, who had led Maine’s public health response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. All three also ran for governor in last month’s primary, a race in which Shah appeared poised to triumph before falling to second place behind the eventual winner, House Speaker Hannah Pingree, due to Maine’s choice system.
As if Maine’s normal election mechanics weren’t complicated enough, the legal requirement to replace Platner on the ballot by July 27 meant the state party was committed to finding a new Senate candidate through a compressed conventional process. The Ellsworth meeting was just one of 16 held last weekend, with registered Democrats in each of Maine’s 16 counties coming together to elect a total of 500 delegates. Then, on July 25, those delegates would join 101 party officials at a statewide convention, and the candidate receiving 301 or more votes at the convention would win the nomination.
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Robinson, who lives on Mount Desert Island near Acadia National Park, was handing out markers and asking people to put a check under the person they were supporting. “I didn’t want to commit to just one candidate,” Robinson told me, “because I felt like I represented everyone involved in Graham’s campaign who isn’t there.” Despite Shah’s strong performance in the gubernatorial race, Jackson led Robinson’s poll. After we sat down in the bleachers, a woman sitting next to Robinson leaned over and said, “You can add two more votes for Troy: My daughter and I both support him.”
By the end of the weekend, Jackson would indeed become the decisive winner of the 16 county conventions. At least 456 of the 500 elected delegates promised that they would vote for Jackson at the nominating convention in Bangor this Saturday. All of Jackson’s rivals have dropped out, ending any speculation about who Democrats believe is best positioned to continue the energy unleashed by Platner in their latest bid to unseat Susan Collins.
Jackson himself seems stunned by the way progressive activists have rallied around him over the past week. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he told me before the county meetings. “In 2016, with Bernie Sanders, I thought that was the most exciting campaign I had ever been a part of. But this eclipses that.”
Jackson’s campaign got out of the starting blocks faster than its rivals, allowing it to stay ahead during the week-long sprint of a campaign to identify, secure and elect delegates. At the same time, the scale of Jackson’s victory suggests that it was not just due to his organizational prowess, but the result of broader movement politics. Many supporters signed up to become Jackson delegates in their respective county races, not because anyone from his campaign asked them to, but because it felt natural to them. “We took down our Jackson signs after Platner dropped out,” said Jennifer Temple, who lives in Lincolnville. “We put tape on them to say ‘Senate’ instead of ‘Governor’ because we saw a neighbor had done that. At that time we didn’t even know if he was going to run.”
Early in this process, Democrats in Waldo County, part of the Midcoast region that stretches between Portland and Acadia, gathered for their regular monthly meeting. The state party had just released the rules for the special nominating convention, so Imke Schessler, the party’s vice chair, joined on Zoom to explain how everything would work. “If you’re tired, angry, confused, I’m with you,” Schessler told attendees, pleading for patience as the party worked to create a fair process. “We build the car while we drive it.”
With only a few days left for potential delegates to register, most of the questions Schessler asked were about exactly what they could say in the biography that would be made available to each voter. At this point, it was unclear whether delegates were even allowed to explicitly support a candidate. “We will not infringe on anyone’s freedom of speech,” Schessler said. “This includes what they write in the blurb and how they vote.”
Jennifer Temple attended this meeting and was happy to be able to explicitly express her support for Jackson in the biography she submitted in her registration form. “I knew if we needed anyone it would be Troy, because he was most closely aligned with Platner in terms of policy.” Between that and Jackson’s accessibility, it seemed like a no-brainer. “My first experience with Troy,” Temple said, “he came in his beat-up minivan to someone’s barn to have a conversation. It seemed incredibly sweet to me.”
“I’ve been in politics for 22 years here in Maine,” Jackson told me, referring to his long tenure in the state Legislature. During that time, he represented the House and then Senate district surrounding Allagash, his hometown of just over 200 people in the far north of the state, right next to the Canadian border. Although less polished than Shah or Bellows, and far from the charismatic orator Platner, Jackson is a staunch defender of the rural working class. “I wear my heart on my sleeve,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing that people are not politicians, that they are honest and sincere on these issues. It’s a very clear choice for people. I mean, what you see is what you get.”
Although Temple made the decision to support Jackson alone, her daughter received a call from the campaign encouraging her to run as well. The importance of this type of recruitment was highlighted by Todd Chrétien of Portland. “Any responsible candidate who is serious about winning has a massive volunteer operation in every county,” he said. “It’s about phone banking, talking to neighbors and co-workers. The people of Troy are doing it more effectively than other campaigns, and that’s why he’s going to win.”
Jackson’s campaign acknowledged it could block the nomination well before the convention itself by emphasizing these kinds of get-out-the-vote tactics. Using the list of volunteers from his gubernatorial race, Jackson’s staff spent all week working the phones to recruit delegates in all 16 counties, as well as making sure as many supporters as possible understood that to vote for those delegates, they would have to pre-register through the state party website. Meanwhile, his main rival, Nirav Shah, was waging a larger campaign. Shah embarked on a “Defeat Susan Collins” tour that included town halls in Freeport and Bangor. On Friday, advertisements for his campaign were broadcast on the New York Times home page. He, Bellows and the other candidates appeared slow to understand that this abbreviated process was not about reaching all of Maine’s Democratic voters but about getting delegates to the convention.
To that end, Jackson’s campaign was the first to release a list of delegates from each county that voters could use as a guide at their respective meetings. Shah and Bellows’ campaigns rushed to create their own lists, but were clearly outmaneuvered: On Saturday in Ellsworth, Shah’s list initially included the leader of Jackson’s organizing effort in Hancock County, state Rep. Nina Millikin. At one point, while I was chatting with a few delegate candidates, a Shah volunteer leaned over and asked, “Have you received the new lists?” He handed over a paper in which Millikin’s name had been crossed out and replaced with the name of a real supporter in ink.
The emphasis on list voting disadvantaged anyone attempting to run as an unaffiliated delegate. Late last week, a National Nurses United organizer, Alex Newell Taylor, told me that she had created a Google form that she planned to “send to everyone I know. I’ll make my own decision, but I feel like I should hear from as many people as possible, especially unregistered voters” who had been left out of the process.
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In Ellsworth, I caught up with Taylor while chatting with Leslie Jones, another aspiring delegate who had explicitly avoided committing to any candidate. Jones had arrived with a basket of lollipops bearing her name in the hope of winning in-person support, but she soon realized that the slates meant such an election campaign would go nowhere. “It’s something I wanted passionately,” Jones said, “so it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.” Taylor nodded, looking a little glum. Although disappointed, Taylor said delegates’ support for Jackson made sense given her union’s support. “I just heard Bernie in my ear say, ‘Not me, us.'”
Although the gymnasium was filled with lively discussion as everyone gathered to vote, the crowd quickly dispersed when it became clear that Hancock County Democrats would keep a digital voting window open much longer than originally planned. By the time county party chairwoman Marcia Myers was ready to announce the results, nearly two hours after voting began, only a dozen delegate candidates and media members remained in the cavernous gymnasium. Nevertheless, we rushed to the desk where Myers was standing; Millikin, on the phone with someone from the Jackson campaign, told them, “Don’t say anything, okay? I’ll make you listen,” and placed his phone on the lectern in front of Myers.
As Myers read the names of the winners, Millikin knelt before his list of Jackson delegates, frantically checking. It was a rout: All but one of the delegates elected in Hancock County had pledged to vote for Jackson. His dominant performance was the first sign Saturday that Jackson would easily win the nomination, capped by a 148-of-149 delegate victory later that night in Cumber, Portland. land county, the largest in the state.
When it was originally scheduled for next Saturday, it was easy to imagine that the Bangor convention would be a scene away from the smoke-filled halls of old, with party members facing off round after round in a bruising brawl until a consensus candidate emerged. Instead, Jackson’s wanderings into county meetings mean the convention will now serve a more contemporary purpose: a platform for the chosen candidate to unify his party and turn his eyes toward the general election. In the space of just over a week, Troy Jackson found himself able to finish what Graham Platner started. “It’s about continuing the movement,” Jackson told me. “Continuing to push for universal health care, prescription drugs, child care, making sure corporations stop screwing people over. These are things I’ve fought against my whole life.”
Kyle Paoletta Kyle Paoletta is a contributing writer to Columbia Journalism Review and the author of American Oasis: Finding the Future in Southwest Citiest.
