‘We Can’t Eat Road Salt’: Other Maine Takeaways

Mainers have spoken. One hundred and one days after a hastily assembled state convention gave him the nod to do battle with Sen. Susan Collins, Troy Jackson is a U.S. senator.

It was a stunning, almost fantastical journey-come-true for the former state Senate president and logger, the fifth generation of his family to work in the Maine woods along the Canadian border. He’d subbed in for the disgraced Graham Platner, who flamed out in July after tattoos and texts blew up his candidacy.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Jackson’s Senate run presented one of the biggest question marks in the country. But as the state’s residents like to say, “You don’t know Maine.” Early Wednesday morning, Jackson put the doubters down. Decisively. He buried the 30-year Republican incumbent 84 percent to 16 percent in Portland, the state’s largest city, and did equally well in its suburbs.

Both candidates hailed from northern Maine. Jackson grew up in Allagash, 70 miles from Collins’s hometown of Caribou, so the state’s prickly regional divide that often pits the rural north against the urbanized south was more muted in this contest. But the south is where the vote-rich cities and suburban population centers delivered for Jackson and where he spent the waning days of the campaign. Collins picked up the northern towns where her campaign wound down.

It wasn’t the most expensive Senate campaign in Maine history (2020 was), but Jackson and Collins managed to spend tens of millions on their campaigns, while other groups chimed in with hundreds of millions. Longtime Maine residents were surprised at the lengths to which at least one person went in his efforts to tip the result to the Republican. “We beat a failed trillionaire, so what do you think of us now?” Jackson said on early Wednesday morning, referring, of course, to Elon Musk, a Collins supporter.

Decked out in one of his trademark fleece vests emblazoned with a large button with a red line running through a pile of road salt with the words “We can’t eat road salt”—a reminder of his rejoinder to Collins’s boast about getting a tariff exception for those piles—Jackson spent half an hour thanking supporters and outlining his top priorities during his victory remarks in Portland.

Throughout the campaign, Jackson emphasized that one of his key goals was getting to grips with America’s health care crisis. “If you’re watching this after getting home from a shift or sitting at the table, wondering how you’re going to pay the next bill, I want you to hear something very clearly: You are sending somebody to Washington who knows exactly what that feels like,” he said.

He went on to mention how he had been impressed by the courage of the individuals who cried after town halls and told him about cutting pills in half, “if they could afford them at all,” he added.

Last week in Portland, he name-checked possible health care reform allies, including now newly elected Democrats who will join him in the Senate: Josh Turek of Iowa, Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota, James Talarico of Texas, and perhaps Mary Peltola of Alaska. “I think we’ll have a bloc that we can push it,” he told the Prospect. Three of the group won their races. Peltola’s race in Alaska is still tight and, with absentee, early, and rural votes still waiting to be counted, may not be called for days.

On the labor affairs front, Jackson, a rank-and-file union member, said that he already has a competition going with former and soon to be again Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown to see who can be the most labor-focused senator.

But the loudest and longest cheers at his victory celebration came for his pledge “to fight to abolish ICE” and “enforce immigration laws without abandoning our humanity.” Immigration terror had been brought home to Maine with the death of young father Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, killed by an ICE agent in the Portland suburb of Biddeford this summer.

The Jackson-Collins race was a study in profound contrasts. Collins had long ago become a creature of the Washington establishment, the blob that President Trump once disparaged as the swamp. She’d held no town halls in decades and resisted anything less than scripted encounters with her constituents. Her Biddeford office was vandalized Monday night for the second time this fall, and residents turned out to heckle her at public events.

Many Maine women never forgave or forgot her support that sent Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Nor were voters impressed by her efforts to intercede with President Trump on rural health care matters or tariff exceptions on road salt and other commodities.

For his part, Jackson, who has been a member of five different labor unions, proudly celebrated his working-class Maine roots. But in an episode that misjudged the tenor of the times, Collins unwisely decided to take up the Maine version of the nasty campaign rhetoric that had marred Republican races in places like Ohio and Mississippi. That was a fatal error.

One of her campaign surrogates, Bill Green, once a very popular Maine television personality, became her designated attacker. He cut a commercial saying that Jackson “didn’t have the tools” to serve in the Senate.

In response, Jackson picked up a chainsaw and cut an ad in front of a neatly stacked pile of firewood, saying that he wouldn’t “buy wood from people who break their word, who screw people over, break their word and cheat—and I sure wouldn’t buy a cord of wood from Susan Collins.” In Portland, he wore a Halloween costume, a pullover dotted with wood stumps with a price tag for a cord, $350, pinned to it.

For many voters, Jackson’s leadership position in the state Senate provided evidence enough of his fitness for office. Yet with his focus squarely on Collins’s record in a campaign that turned into a prickly showdown over two years of Trumpian overreach, Jackson had mostly skimmed over his own major legislative successes, such as securing free meals for K-12 studentsand shoring up reproductive rights in Maine after Roe had been struck down.

But the Collins campaign wouldn’t let it alone. Even though the original ad was roundly panned as a low blow, the Collins campaign decided to go lower with its classist commentaries. In a conversation with a New Yorker staff writer that appeared on Election Day, Green called Jackson “a bumpkin,” adding, “He’s not an intelligent guy.”

Jackson, now Maine’s junior senator-elect, will be sworn in when the 120th Congress convenes in January. “It’s not enough to go back to the way things were before Trump, Democrats must do better,” he told his supporters.