Troy Jackson, the North Woods legislator-logger, has snatched up Graham Platner’s mantle of Maine authenticity and anti-establishment populist cred, a dazzling profile that blinded almost an entire state to Platner’s catalog of personal defects. Backed by Platner’s enthused volunteers, Jackson harnessed those grassroots organizers to his union supporters and crushed the statewide caucus game. Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state; Nirav Shah, the former state public health leader; and other Senate contenders gracefully stepped aside.
Fact: Jackson can’t match Platner’s charisma. Reality: That may be a good thing. Charisma can mask competence. Voters have a fatal attraction to tapping outsized personalities to tackle subpar health care, abysmal schools, inadequate middle-income housing, and other complexities. Talking a good game about eradicating long-standing social and economic inequities doesn’t necessarily translate into an FDR-level skill set.
Jackson is a known political quantity, 20 years in the making. And in this tortured political environment, the last thing a deeply betrayed Maine needs is Platner 2.0. It’s still an open question, however, if all this energy powers Jackson past Susan Collins.
A University of New Hampshire Survey Center/Pine Tree State poll released on Tuesday found the two candidates in a statistical tie: 49 percent of likely voters say they would go for Jackson; 46 percent would vote for Collins; 3 percent are undecided. Jackson’s unfavorables are high: 37 percent have favorable opinion; 32 percent have an unfavorable one. But Collins’s unfavorables are higher: 35 percent have a favorable view; 53 percent do not. Among independents, Collins is unpopular; they’re split over Jackson.
On the stump, no one is going to confuse Troy Jackson with Graham Platner. There’s been an intense focus on the former state Senate president’s Allagash accent and his tepid debate performances during his race for governor. In a new ad, he takes on the class-tinged negativity: “Movements are not built on debate stages,” he says. “They’re built in union halls, at kitchen tables, on picket lines, and in conversations with neighbors.” His critics also would do well to pull up a chair and acknowledge that Jackson has won the votes of some of the most conservative people in Maine, ones who also voted for President Trump.
But so has Collins. She grew up in Caribou, Maine, a town near the Canadian border not far from Allagash, Jackson’s hometown. She isn’t known for her mic-dropping either. Maine’s senior senator so often expresses “concern” about one issue or another, but she doesn’t respond in ways that demonstrate she actually understands that what her constituents want is action. This failing is so egregious that her comments about “concern” appear in memes and on T-shirts. She has been faulted for failing to hold town meetings. Her constituents must show up to ribbon cuttings to get her attention. And she isn’t exactly wading into ICE protests to explain what she plans to do about the agency.
On Wednesday, NBC News asked Collins about her new opponent. She had this to say about him: “He’s had quite a transformation over the years in his political views, but now seems to be firmly aligned with the democratic socialists.”
Troy Jackson’s response: “Very concerned.”
ONCE A CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC REPUBLICAN, Jackson has evolved into a Democratic progressive working man’s politico. Prior to his election to the state legislature in 2008, the crusading labor leader helped organize a 1998 blockade of the U.S.- Canada Canadian to protest lumber companies’ illegal hiring of Canadian loggers. Once in Augusta, he went on to pursue collective bargaining rights for workers in the Maine woods. He’s tempered his views about abortion and now supports reproductive rights. After taking a tour of a Planned Parenthood facility in Portland in 2016, Jackson said that he was “really shocked at all services they provide there that have nothing at all to do with abortion… there was so much more that I didn’t even understand.”
His origins in Aroostook County (known as simply “the County”), the most rural area of Maine, gives him an understanding of the white working class that a conference room full of K Street consultants can only guess at. Maine’s Second Congressional District helped deliver one of the state’s four electoral votes to Donald Trump ten years ago. Trump’s rhetoric matched their belief systems—even though Trump had never really professed any interest in the problems facing working-class white people.
Jackson’s perspective on the president was prophetic. “Donald Trump understood that so many people feel like they are losing what they have in life because of bad trade deals and things like that,” he told me in 2016. “I flat-out don’t believe that he will do anything to help in that regard.”
Trump proved Jackson right: The lumber tariffs, for example, have had mixed effects. Hardwood exports to Canada have been subject to punishing tariffs throwing that market out of kilter, while potentially offsetting stateside demand never materialized. Softwood products haven’t been as severely affected, but the turmoil isn’t helping that sector either.
This year’s race will turn on affordability, and one issue Jackson championed during his campaign for governor was prescription drug reform. During the Democratic primary debate season, Jackson saluted Mills’s work on expanding Medicaid in 2019, while faulting her for failing to support his efforts to limit huge prince increases on certain prescription drugs. Jackson has noted his constituents are well-aware that their Canadian neighbors don’t have to make the choice between paying for rent or medications.
He’s been outspoken about the challenges facing public K-12 education in a state where 74 percent of children still cannot read proficiently by fourth grade. He points out that Maine’s minimum starting salary for teachers—a little more than $44,000, one of the lowest in the country—is “a joke.” And he doesn’t have much time either for a new state law that finally raises that minimum to $50,000 three years from now. Teachers, he said in the gubernatorial debate, need a pay raise immediately to improve their quality of life and to improve the state’s ability to recruit educators. He’d like to see a minimum starting salary of $60,000. Jackson finished third in the gubernatorial primary.
Coming on the heels of Platner, it’s no surprise that long-held concerns about Jackson’s temperament have exploded on the national scene, and right now, policy debates have been shunted aside. During one televised gubernatorial debate Jackson complained that Gov. Janet Mills (D) “vetoed 40” of his bills and that they “disagreed a lot.” The grumblings in Augusta about his volatile temper were bound to catch up with him—and they have. The Washington Post reported on the infamous Jackson plastic water bottle throwing episode (a five-year-old story) and other tirades, producing a veritable pile-on of confessions and observations from Maine pols and others.
Jackson and Maine’s far-right Republican former Gov. Paul LePage also tangled frequently. In the middle of a state budget dispute in 2013, LePage went on an off-the-rails attack. “Sen. Jackson claims to be for the people but he’s the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline,” LePage said. Jackson took the high road, at least publicly: “Stamping his feet and making these type of comments doesn’t do anything to help the people of the state of Maine … I understand that that’s not the way that you do things if you’re going to be an elected official.” LePage is now on a comeback trail, running for the Second Congressional District seat against Democrat Matt Dunlap, the state auditor.
The irony is that Congress has become its own fight club. But facing off against the preternaturally calm and concerned Collins means that anger management is an issue Jackson must take seriously. His political passion has been offered up as a tepid explainer, but there comes a point when the candidate must show how he plans to navigate the ongoing temperament questions in this nationalized race.
Jackson also isn’t anywhere near matching Collins’s $11 million in cash on hand (as of June 30), so reassuring jittery potential donors will consume much time—especially since Senate Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer is slow-rolling his endorsement. (A spokeswoman has said that he’ll support the party’s nominee. Maine Democratic Party delegates meet and vote next week on Jackson.)
THE BENEFITS OF INCUMBENCY, HOWEVER, are only going to get Collins so far in her sixth run for office. This contest marks the first time that Collins faces voters after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, aided by her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as an associate justice. November 3 is effectively a referendum on her Kavanaugh vote and its consequences, as is her ongoing acquiescence to Trump’s decision making.
Collins’s Trump mollification strategy won’t help either. The University of New Hampshire poll found 53 percent of voters ranked her “good or very good” for steering federal dollars to Maine. But the Senate Appropriations Committee chair has a mixed record of confronting Trump’s impoundment reflexes. She’s clawed back funding for the state university system but has been thwarted in other areas. Smaller majorities of voters rated her “poor or very poor” for her voting records on key legislation, Cabinet nominations, and Supreme Court justices.
She’s also being called to account for the administration’s heinous immigration policies and the killing of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, the young father killed in Biddeford, a Portland suburb, by an ICE agent. His death has completely upended the Senate race. Mainers have turned up to protest at the senator’s state offices. Collins resisted calls to defund ICE and called on the Department of Homeland Security to end “non-urgent vehicle stops.” But Trump quickly countermanded that move. Jackson expressed support for the family and vowed “to do something to get rid of ICE [and] the people that support them.”
Like it or not, televised debates will be key. Questions have begun to percolate about Collins’s health challenges. Reservations about her age, 73, continue. Though there’s much handwringing about Jackson’s ability to face down a sitting senator on the debate stage, Maine Republicans had counted on having Platner’s womanizing as a foil. A 58-year-old’s anger issues may or may not prove to be as potent in an era when a cabinet member (DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin) once invited a union leader to step outside a Capitol Hill hearing room.
But one tactic, using “democratic socialist” as a pejorative in 2026—when nearly 10,000 Mainers have been compelled by Trump’s budget cuts to give up their health insurance and another 33,000 will lose Medicaid—isn’t going to have the fright factor that labeling someone a communist did 70 years ago. In the past 18 months, Americans have faced a perfect storm of unparalleled economic, social, and international cataclysms, courtesy of Republicans in Washington.
It’s déjà vu all over again for Troy Jackson. “The only thing that I know damn well is that Donald Trump played a game,” Jackson told me in 2016. “I said that from the beginning the difference between Trump and LePage was I thought Trump was saying things he believed he had to say, as opposed to LePage, who actually believes them. I am concerned about so many things now that it is not even funny.”
