Troy Jackson jumps out to big lead in race to replace Graham Platner in Maine

WISCASSET, Maine — As Maine Democrats began the rushed and convoluted process to name a successor to scandal-plagued former nominee Graham Platner, it became quickly clear that progressive Troy Jackson was in control.

From meetings in rural Calais near the Canadian border to urban, progressive Portland, in high school gyms and over Zoom calls across eight counties, the blue-collar logger former state Senate president ran up the score on Saturday.

His campaign dominated the first of two days of the delegate-selection process, with his longtime union allies flexing their organizing muscles to out-maneuver his rivals en route to capturing a strong majority of delegates.

“I'm asking for your vote, but I'm also asking for more than that,” Jackson told over 100 supporters at a Friday evening rally under a gazebo at a park overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Portland, Maine.

“I'm asking you to organize,” he continued. “I'm asking you to talk to your neighbors. I'm asking you to show up at your county meetings, make the calls, send the texts and bring even more people into this movement.”

Organize they did.

On Saturday, Maine Democrats in eight counties chose 319 of the 500 open delegate slots. Jackson-aligned candidates carried an overwhelming majority of the spots selected, while supporters of former state Center for Disease Control director Nirav Shah and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ backers made up just a handful apiece, according to a POLITICO analysis of the campaigns’ released slates and the lists of elected delegates.

Jackson’s performance was so dominant on Saturday — capped off by a clean-sweep of the state’s largest county — that he announced he would host a celebratory tailgate during Sunday’s delegate selection caucus in York County.

The victor of Democrats’ flash pseudo-primary will be thrust immediately into the national spotlight in arguably the most important offensive opportunity for Senate Democrats this fall. Collins is the only Republican running for reelection in a state that President Donald Trump lost in 2024.

Speaking to a small group of reporters in Augusta on Saturday afternoon, Jackson acknowledged the stakes and the challenge.

“It’s probably the biggest race in the whole country,” Jackson said. “And Senator Collins is a whole different type of person to run against.”

Jackson’s campaign showed up to the county conventions with organized groups of volunteers, many of them sporting “Jackson for Maine” t-shirts from his recent unsuccessful run for governor. They also carried flyers with clear delegate slates after making a deluge of calls across the state to recruit supporters and make sure their backers were in place to push him at next week’s convention.

A logger from far-northern Allagash, Jackson made his rise in Maine politics through organized labor and has long been an ally of progressives, receiving Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) backing in the gubernatorial race. He campaigned arm-in-arm with Platner during the original primary. But Jackson swiftly called for him to exit the race after POLITICO reported that a person who dated Platner said he sexually assaulted her. Platner denied the accusation, but dropped out four days later.

Jackson has been able to quickly establish himself as the candidate most in the mold of the oysterman, who dominated the Senate primary, given his longtime track record of backing similar policies.

Saturday’s strong organizational effort by Jackson and his allies — which came just eight days after Platner dropped his campaign, augmented by volunteers from more than a dozen unions that are endorsing Jackson — represents an impressive accomplishment under a tight timeline.

And it has set him up as the clear favorite over a crowded field of more than 10 candidates heading into the second day of county conventions. His nearest rivals, fellow former gubernatorial nominees Shah and Bellows, came out of Saturday’s slate of conventions with hardly any path to victory. Eight more counties will select 181 more combined delegates on Sunday, with another 101 Democratic state committee members already chosen and whose votes are less clear since they are not being elected as part of any slate. Together they will all make up the 601 delegates who will pick their party’s nominee next weekend in the crucial Senate race.

Some of Jackson’s supporters didn’t come in committed to a candidate, but had been swayed by his team’s hyper-local level of retail politics, which will be crucial in the battle with Collins, one of the strongest retail politicians in Congress.

Liam Kent, a Jackson supporter who was elected as delegate on Jackson’s slate in Lincoln County, said he had been undecided when he applied to run as a delegate. But he threw his support behind Jackson.

“I was in the middle of making a sandwich for lunch, and I was shocked to have him call me,” Kent said. “It was really nice because he's as real on the phone as he is in person.” 

The makeshift slate of county caucuses had its challenges. Voters, delegate nominees and campaigns encountered some minor hiccups while participating in the process, which was created by state and local Democrats in the two weeks after Platner’s exit from the race.

In-person and virtual county meetings provided staff to help voters resolve issues with the state’s online ballots, while campaigns scrambled to adapt to the quirks of the process.

Some delegate nominees were listed on the slates for multiple campaigns, although Jackson’s campaign featured less overlap than others. Bellows’ delegate slate included enough nominees in each county to account for the alternates that voters are allowed to select in each state. Shah’s and Jackson’s campaigns did not, causing confusion among Shah and Jackson supporters in Hancock County over where to assign their additional votes.

Nina Milliken, a state representative who coordinated Jackson’s delegate slate in Hancock County, was listed as a Shah delegate when his campaign initially released their slate. Shah’s campaign later removed her.

“It is nonsensical to me, frankly, that I’m on Shah’s list,” Milliken said. “This has been a profoundly messy process.”

The big delegate prize on Saturday was in Cumberland County, which includes the state’s largest and most Democrat-dense city of Portland. Jackson-aligned candidates claimed a clean sweep of the nominating spots in an online process that saw such high interest the party needed to extend the voting times. The final alternate delegate was a tied vote, so the county chair drew names out of a baseball cap to decide the winner.

While Jackson has a clear lead heading into Sunday, the delegates who are chosen — even if they are aligned with a particular candidate — are not formally pledged and can still change their votes at next week’s convention.

Even as he was able to rally his supporters, there were some voters who were dissatisfied with the process the Maine Democratic Party set up during the extremely narrow window they had to work with, with some who had hoped to serve as delegates feeling they were cut out of the process by campaigns that had coordinated delegate slates in advance. Other voters said the party did the best under the timeline that is outlined in state law.

Richard Zandler, a 75-year-old Democrat from Southwest Harbor, Maine, ran as an uncommitted delegate on Saturday but lost. He expressed dismay that his independence weakened his chances of being elected.

“I think a lot of the slates were established by looking at donors and people who had worked on the campaigns, because all of these candidates have just freshly come off a primary campaign,” he said.

Zandler is at least somewhat correct. A person running for delegate to back Shah said the campaign had contacted him to participate because he had previously donated to Shah’s gubernatorial race.

Other delegate-hopefuls bemoaned the sheer number of phone calls they had gotten from the want-to-be senators. Roughly 3,700 Mainers signed up to try to be delegates, and a number said they’d received 20 or 30 calls and texts from the various campaigns. Shah told POLITICO he’d personally made about 500 calls to delegate nominees ahead of the weekend meetings.

Jackon’s closest rivals were not deterred by early results on Saturday. Shah told POLITICO during a brief interview at Wiscasset Middle High School, before the scope of Jackson’s dominance had become clear, that his campaign would “keep their feet on the gas.”

“No one here is committed, and so there's going to be a lot of persuasion that happens, without a doubt,” Shah said. “We're going to continue.”

As the day wrapped up, Jackson posted a video to social media thanking his supporters.“All of you just smoked it,” he said. “Thank you so much. We’re well on our way to get the government we fucking deserve.”