Democrats in Maine have reset a Senate race seen as critical to their party’s chances of retaking the chamber after an improvised scramble to swap out a damaged candidate, Graham Platner, for a new one, Troy Jackson, after a wild 17 days.
Now comes the tricky part.
Mr. Jackson, a former State Senate president, is trying to keep alive the grass-roots energy that Mr. Platner built over the past year while distancing himself from the former nominee’s personal history. With help from her allies, Senator Susan Collins, the five-term Republican he is trying to defeat, is seeking to tie the two Democrats together in ways the G.O.P. hopes will alienate swing voters.
A 100-day contest
This dynamic is beginning to shape a 100-day contest that will drench this largely rural state with money and place it at the epicenter of the national fight for Senate control. Democrats have turned to a familiar fixture of state government and a fifth-generation logger from Maine’s north woods to make their case against a far better-funded incumbent who has already defied national headwinds once in the Trump era.
The race will test whether Mr. Jackson can leave behind the baggage of a candidate, in Mr. Platner, who bowed out after a rape allegation that he denies, revelations about a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol and a trail of offensive online posts.
By replacing Mr. Platner with Mr. Jackson, Maine Democrats hope to make the race less about their candidate and more about painting Ms. Collins as a tool of the ultrawealthy and a rubber stamp for President Trump on the most pressing matters.
“Who has she served?” Mr. Jackson asked Maine Democrats at the Saturday convention where he was officially selected to be his party’s nominee. “She’s served Donald Trump.”
Ms. Collins, in a brief interview before a Saturday parade in Casco, Maine, signaled an intent to portray her new rival as outside the mainstream and in many ways a continuation of the Platner campaign.
“My likely new opponent has adopted exactly the same platform as my old opponent,” she said. “It’s the democratic socialist platform and it’s very similar. So the issues have not changed.”
Jackson’s strategy: Tie Collins to Trump
It is no secret what Mr. Jackson plans to do: Tie Ms. Collins to Mr. Trump, who lost the statewide vote in Maine in each of his three presidential campaigns.
At the Saturday convention where Democrats picked Mr. Jackson as their new candidate, speaker after speaker cited Ms. Collins’s vote for Brett Kavanaugh, the Trump-nominated Supreme Court justice whom Ms. Collins voted to confirm after claiming she received an assurance that he would protect abortion rights.
“She voted with him 96 percent of the time,” Mr. Jackson said of Ms. Collins during his victory remarks Saturday. “She helped deliver enormous tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy on our backs. And she voted to confirm Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.”
Making that case will require Mr. Jackson, whose Senate campaign started with zero money two weeks ago, to raise a lot, and quickly. Ms. Collins had $11 million at the end of June, according to her latest campaign finance report. The Senate Republicans’ main super PAC, which has announced it will spend $42 million in Maine alone, began attacking Mr. Jackson minutes after he was named the nominee.
Mr. Jackson told reporters after the convention that he had not spoken with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader whose allies control the Senate Democrats’ main super PAC, and whom Mr. Jackson said he would not support to remain in his leadership role. Asked if he has enough money to win the race, Mr. Jackson replied: “Not now, but I hope to get it.”
“Troy is not a classically trained pianist,” said Bev Uhlenhake, a former Maine Democratic Party chairwoman. “He doesn’t sound like a typical politician. I think in terms of Mainers, that’s OK. They want someone to come to the party who can play the piano and get people dancing.”
But in an era when creating content is a key part of movement building, Mr. Jackson has a lot of work to do. He has just one tenth the Instagram following that Mr. Platner does.
“You can be outspent, but if you keep the attention of the crowd you can offset the money advantage,” said David Farmer, a longtime Democratic political operative in Maine. “Troy is going to have to win that attention war.”
Collins’s approach: Don’t forget about Platner
Ms. Collins and her allies are now racing to define a new rival after spending months campaigning against someone else. And while the Democrats onstage on Saturday never once mentioned Mr. Platner’s name, Ms. Collins and her backers appear determined to make sure nobody forgets it.
“The Graham Platner candidacy,” said Josh Tardy, a co-chair of Ms. Collins’s campaign, “is the gift that keeps on giving.”
While Mr. Jackson and Maine Democrats are making their case against Ms. Collins about policy, some of Ms. Collins’s allies aimed their first attacks at Mr. Jackson on his character, after reports that former legislative colleagues said he could be quick to anger. On Friday night, Mr. Trump called Mr. Jackson “another lunatic.” The opening advertisement about Mr. Jackson from the Senate Republican super PAC said he was “like Graham Platner, but worse.”
It showed the two men campaigning together, their hands tightly clasped.
Mr. Jackson champions some of the same progressive ideas that Mr. Platner favored, such as “Medicare for all” and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Republicans have sought to cast him as too far left.
Ms. Collins herself has tried to tie Mr. Jackson to democratic socialists, though he does not identify as one. She also recently called him a “Bernie bro,” a term nodding to what critics see as a dismissive attitude toward women among some male followers of Senator Bernie Sanders. Mr. Sanders, an independent from Vermont, initially endorsed Mr. Platner for Senate and Mr. Jackson for governor.
But she also highlighted differences between Mr. Platner, who was a first-time candidate, and Mr. Jackson, a political veteran.
“Troy, I’ve known for more than 20 years. He is an insider in Augusta, and he’s been there for 24 years, and so that’s a very different persona than what Graham Platner was trying to portray,” Ms. Collins said in Casco.
Collins, the Senate appropriations chairwoman, has also spent decades entrenched in government. She has won re-election four times with campaigns that emphasized the federal funding she brings to Maine and positioned her as an independent voice. She said on Saturday that she would keep making that case.
“I will be stressing how much seniority matters,” Collins said.
Both sides brace for a tight race
Ms. Collins won in 2020 with 51 percent of the vote against a field splintered by two independent candidates. This time she will face only Mr. Jackson in a political environment polls show could be worse for Republicans than it was six years ago.
Limited public polling in Maine has shown a close Senate contest. And both candidates have headwinds of history pushing against them.
Ms. Collins will, once again, have to detach her political fortunes from an unpopular president. Mr. Jackson is trying to become the first Democrat to win a Maine Senate race since George Mitchell won re-election in 1988. (Senator Angus King of Maine caucuses with Democrats, but he was elected as an independent.)
Lance Dutson, a Maine Republican and a former campaign aide to Ms. Collins, said she was perfectly comfortable running against a standard-issue Democrat, as opposed to a political phenomenon, as Mr. Platner became before he dropped out.
“It’s easier to say, ‘This is your résumé. What have you done for Maine? And this is my résumé. What have I done for Maine?’” Mr. Dutson said. “That puts Collins on much more solid footing.”
For his part, Mr. Jackson did not directly answer when he was asked after the convention if he could point to any issue on which he differs from Mr. Platner.
“I don’t know about the daylight, the separation, any of that stuff,” he said. “All I know is I’m Troy Jackson, and I care about Maine.”
Esmé E. Deprez contributed reporting from Casco, Maine.
The post Democrats Reset the Maine Senate Race. Now Comes the Tricky Part. appeared first on New York Times.
