BIDDEFORD, Maine — Troy Jackson knows he wasn’t Maine Democrats’ first choice to challenge incumbent Sen. Susan Collins. And he knows he isn’t the most charismatic candidate to grace a Senate ballot.
But the Democratic nominee in one of the country’s highest-profile races also knows that may not matter.
“This race isn’t really about me; it never was,” Jackson, 58, told The Washington Post in an interview in Biddeford, Maine. “People should be angry that our government is broke.”
As Jackson’s contentious contest with Collins reaches its final days, Democrats in Maine are acknowledging — and in some ways celebrating — that the race isn’t about their accidental nominee.
They are instead banking on rage with President Donald Trump — and deep-seated resentment over Collins’s role in advancing his policy goals — to deny the 73-year-old Republican senator a sixth term.
Jackson is “not inspirational,” said Chris Gulick, a 73-year-old in Kennebunk, Maine, who had cast a ballot for Jackson just seconds earlier. “We have got to get rid of the Republicans,” he said, holding back tears as he explained his vote. “They are killing the country.”
Gulick, who said the Democratic nominee was a secondary factor in his decision, represents a core part of Jackson’s base: people so upset by Trump and the state of the country that they would vote for almost any candidate running against Collins.
“I wish they were voting for Troy, for Troy,” said Mattie Daughtry, Jackson’s successor as president of the Maine state Senate, before rallying a group of door knockers for Jackson in Brunswick, Maine. “But I think even if Troy were here, he would agree that the state has had enough of Susan Collins.”
Looking around the room full of committed Democrats, clipboards in hand, Daughtry wondered whether “anyone in this room” could have been the party’s nominee and had a shot at ousting Collins.
“It shows you the level of anger there is about Susan Collins,” Daughtry said.
Collins has outrun Trump’s shadow in Maine for more than a decade. The president is widely unpopular in the state — something Collins acknowledged in an interview with The Washington Post — and the state has moved left since the businessman-turned-politician entered politics in 2015. Collins won reelection in 2020 despite Trump hanging over her campaign, but Democrats said disgust with the president and Collins’s ineffectiveness in reining him in have only grown over the last six years.
“She’s not willing to stand up to Trump. She’s given up her role as a U.S. senator,” Jackson said shortly before he appeared on stage with the Dropkick Murphys at an event organized by the Maine AFL-CIO last week. He said he, like other Maine voters, felt let down by Collins, in part because he voted for her in 1996 when he was still a Republican and she was running for her first term.
Plenty of Maine voters are fired up for Jackson, drawn to the Democrat by his story as a one-time Republican and logger who talks about the value of working people. Some feel his no-nonsense, sometimes gruff, style captures this political moment; others have been won over by what they see as his uniquely Maine ethos, with his mumbly northern Maine drawl.
“I have been waiting for a long time for politicians to actually pay attention to the people that matter,” said Lori Poland, a postal worker who was volunteering for the AFL-CIO union for the election. “Like he says, solidarity is a lifestyle.”
But conversations with both candidates, dozens of Maine voters and several party operatives reveal a campaign that is undeniably more about Collins than about Jackson. Some Democrats worry it could keep non-hardened partisans on the sidelines.
“People tend to be more motivated if they are in love with the person they are voting for, and I don’t see that at all,” said a top Maine Democrat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about the state of the campaign. “There is absolutely a lack of enthusiasm for our candidate. And there is no way to fix it.”
Jackson’s path to this moment has been anything but normal. The former Senate president initially ran for governor, but finished third during the state’s June primary. Democrats on that day nominated Graham Platner for the Senate, but weeks later the populist oysterman’s campaign imploded, done in by allegations, which he denied, that he sexually assaulted a woman he once dated.
Maine Democrats then held a frenetic, complex nomination caucus that ended with Jackson’s win, largely because the political movement that powered Platner’s campaign backed him.
That unique process allowed Republicans to inundate the state in attack ads about Jackson from the moment he became the nominee, casting him as everything from too liberal to too corrupt to, in the words of a recent ad by Republicans, “a creep.”
But if Trump is hanging over Collins’s campaign, Platner is casting a different kind of shadow over Jackson.
The two Democrats shared several policy positions, like support for universal health care and raising taxes on the wealthy, but the men are strikingly different political figures. Jackson is a former top state legislator who built power in Maine through a mix of intimidation and passion for the issues. But he lacks the natural charisma on the campaign trail that led Platner to command a devoted group of supporters who nominated him over Gov. Janet Mills even after damaging stories raised questions about his character.
The Platner hangover could be “one of the reasons people aren’t excited about Troy,” said Beth Ahearn, a 66-year-old from Freeport, Maine, shortly before knocking on doors for Democrats.
“Wouldn’t that be lovely” if people voted for Jackson because of Jackson, Ahearn said, before adding that “people are really excited about Hannah Pingree,” the Democratic nominee for governor who defeated Jackson in the primary. “But it’s absolutely true in my mind that Troy is way better than the incumbent,” she added.
Jackson knows he’s been compared to Platner. But if Platner were still the nominee, the race wouldn’t be about him either, Jackson argued.
“I’ve been able to give barn-burner speeches before, whenever I get fired up. I don’t typically feel the need to get into a room of people and say, ‘Hey, look!’” Jackson said. “Hopefully, in the end, they just know that I am like a bulldog and I’m never going to back down for what I believe in.”
Mathias Kamin III, a Platner friend and head cider maker at Bon Vent Cider in Hancock, Maine, acknowledged that Jackson doesn’t have the “groundswell momentum and charisma that Graham has” but said that the Democratic nominee has done enough.
“He is like an old truck or something,” Kamin said of Jackson. “It’s slow to start, but once it gets going, you know it will get you there.”
(Jackson relished the comparison when asked. “If I am nothing else, I am a guy with a pickup truck,” he laughed.)
The Democrats’ quandary is whether this lack of innate enthusiasm for Jackson’s campaign matters. It has given some of them flashbacks to 2020, when Democratic nominee Sara Gideon lost to Collins by nine percentage points despite polls ahead of Election Day consistently showing her with a sizable lead.
A Washington Post poll this month found Jackson attracts 50 percent of likely voters compared with Collins’s 46 percent, a lead within the poll’s margin of error. But only 36 percent of voters approved of the job the president is doing, 48 percent of voters said they were worse off now than when Trump became president and 58 percent of voters said Collins has supported Trump too much.
“How people get on the bus is up to them,” said Jason Shedlock, a Democratic nominee for state representative around Portland, Maine, who helped Jackson navigate the last-minute nominating caucus. “The fact that they are on the bus … is more important.”
Jackson’s strengths and weaknesses were on full display during his four debates with Collins this month. In answer after answer, Jackson tried to make the race about Collins’s record furthering Trump’s goals, hoping to tap into Mainers’ anger at the Republican leader. But he also showed a lack of knowledge about the Senate and, at one point, told Collins to “shut up” when she suggested a protester was supporting his campaign, flashing the temper he became known for while leading the state Senate.
Republicans decried the outburst but some Democrats supporting Jackson loved it. Danny Bailey, an AFL-CIO organizer, made “Shuddup Susan” buttons and handed them out at a Jackson event. “He is one of us. That is what I want to say to her all the time, too,” she said.
Jackson said he didn’t regret it. “She accused me of something great in the spur of the moment when I was as shocked as anyone else. I’m tired of Senator Collins talking down to working-class people and me,” he said.
But in a moment of reflection on his campaign and the reality that Collins overcame far worse polling in 2020, Jackson acknowledged the enormity of what he is trying to do.
“Obviously, Senator Collins is the biggest unicorn that you can ever go up against,” Jackson said. “But she has put herself in a position where people across the state now feel like she’s hurting us.”
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