PORTLAND, Maine — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) came onstage inside a crowded theater of college students Thursday and urged them to head to the polls for Democrat Troy Jackson — and bring a friend or two with them.
“We’ve got a Senate race to win,” she said, “and we’ve got a logger we’re hoping to send to the United States Senate.”
About 40 miles and a partisan divide away, a former congressional colleague who long identified as a Democrat had spent the previous day urging Maine residents to do the exact opposite.
“You lose Susan Collins, you lose the soul of the Senate,” said Joe Manchin III, the former senator from West Virginia, who left the Democratic Party months before leaving office in 2025. “She needs to stay. That’s the best senator in America right there.”
The bold-name surrogates’ dueling appearances in Maine, in one of the most closely contested Senate battles this year, was a microcosm of the tensions riling Democrats across the country.
As the party barrels toward a 2028 presidential contest, it is still trying to present itself as a big tent. But the proxies’ trips to Maine highlighted the poles that may threaten to divide it.
Ocasio-Cortez has been sharply critical of moderates’ affinity for corporate money and mainstream compromise, which she has said weakens Democrats’ pitch to working-class voters.
And Manchin, who changed his party registration from Democratic to independent less than a year before leaving office, said he left the party because it had shifted too far left.
Now, the pair — who openly sparred in Congress over energy and climate bills, Manchin once calling her a “young lady,” and more — have emerged on opposite sides of a closely fought Senate battle, bringing help that each candidate desperately needs less than two weeks before Election Day.
Jackson could rely on the kind of energy that only someone like Ocasio-Cortez could provide. He openly admits that other candidates have more charisma, while Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most popular politicians in her party and a potential 2028 presidential candidate.
Collins, who has outrun President Donald Trump’s shadow in Maine for more than a decade, is banking on the fact that she can appeal to the moderate Democrats and independents, like Manchin, who tend to decide this state’s elections.
At a stop on Wednesday at a New Balance factory in the town of Norway, Collins and Manchin spoke about working with each other across the aisle as some of the most moderate senators from their respective parties.
“Politics has been weaponized,” Manchin said. “Today, they want you to pick a side — like the other side’s evil, the other side’s the enemy.”
Collins cast some skepticism on Ocasio-Cortez’s visit, saying that Jackson was only campaigning with “the far left of the party” and suggesting that she and Manchin knew each other far better than the Democrats rallying in Portland on Thursday.
“Troy certainly has every right to invite whomever he wants to campaign with him in Maine,” Collins said. “Personally, I’m very happy—”
“I’m not AOC,” Manchin cut in.
Inside a theater in Portland, Ocasio-Cortez seemed to subtly shoot back at the idea that she could be a liability.
“There are a lot of consultants out here in Washington that would say, ‘Do not sit on a stage next to her,’” Ocasio-Cortez said of herself as she and Jackson answered audience questions during a town hall. “It takes a lot of courage to say, ‘I know my people.’”
Minutes later, after a standing ovation and an impassioned answer from Ocasio-Cortez, Jackson said: “Why wouldn’t I want to sit aside someone that talks like that?”
Then, he shared a story he often tells on the campaign trail about meeting his first billionaire as a seventh-grade student.
“Senator Collins yesterday was with that billionaire in Lewiston,” he added, referring to Manchin. (Manchin is not a billionaire but had a net worth of $7.6 million in 2018, according to the nonpartisan group OpenSecrets.)
Manchin’s appearance with Collins presents additional vulnerabilities that other Democrats have seized on. He started working last year as an adviser to the asset manager Apollo Global Management, which backed a company that helped shutter two paper mills in Maine in recent years. The closures eliminated more than 1,000 jobs in the towns of Bucksport and Jay.
Asked about those shutdowns Wednesday, Manchin said he wasn’t aware of the company’s connection. “Oh, well that’s not good,” he said, before walking away.
Outside both events this week, voters seemed to have already made up their minds.
David Sysko, 66, stood across the street from the Lewiston hot dog shop where Collins and Manchin had breakfast among a half-dozen other protesters with oversized cutouts of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s face.
Sysko said he had voted for Collins before but said she had “become an enabler” for Trump and far-right corners of the GOP, particularly after voting to confirm Kavanaugh’s nomination in 2018.
Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, brings energy, logic and an appeal to young people, Sysko said. “I like this approach that contrasts the super rich versus common people,” he said.
Inside the hot dog store, owner Jimmy Simones said Collins probably has his vote — in part due to her willingness to work across the aisle with figures like Manchin. Simones’s daughter works for Collins in her district office, and the wall of his shop is adorned with photos of visits from the who’s who of Maine politics, including several of Collins.
Simones said he was not a fan of Ocasio-Cortez’s politics. “We’ve got to get law and order going, and I don’t see that with AOC,” he said.
But if the congresswoman wanted to try one of his famous “red snapper” hot dogs while in Maine, Simones said, she was welcome to stop by, too.
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