He rubbed his hands together. He cocked his eyebrows. He gave a little shrug. And as Troy Jackson looked out at hundreds of Democrats cheering his name, he seemed as surprised any anyone to find himself here, in an antiseptic convention center on a hot day, moments away from accepting his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate after the implosion of Graham Platner’s candidacy.
“I went into the woods right after high school — all of us, I was no different,” Jackson said on Saturday, speaking with a gravelly northern accent that swallows some of his words whole. “I’m nothing special.”
Certain aspects of Jackson’s electoral history would support that assessment, politically speaking. A former state legislator, he lost the primary for governor this year, coming in third. He lost the primary when he ran for Congress in 2014. He is not well known outside the State House and the sparsely populated stretches of Northern Maine he represented as a state senator.
But Democrats whom I have spoken to, both in the buzzy hall on Saturday and well beyond, believe that Jackson’s life story makes him very special indeed. They have chosen an honest-to-God lumberjack to finally topple Senator Susan Collins, and they are hoping his working-class bona fides will hold down her margins in the reddest parts of the state — which could push Democrats to elevate similar candidates elsewhere.
“He is a true working-class champion — he’s not an academic that’s stepped in, or a political operative,” said Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, a progressive group that emerged from Senator Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign (which Jackson worked on in 2016).
Jackson’s candidacy, Geevarghese said, will be an “example and case study in how our movement succeeds or fails going forward.”
‘We’re from the bottom, and we are rising.’
Jackson’s general-election campaign, which is only officially two days old, is leaning heavily on his biography. A fifth-generation logger from the tiny town of Allagash, Maine, he joined a 1998 blockade of the northern border to stop cheap Canadian labor from going in and American wood from going out.
“The people that I worked beside were getting screwed, and no one in power seemed to care about that,” Jackson said on Saturday, explaining the origins of the populism that would take him first to the State House — where he was elected in 2002 as an independent — and then to the State Senate, where he served as president.
“We’re not from the left, we’re not from the right,” Jackson said before some of the delegates piped up to join him. “We’re from the bottom, and we are rising.”
Jackson is, of course, the second man with a working-class persona Democrats have turned to this year to take down Collins. The party’s primary voters decisively rejected Gov. Janet Mills, a former prosecutor and the choice of the party establishment (and, as she frequently pointed out, the only Democrat who has actually won a statewide election since 2006).
Democrats are quick to say that Jackson’s politics and life story make him an obvious inheritor of Platner’s insurgent movement. What they don’t say out loud is that someone who actually worked as a logger might be a better avatar than Platner, a prep-school alum and gentleman oyster farmer whose working-class credentials were open to debate but who seized on a wave of populist anger anyway.
“We need people like loggers, millwrights, papermakers, ditch diggers — anybody in there that can represent us because they are us,” Joel Hooper, 63, a Democrat and former millwright who lost his job when the mill where he worked closed down, told me on Saturday, shortly after voting to make Jackson the new nominee.
“We’re trying,” he added, “to make this party represent the working class again.”
Democrats’ working-class push
Jackson is one of several Democratic candidates around the country who are leaning on hardscrabble personal stories to make inroads with working-class voters who have peeled off from the party in the Trump era.
Some Democrats have done that successfully. Take Representative Jared Golden, who represents northern Maine, including the turf Jackson represented as a state lawmaker, or Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, who owns an auto shop.
But it doesn’t always work. Remember when Democrats hoped that Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, with his camo hats and working knowledge of a car engine, would help former Vice President Kamala Harris win over white men?
“This is the category error that the left is making,” Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way, told me, “which is, if you find someone that looks the part, that they will be satisfied with that.”
Republicans are moving to tie Jackson to Platner and present him as too far left for Maine, hoping to neutralize any cultural affinity he might have with voters in the rural and conservative areas of the state.
Democrats are talking little about the 20 years he spent in state government. And they are hoping that his life story is enough to paper over the obvious weaknesses of his candidacy, including his stark fund-raising disadvantage; his halting speaking style; and the reports, including some from my colleagues, that he was quick to anger during his time in state government.
“If there aren’t more stories that we don’t know, I think that’s just who Troy has always been,” said Representative Chellie Pingree, a Democrat. “I guess without thoroughly excusing anybody’s anger, people are so frustrated. They are looking for candidates who show their passion and do a little fist pounding.”
