After a tumultuous month of uncertainty, Maine Democrats have a new nominee to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins in the fall. They're hoping that Troy Jackson, the former Maine Senate president and fifth generation logger, can harness the populist energy of his predecessor, Graham Platner, who was forced to end his campaign under a cloud just after the primary.
Jackson has long pushed for the rights of the working class, but will now face heightened scrutiny from the national press and the Republican Party on his record and conduct in the Maine Legislature.
At a Labor Day rally in Portland last year, a crowd of 6,000 strong turned out to hear their anti-establishment hero lead the charge.
"As Maine goes, so goes the nation," Platner said, concluding his remarks.
He then left the stage, making way for a logger from Allagash who was running for governor, but also leveraging his everyman image.
"And don't want somebody with grease on their hands and s— on their shoes. Someone who talks funny, didn't go to the right school and doesn't share their pedigree. To them, that is what we are — nobodies. But we know better. We know they aren't coming to save us. They never have and they never will," Jackson said.
Jackson would place third in the Democratic primary for the Blaine House. Platner vaulted to national prominence and emerged as the party nominee, until he collapsed under the weight of scandal.
"We believe that for the movement to continue, it can't be me," Platner said in a video announcing his exit.
Now, after winning a hastily arranged nominating convention process, the party's hopes of unseating Republican Sen. Susan Collins have been handed over to Jackson.
A lot is at stake. And the contest will be a test of whether he can channel the energy of a movement that Platner built, and had sustained until just a few weeks ago.
Who is Troy Jackson?
Jackson's journey from the North Woods into politics began nearly 30 years ago, at a protest at the Canadian border.
"For the second day in a row, a group of American loggers parked their pickup trucks in the middle of the road near a remote border crossing in northwestern Aroostook County. The loggers are upset with the way Canadian logging companies are doing business in Maine," a news report at the time said.
Jackson was among a group of unemployed loggers who used their pickup trucks to blockade the St. Pamphile border crossing with Canada. They were protesting what they said were labor law violations by companies that hired Canadian loggers to cut American wood in the vast timber lots near Jackson's hometown of Allagash.
Then just 31 years old, Jackson joined the protesters in arguing that American woodcutters were losing job opportunities or working for less.
"It's gone from what it was 10 years ago. I mean, I don't make near what I used to 10 years ago," he said at the time.
An Associated Press photo taken a year earlier in 1998 shows him glaring at the Maine State Police troopers as they tried to persuade the loggers to open the road.
"Troy was very emotional and rightfully so," said Dana Doran, who was working for the state Labor Department at the time and was dispatched to the scene.
Doran said landowners in Maine — mostly paper companies — had a financial incentive to hire Canadian loggers.
"There was a real demand from those landowners to have a lot of people on the ground to cut wood and to move wood. And so, they looked heavily upon Canadians to do that work," Doran said.
Jackson's sense of injustice simmered. The population in Allagash had plummeted to about 250 people. The local school closed.
By then he was a young father and often forced to leave his family during the week to take jobs that were hours away.
In a speech during a run for Congress in 2014, Jackson recalled how his son would hold tightly to his hand on Sunday nights because he didn't want his father to leave.
"As if all the strength that he had in that little hand could counter generations of corporate greed that was keeping other young children in the St. John Valley from their parents. It was during those long Sunday nights that would turn into early Monday mornings that I stopped accepting things for the way that they were and started thinking about the way that they should be," he said.
Jackson first ran for the Legislature in 2000 as a Republican, and lost. Two years later, he ran as an independent and won. Two years after that he became a Democrat.
And his positions on social issues have also changed. Early on, he earned top ratings from anti-abortion groups. In 2009 he opposed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage.
He's tacked sharply left on those issues as he climbed the political ladder. But his focus on economic populism remained steady, especially when it comes to protections for Maine loggers.
In 2009, he led reporters on a ride-along as he scanned radio traffic for French voices and led incursions into logging job sites to inspect for Canadian workers. He fired back at landowners who branded him a rabble-rouser.
"You're either lazy and a troublemaker, or you don't want to work. That's what they do, they try to discredit you," he said.
Jackson has long claimed the working class as peers and invited confrontations with what he says are their enemies — corporations, business owners, even governors.
In 2013, Republican Gov. Paul LePage made headlines for using a crude sexual remark about Jackson during a budget standoff. He also insulted Jackson's intelligence.
"People like Troy Jackson, they ought to go back in the woods and cut trees and let somebody with a brain come down here and do some work," LePage said.
It played right into Jackson's 2014 convention speech. He likened LePage to the landowners he'd been fighting for more than a decade.
"I wear that insult as a badge of courage. Because it means that I'm standing up for men and women that have been forgotten for too long and left behind for too long," Jackson said.
His rousing speech did little for his Congressional primary bid. He lost to centrist Emily Cain by 40 points.
The loss stung. He began to gravitate toward independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, endorsing him over Hillary Clinton and working for his campaign during the bitter 2016 presidential election.
"Ladies and gentlemen I never believed that I'd have the chance to vote for someone who speaks directly to me, my family, our feelings and our fears," he said at the Maine Democratic Party convention that year.
Jackson returned to the Legislature that same year, setting his sights on leadership. He was chosen as Senate president two years later when Gov. Janet Mills was elected to her first term. He clashed frequently with Mills, and butted heads with others, too.
Doran, director of the Professional Logging Contractors of the Northeast, says Jackson and his group were sometimes at odds as the logging industry became more mechanized. There were blowups at the State House, but Doran says the relationship is OK now.
"He may have developed perspectives when we were in opposition that he wasn't OK with, but I think that's evolved over time and he's matured," he said.
And now as he enters the Senate race, the national press has begun probing Jackson's dust-ups with lobbyists and fellow lawmakers, including a shouting match with legislator Charlotte Warren in 2021 over a criminal justice bill.
Warren, who endorsed Jackson at the convention, called it a family fight.
"Troy and I are bare-knuckle brawlers. We believe what we believe in, and we're going to fight for it," she said.
Warren said the U.S. Senate needs more brawlers like Jackson.
And Jackson said he's not worried that any of his past political disputes will hobble his campaign.
"People elected me and I feel like I have a job to deliver. And sometimes that maybe got more passionate than it needed to be," he said.
And right now, intensity is what Democrats need from Jackson. He has just 99 days to assemble a campaign to take on incumbent Susan Collins, backed by a well-funded Republican.
