By
Benjamin Hart,
staff editor at Intelligencer who joined New York in 2017
In the days immediately after Democrat Graham Platner dropped out of Maine’s senate race amid an allegation of sexual assault, it looked as though selecting his replacement might be something of a free-for-all. Ahead of an unprecedented convention to choose a new nominee on July 25, 13 Democrats threw their hats in the ring. But a large majority of delegates who will vote at the convention (mostly selected by voters at county meetings last weekend) quickly rallied around Troy Jackson. A former state senate president who had unsuccessfully run for governor earlier this year, Jackson is now almost certain to face Republican Susan Collins this fall, in a crucial race for national Democrats. Like her, he hails from Aroostook County, the vast, sparsely populated northern section of the state. To add to his blue-collar bona fides, Jackson is also a former logger who made his name participating in a blockade to protest the hiring of temporary Canadian workers over locals — a show of the kind of economic populism that Platner espoused. But reports have also emerged that Jackson can be temperamental and domineering.
To get some perspective on who Jackson is, I spoke with Mike Carpenter, another Democrat from the state’s northern reaches. Carpenter has been involved in Maine politics for more than five decades, including a stint as attorney general in the 1990s. (He currently serves as a probate judge.) He has known Jackson for a relatively small portion of that time, but endorsed his gubernatorial run earlier this year. Carpenter describes a serious, rough-hewn legislator who he believes can defeat Collins in November.
