How Troy Jackson Became the Heir to Graham Platner’s Movement

Ellsworth, Maine—More than 500 Mainers packed into a middle-school cafeteria here on Saturday morning. Party officials, activists, and voters were gathering to choose the 23 delegates whom Hancock County would send to a nominating convention after Graham Platner withdrew from the race just eight days earlier, following a credible rape accusation. Platner grew up just a short drive away and his mother runs a store in town, so his presence hovered over the proceedings. Numerous attendees still wore “Platner for Senate” shirts, and someone had addressed an oversize sheet of paper to him and his wife, with dozens of well-wishers leaving notes like “Your message remains,” and “Feel pride in what you started.” One note that could have only been written in Downeast Maine went: “Graham, you are the leavener that started this dough rising! We couldn’t bake the bread without your power.”

As soon as the state Democratic Party announced the rules for replacing Platner, the race became about who could step into the vacuum he had left behind. Given how many people had been activated by Platner’s campaign, most progressives here have been clear-eyed in their belief that the only way to beat Susan Collins—who has triumphed over establishment figure after establishment figure across five elections—was by finding a candidate capable of making a similarly forceful case for supporting the working class and tearing down corrupt systems of power.

Standing near a picnic table outside, a delegate candidate from Blue Hill named Carole Beal told me, “I voted for a movement, not a man.” To her, the choice was clear: Troy Jackson, a former logger and longtime state senator from the North Woods, was the closest policy match for Platner and seemed to have the ability to connect with disengaged Mainers in the same way Platner had. “We want to see a senator in suspenders and L.L. Bean boots—”

Before Beal could complete her thought, a bagpiper in a red tartan suit began blasting a tune, indicating that we should follow him inside to the school’s gymnasium for the vote. I edged through groups of excited voters sipping coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts and found a delegate candidate named Jana Robinson, who had hung a poster board on her back with a picture of Jackson and his two leading rivals: Nirav Shah, who had led Maine’s public-health response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. All three had also run for governor in last month’s primary, a race in which Shah had seemed poised to triumph before he fell to second place behind the eventual winner, state House speaker Hannah Pingree, because of Maine’s ranked-choice system.

As if Maine’s normal electoral mechanics aren’t complicated enough, the statutory obligation to replace Platner on the ballot by July 27 meant the state party resolved to find a new Senate nominee through a compressed convention process. The meeting in Ellsworth was only one of 16 held last weekend, with registered Democrats in each of Maine’s 16 counties meeting to elect a total of 500 delegates. Then, on July 25, those delegates would join 101 party officials at a statewide convention, and whichever candidate received 301 or more votes at the convention would win the nomination.

Robinson, who lives on Mount Desert Island near Acadia National Park, was handing out markers and asking people to put a check under whomever they supported. “I didn’t want to go in committed to one candidate,” Robinson told me, “because I felt like I was representing all the people involved with Graham’s campaign who aren’t here.” Despite Shah’s strong showing in the governor’s race, Jackson had the lead in Robinson’s straw poll. After we’d sat down on the bleachers, a woman sitting next to Robinson leaned over and said, “You can add two more votes for Troy—me and my daughter are both supporting him.”

By the end of the weekend, Jackson would indeed emerge as the decisive victor of the 16 county conventions. At least 456 of the 500 elected delegates pledged that they would vote for Jackson at the nominating convention in Bangor this Saturday. All of Jackson’s rivals have dropped out, effectively ending any speculation about who Democrats believe is best positioned to carry forward the energy unleashed by Platner in their latest bid to dethrone Susan Collins.

Jackson himself seems stunned by how progressive activists rallied around him over the past week. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he told me ahead of the county meetings. “In 2016 with Bernie Sanders, I thought that campaign was the most exciting I’d ever been on. But this dwarfs that.”

Jackson’s campaign bolted out of the starting blocks quicker than its rivals, helping it stay a step ahead during the one-week sprint of a campaign to identify, secure, and elect delegates. At the same time, the scale of Jackson’s victory suggests it wasn’t just his organizing prowess but a result of broader movement politics. Numerous supporters pledged themselves as Jackson delegates in their respective county races not because someone from his campaign asked them to but because it felt like the natural thing to do. “We dug out our Jackson signs after Platner dropped out,” said Jennifer Temple, who lives in Lincolnville, “put some tape over it to say ‘Senate’ instead of ‘Governor’ because we saw a neighbor had done that. At that point, we didn’t even know if he was going to run.”

At the beginning of this process, Democrats in Waldo County, part of the Midcoast region that runs between Portland and Acadia, met for their regular monthly meeting. The state party had just released the rules for the special nominating convention, so Imke Schessler, the party’s vice chair, joined on Zoom to explain how everything would work. “If you’re tired, angry, confused, I’m right there with you,” Schessler told the attendees, begging for patience as the party scrambled to create a fair process. “We are building the car as we are driving it.”

With only a few days left for potential delegates to register, most of the questions Schessler fielded were about exactly what they could say in the bios that would be made available to every voter—at that point, it wasn’t clear if delegates were even allowed to explicitly support a candidate. “We are not going to infringe on anyone’s freedom of speech,” Schessler said. “That includes what they write in the blurb and how they vote.”

Jennifer Temple attended that meeting and was glad that she could make her support of Jackson explicit in the bio she submitted in her registration form. “I knew if we needed someone it was gonna be Troy, because he was most closely aligned with Platner in terms of policy.” Between that and Jackson’s approachability, it felt like a no-brainer. “My first experience with Troy,” Temple said, “he came in his run-down minivan to someone’s barn to have a conversation. That just felt unbelievably kind.”

“I’ve been in politics for 22 years here in Maine,” Jackson told me, referring to his long tenure in the state legislature. Over that span, he represented the House and then Senate district surrounding Allagash, his hometown of just over 200 people in the far north of the state, just shy of the Canadian border. Though less polished than Shah or Bellows, and far from the charismatic speaker that Platner is, Jackson is a resolute champion of the rural working class. “I wear my heart on my sleeve,” he said. “I think that’s a good thing for people not to be politicians, to be honest and sincere about these issues. It’s a real clear choice for people. I mean, what you see is what you get.”

Even though Temple had made the decision to support Jackson on her own, her daughter had received a call from the campaign encouraging her to run as well. The importance of this kind of recruiting was underscored by Todd Chretien from Portland. “Any responsible candidate who is serious about winning has a massive volunteer operation in every county,” he said. “This is about phone banking, talking to neighbors and coworkers. Troy’s people are doing that more effectively than the other campaigns, and that’s why he’s going to win.”

The Jackson campaign recognized that they could lock down the nomination far ahead of the actual convention by emphasizing this kind of get-out-the-vote tactics. Using the list of volunteers from his gubernatorial race, Jackson’s staff spent all week working the phones to recruit delegates in all 16 counties, as well as ensure that as many supporters as possible understood that to vote for those delegates, they’d need to preregister through the state party’s website. Meanwhile, his chief rival, Nirav Shah, ran a more far-reaching campaign. Shah embarked on a “Defeat Susan Collins Tour” that included town halls in Freeport and Bangor. By Friday, there were ads for his campaign on the New York Times homepage. He, Bellows, and the other candidates seemed slow to realize that this abbreviated process wasn’t about reaching every Democratic voter in Maine but securing delegates at the convention.

To that end, Jackson’s campaign was the first to publish a slate of delegates from each county for voters to use as a guide at their respective meetings. The Shah and Bellows campaigns rushed to create their own slates, but were clearly outmaneuvered: On Saturday in Ellsworth, Shah’s slate initially included the head of Jackson’s organizing effort in Hancock County, state Representative Nina Millikin. At one point while I was chatting with a few delegate candidates, one Shah volunteer leaned in and asked, “Did you guys get the new slates?” He handed over a paper in which Millikin’s name had been scratched out and replaced by an actual supporter’s name in ink.

The emphasis on slate voting put anyone who tried to run as an unaffiliated delegate at a disadvantage. Late last week, an organizer with National Nurses United named Alex Newell Taylor told me she had created a Google form that she planned to “send to everyone I know. I’ll make my own decision, but it feels like I should hear from as many people as possible, particularly unenrolled voters” who had been left out of the process.

In Ellsworth, I caught up with Taylor while chatting with Leslie Jones, another aspiring delegate who had explicitly avoided pledging to a candidate. Jones had arrived with a basket of lollipops with her name on them in hopes of winning some support in person, but swiftly realized that the slates meant such electioneering wasn’t going anywhere. “This is something I passionately wanted,” Jones said, “so it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.” Taylor nodded in agreement, looking a bit glum. “While disappointed, Taylor said supporting delegates pledged to Jackson made sense given her union’s endorsement of him. “I just heard Bernie in my ear saying, ‘Not me, us.’”

Though the gym had been filled with excited chatter when everyone gathered to vote, the crowd quickly dispersed once it became clear that the Hancock County Democrats would be holding a digital voting window open far longer than initially planned. By the time the county party’s chair, Marcia Myers, was ready to announce the results almost two hours after voting began, just a dozen delegate candidates and media members remained in the cavernous gym. Nevertheless, we rushed to the lectern where Myers was standing; Millikin, on the phone with someone from the Jackson campaign, told them, “Don’t say anything, OK? I’m going to have you listen,” and plopped her phone on the lectern in front of Myers.

As Myers read out the names of winners, Millikin kneeled over her slate of Jackson delegates, frantically cross-checking. It was a rout: All but one of the delegates elected in Hancock County had pledged to vote for Jackson. His dominant performance was the first sign on Saturday that Jackson would easily take the nomination, capped off by him winning 148 out of 149 delegates later that night in Portland’s Cumberland County, the largest in the state.

When it was first scheduled for this coming Saturday, it was easy to imagine that the convention in Bangor would be a scene out of the smoke-filled rooms of yore, with party insiders going round after round with one another in a bruising floor fight until a consensus candidate emerged. Instead, Jackson’s romp through the county meetings means the convention will now serve a more contemporary purpose: a platform for the chosen candidate to unify his party and set his eyes on the general election. In the space of little more than a week, Troy Jackson has found himself in the position to finish what Graham Platner started. “This is about continuing the movement,” Jackson told me. “Continuing pushing forward universal health care, prescription drugs, childcare, making sure that corporations quit screwing people. These are things that I’ve been fighting for my entire life.”