Looking for a last-minute nominee

In the span of just two weeks, Democrats in Maine lost oyster farmer and ex-Marine Graham Platner and gained Troy Jackson, a former logger and state legislator, as their presumptive U.S. Senate nominee. The race has garnered national attention as one of several battleground states leaving the Senate vulnerable to turning blue.

“We were expecting tons of outside attention, tons of outside money, and then you get the oystermen, Nazi tattoo, sexual assault candidate of the year,” said Nicholas Jacobs, associate professor of American government at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, referring to Platner. “And then he drops out.”

Platner, the former Democratic Senate nominee, suspended his scandal-fraught campaign on July 8 following a sexual assault accusation, first reported in Politico, that effectively cost him every major endorsement. The new frontrunner, Jackson came in third in last month’s primary race for governor despite being Platner’s first pick. But now, with a Senate race on the table, Jackson’s ties to Platner have provided a boost, with some caveats, for engaging his inherited voter base. At Sunday’s convention, Jackson appeared to win the overwhelming majority of county delegates, pushing his biggest competition out of the race ahead of a Saturday convention to confirm the nomination.

“Troy Jackson is clearly the closest candidate to Platner ideologically,” said James Melcher, a professor of political science at University of Maine at Farmington.

Platner’s progressive campaign championed initiatives like universal healthcare, affordable housing, and a populist critique of corporate influence. Jackson has swiftly pivoted from his failed gubernatorial bid to adopt a Senate focus—prioritizing Medicare for all, taxation of billionaires, abolition of ICE, and other Platner-aligned campaign items. But Melcher says the former state senator brings something else to the table for Democratic voters—a clearer track record.

“With Platner, those accusations coming out of Politico, that was too far for a lot of Democrats, although it should be noted that plenty of his supporters said, ‘We were still going to back him. We think he was unfairly forced out by the party establishment. We would still have supported him,’” said Mark Brewer, department chair of political science at the University of Maine.

Melcher, an Episcopalian, added that while nearly 40% of Maine adults say they are religiously unaffiliated, he personally knows Christian women who vote blue and had moral objections to Platner.

“There was moral outrage,” said Melcher. “But it was more about a feminist sense of, “Hey, this man doesn’t treat women the right way.”

Recently, Jackson has also faced accusations from former legislative colleagues and associates who claimed he has a poor temper and even threw a water bottle at a colleague. But Melcher says in light of the string of earlier accusations that Platner’s campaign initially survived, the claims against Jackson likely won’t amount to much.

“There are Democrats that would vote for almost anybody against Susan Collins, and no matter who the Democrats nominated,” said Melcher. “I think that they’re going to tend to like Troy Jackson as a candidate as the next best thing [to Platner]. In some ways, he’s better.”

Incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins is in her fifth term representing Maine, but the competitive nature of the state will likely make for a tight race. In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris won the state by around 7 percentage points, and Cook Political Report rates the Senate race in Maine as a toss-up. Casey Burgat, a former congressional staffer and current politics professor at Platner’s alma mater, George Washington University in Washington, D.C., wrote in an email to WORLD that the state’s battleground status “is why the nominee replacement process matters well beyond Maine.”

Burgat added, “It is extremely important because Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take the Senate, and Maine is one of the few Republican-held seats in a state with clear Democratic competitiveness.”

Last Thursday, during the Democratic debate between candidates vying to replace Platner, the moderators asked the candidates to make the case to Maine voters for why Democrats should win the Senate seat.

“People in my area vote for me because they know that I stand up for working-class people, and I think in this case Collins has completely forgotten who she’s representing,” said Jackson. “The people in this state didn’t send her down there to actually give income tax cuts to billionaires, they sent her down there to fight for farmers and other people that needed help, that needed a government that they could rely on.”

Jackson doesn’t possess the dynamism of Platner as a speaker, but Melcher assessed that the support of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., will help him garner a similar young-person energy. Unlike Platner, Jackson also has experience running a congressional campaign from a House race he lost in 2014.

Platner’s abrupt withdrawal left the Maine Democratic Party with a tight turnaround to find a new Senate candidate just four months out from the general election against Collins. The party’s solution to fill its empty ticket came in the form of a nominating convention—a coalition of 500 delegates appointed from each county and 101 members of the Democratic State Committee—tasked with selecting a replacement nominee by July 27. According to the Maine Democrats website, the party isn’t holding an emergency snap primary that voters can participate in because of “the realities of the timing constraints we are under.”

The inclusion of county-elected delegates allowed registered Democrat voters to participate in the process to an extent. Last Saturday, Maine’s 16 counties held nomination conventions to select their apportioned delegates. Over 17,000 Maine Democrats voted in the process, but independent voters, who contributed a notable percentage of Platner’s base, were barred from the process.

Melcher says this could be a problem in the short run, but that when it comes to rallying the base for their replacement nominee in the general election, they will likely still coalesce.

“I think some of them [independents] are upset with the process. I don’t think they’ll blame Troy Jackson for it per se, and probably because Jackson won so convincingly,” said Melcher, who predicts Jackson will secure the nomination. “There’ll be some small resentment. I don’t think it’s going to add up very much by the time the general election rolls around. They may stay mad at the Democratic Party but not Jackson himself.”

Even with a candidate that Maine Democrats can likely get behind, Jacobs says the media and polls tend to underestimate Collins’ popularity. However, he added that this election cycle has introduced some new vulnerabilities for Collins. Jackson, while 17 years Platner’s senior, is still 15 years younger than Collins, the most senior Republican woman in the Senate.

Jacobs said that Collins’ age may prompt some voters to support another candidate. “I think people are pretty upset about their senators and the median age of our Senate and our House being as high as it ever has been historically,” he said.

But it’s uncertain whether the most deeply partisan voters learned any lesson from supporting a candidate like Platner all the way to the polls.

“I think it’s clarifying, at least a little, in unsettling ways,” said Jacobs. He pointed to examples on both sides of the political divide where voters have defended candidates despite disturbing allegations. Often, such supporters turn on the media or political institutions as undermining their cause.

“​​I think when the populace go out and begin attacking these malevolent forces in society, these unnamed things that are keeping the people from rightly ruling, it becomes all the easier to excuse bad behavior,” said Jacobs. “And I don’t think we’re past that point where that’s not going to become a more recurrent feature of politics in both parties.”