By Nolan D. McCaskill
WASHINGTON, July 25 (Reuters) – Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson on Saturday won the state Democratic Party’s U.S. Senate nomination, formally ending a two-week scramble to replace Graham Platner on the ballot for November’s midterm election.
Platner withdrew on July 10 after sexual assault allegations were made against him. He denies the allegations.
The overwhelming majority of some 600 delegates at a party convention on Saturday in Bangor selected Jackson over Saundra Pelletier, the wealthy chief executive of a biopharmaceutical company.
Jackson will face Senator Susan Collins, a Republican who has held the seat since 1997, in the general election. Maine is seen as a key battleground state that will determine whether Republicans maintain control of the Senate.
The Democratic nominee’s speech before the vote on Saturday reflected his party’s broader push to tie Republicans to cost-of-living issues that are expected to influence the outcome of the midterm elections.
“Working people are getting crushed in this country. … Meanwhile, the billionaires and corporations rigging this economy keep getting richer and Susan Collins has done every damn thing that they ask for nearly 30 years,” Jackson said.
A fifth-generation logger and former Republican from northern Maine, Jackson locked up the nomination last weekend, when his supporters dominated the state party’s delegate selection process.
Jackson’s campaign said on Wednesday it had raised more than $1 million since he jumped into the truncated race earlier this month.
AFFORDABILITY LIKELY TO BE A KEY ISSUE IN RACE
Jackson’s nomination kicked off a 101-day sprint to unseat Collins, who has used her seniority and perch as head of the Senate Appropriations Committee to steer resources to Maine.
She is the only Republican up for reelection in a state that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris won in 2024, making Maine a top flip opportunity for Democrats hoping to regain control of the chamber for the final two years of President Donald Trump’s administration.
Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, but winning Maine is crucial to both parties’ midterm strategies.
Jackson held a narrow lead over Collins among likely general election voters in a University of New Hampshire poll released this week.
Collins, a 73-year-old moderate with an $11 million war chest, won her 2020 race by nearly 9 percentage points, even as Maine voters backed Democrat Joe Biden over Trump by a similar margin. Harris, herself a replacement nominee after Biden abruptly withdrew from the 2024 campaign, carried Maine by about 7 percentage points.
Experts say affordability, Trump’s leadership and immigration are likely to be key issues in the general election. Jackson has called for abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency that has killed several people in high-profile incidents this year, including a 26-year-old Colombian man in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13.
Collins voted for $70 billion in immigration enforcement funding without ICE reforms last month but has called for a pause in the agency’s traffic stops. Trump has since said such stops must continue, describing them as one of the agency’s most important and effective tools.
Social issues will also likely surface in the contest between Collins and Jackson. Jackson now supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage but opposed both in his state legislative career until his second Senate term in 2016.
His anti-abortion Senate voting record was raised in ads against him during his unsuccessful run in Maine’s gubernatorial primary this year.
The Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC that has pledged to spend at least $42 million in Maine, launched a six-figure ad campaign against Jackson on Saturday aimed at making an issue of an incident in which he flung a water bottle during a 2021 legislative session.
The Republicans’ 30-second YouTube spot says Jackson has “anger issues” and “a history of conflicts with women,” calling him “like Graham Platner but worse.”
The Washington Post and the New York Times have reported that the incident involving the water bottle occurred as Jackson engaged in a heated argument with Heather Sanborn, a Democratic state senator at the time, over a bill to lower prescription-drug costs.
In an interview with the New York Times earlier this week, Jackson said he should not have thrown the bottle, adding, “I was passionate. Do I wish I’ve never yelled or anything like that? Sure.”
(Reporting by Nolan D. McCaskill, David Ljunggren and Jonathan Landay; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Paul Simao)
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