Troy Jackson campaigns for the U.S. Senate in cargo shorts and a baseball cap, driving around Maine in his 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan and telling his life story at every stop.
At 19, he followed his father into Maine’s North Woods to become a logger. At 30, he helped lead a logging blockade at the border to protest powerful landowners hiring cheaper Canadian labor. Four years later, he was elected to the Maine Legislature, where he pushed a populist agenda over nearly two decades in office, including six years as Senate president.
Mr. Jackson, a Democrat, has been leaning heavily into this up-from-the-bootstraps narrative since he replaced Graham Platner on the ticket in July. Before Mr. Platner’s campaign imploded amid a rape allegation he denied, Democrats had been playing up his blue-collar credentials in the hope that he could attract a key constituency that has flocked to the GOP in recent elections. Mr. Jackson, whose working-class roots run much deeper, is now testing that premise as he challenges a five-term Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, in one of the most competitive and closely watched Senate races in the country.
To win, Mr. Jackson must convince Mainers to retire Ms. Collins, who has leveraged her institutional clout to funnel federal dollars and projects to the state, and to take a leap of faith on a scrappy progressive eager to throw bombs at the Trump administration.
“I may not be good at very many things,” Mr. Jackson recently told a crowd at a former union hall in Jay, Maine. “I am very good at pushing back.”
He cuts a striking contrast with Ms. Collins, 73, a genteel centrist who has been skewered by critics over the years for expressing “concern” over tough issues. Mr. Jackson, 58, doesn’t mince words — at times, to his detriment.
In interviews with more than a dozen people who worked with him at the State Capitol, some said he could be belligerent and even personally insulting when he didn’t get his way. He frequently clashed with Governor Janet Mills, a more moderate Democrat, and he took shots at her when he was a candidate for governor earlier this year.
“Governor Mills just vetoed a pause on data centers in Maine. When I’m Governor, this bullshit ends,” he said in a social media post in April that typifies his shoot-from-the-hip style.
Ms. Mills has not endorsed Mr. Jackson in his race for Senate, and a spokesman for the governor said he has not asked for her support. A spokesman for Mr. Jackson declined to comment.
Joe Baldacci, a Democratic state senator who served with Mr. Jackson, told him it was unwise to openly disparage the twice-elected, sitting governor from his own party.
“He said, ‘I’ve got to tell it like it is,’” Mr. Baldacci recalled. “There’s an authenticity to him that’s really important. He might win over some people with that, but he is also going to alienate some.”
When term limits ended Mr. Jackson’s career in the State Senate in 2024, Mr. Baldacci presented him with a framed copy of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again.”
That quote, Mr. Baldacci said, “really explains who Troy is. He’s had to fight all his life.”
‘This is his town’
Mr. Jackson kicked off a recent campaign swing in Kittery, a historic town at Maine’s southernmost tip, by observing, “This is as far as you can come from my house.”
Mr. Jackson lives nearly 400 miles away on the opposite end of the state in Allagash, population 237. It’s a one-road town where the St. John and Allagash Rivers meet, at the foot of the timberland of Maine’s North Woods.
Troy Dale Jackson was born to teenage parents who struggled to make ends meet. “Macaroni and cheese. Hamburger Helper — we ate a lot of that,” Mr. Jackson’s mother, a former public-school teacher, says in a campaign ad. The local high school shuttered a few years after his graduation due to declining enrollment in the economically depressed community.
Mr. Jackson, a fifth-generation logger, has described the 1998 blockade at the Canadian border as his political awakening. In a photo from that time, he stands between two fellow loggers, wearing a baseball cap and flannel shirt, staring down state troopers threatening them with arrest. “Troy realized the only way to change things is to do it from within,” said Hilton Hafford, one of the loggers by his side.
Mr. Jackson lost his first race as a Republican candidate for the Maine House in 2000. He won two years later as an independent and two years after that as a Democrat. He went on to serve in the Maine Senate until 2024, except for a two-year break after a failed U.S. House bid.
“When you grow up, never expecting to go to college, never feeling like you fit in a suit, and never seeing yourself as anything but a working-class person, you certainly don’t expect to find yourself here,” he said as he presided over the opening of the 2020 legislative session as Senate president.
As Mr. Jackson’s Democratic colleagues elevated him to leadership posts, he abandoned socially conservative stances common in his rural district and embraced liberal views on abortion and gay rights. He spearheaded groundbreaking legislation to provide child care subsidies, paid family and medical leave, and free school lunches.
But some of Mr. Jackson’s other priorities floundered, and he did not handle setbacks gracefully. Most notably, during a dispute with a Democratic senator who opposed his 2021 bill to lower prescription drug prices, he flung a water bottle across a room.
“Troy gets frustrated an awful lot, and that’s why some people find him kind of rough to deal with,” said Mark Lawrence, a Democratic senator who witnessed the argument. “He’s unwilling to back down when he thinks he’s right.”
Still, Mr. Jackson’s Senate colleagues chose him to serve three consecutive terms as president because, Mr. Lawrence said, “When you’re in a political battle you want Troy on your side. He’s very good in the trenches.”
Mr. Jackson recently owned up to trolling Paul LePage, the Republican who served as governor earlier in his career, in the comments section of The Bangor Daily News using an anonymous account.
Maine legislators work only part-time, and during his last term in 2023, Mr. Jackson ran for selectman in his hometown. He lost 78-70. Mr. Jackson demanded a recount, which produced one additional vote for him.
Mr. Jackson told The New York Times that he ran for the local post because he was upset about an “unfavorable” land deal quietly approved by town officials that became the subject of a lawsuit filed by other residents.
Alison Bartlett, one of the plaintiffs and a high school classmate of Mr. Jackson, said she wasn’t surprised he would seek local office even while serving as Senate president.
“This is his town,” she said. “It’s just as important to him as everything else, if not more.”
‘Wish he had a little more bling’
Mr. Jackson is not a natural campaigner.
At an early morning stop in Kittery, he said he kept his remarks short because “I figured people wanted coffee.” Later that day, as he launched into his biography at a town hall-style meeting in Jay, he apologized to those who had heard it before. “I still don’t think I’m anything extraordinary,” he said.
Mr. Jackson offers plain-spoken empathy for the struggles of the working class, not the rousing speeches of a rising political star. Some voters regret that he lacks the charisma that made Mr. Platner a sensation.
“I wish he had a little more bling or pizazz so he could stand out, but that’s not who he is,” said Doreen Rogan, a college administrator from York. “Will that hurt him or will that be the thing that appeals to people?”
At the former union hall in Jay, where striking mill workers once gathered and a colorful mural of people holding hands graces the walls, Mr. Jackson spoke about his father bringing him as a child to a tense standoff between loggers and a powerful landowner. He called for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, bolstering Social Security, and establishing a universal health care program.
In a state that has never voted for President Trump, Mr. Jackson tries to undercut the image Ms. Collins has cultivated as an independent voice for Maine, casting her as beholden to the president and to his billionaire allies.
“I think he speaks from the heart and like a normal person,” said Linda Deane, a retired mill worker who lives in Livermore. “What good is it to be a great orator if you’re not going to stand up for the people that you’re representing?”
This is a campaign powered by organized labor. Mr. Jackson’s young campaign workers run around in T-shirts that say “SOLIDARITY.” It was labor activists who hastily threw together the infrastructure to propel Mr. Jackson to the nomination; he now touts endorsements from dozens of unions.
Little information is available about Mr. Jackson’s finances, but he appears to live modestly. His 1,200-square-foot home on 3.5 acres in Allagash is assessed at $125,200, according to tax records.
After his late start in the Senate race, he got an extension until Oct. 5 to submit a financial disclosure form. The last report he filed as a state lawmaker in 2024 says he was paid by the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades for organizing construction work and by an organization that provides Thanksgiving meals to laid-off workers. He also earned $17,502 as Senate president that year.
As a former logger with an associate degree from the University of Maine, Mr. Jackson would be “extremely rare” in the pedigreed halls of Congress, said Nick Carnes, a Duke University public policy professor. Mr. Carnes, who is tracking all of the general election candidates running for Congress, has identified only seven who went straight into politics from manual labor, clerical or service jobs. Mr. Jackson is the only Senate candidate in that category.
“He’s someone you’d expect to run into at the hardware store,” said Matthew Beck, a Democratic state representative.
But an onslaught of Republican attack ads aim to undercut Mr. Jackson’s man-of-the-people narrative. “Another phony politician,” says one of the latest broadsides from a Republican super PAC.
The danger for Mr. Jackson, who has never run in a statewide general election before, is that the attack ads will define him before he can raise his own profile. Since July, Republicans have spent or reserved nearly $88 million in advertising, compared to about $60 million by Democrats, according to AdImpact.
“We don’t know too much about him, and everything on TV is very negative,” said Leslie McGuire, a 77-year-old retiree who was sitting on a lawn chair when Mr. Jackson recently came to visit the mobile home park where she lives in Wells. “He threw a bottle and what else?” added her 75-year-old sister sitting next to her, Lynne Hebert.
The Senate campaign has put a bright spotlight on Mr. Jackson’s temperament. Three weeks after he faced questions about the water bottle incident, The Bangor Daily News surfaced a police report that said he punched a resident of Fort Kent, near Mr. Jackson’s hometown, in 1988.
The police report, which was obtained by The Times, said Mr. Jackson’s ex-girlfriend said that he had “pushed her around” after the fight. The woman’s name is redacted in the report. But Mr. Jackson and his longtime partner, Lana Pelletier, issued statements indicating that the report was referring to Ms. Pelletier, and they both disputed that he had pushed her.
“Nearly 40 years ago, when I was 19 years old, I got into a fight with another man,” Mr. Jackson said. “I took responsibility for it then, and I take responsibility for it now. But let me be clear: I have never been violent with my partner Lana, or any other woman.”
Ms. Pelletier said she did not recall making the statement about Mr. Jackson to police and that it was “not accurate.” Records show Mr. Jackson was charged with misdemeanor assault and paid a $50 fine.
“It appears that he struggles to control his temper,” Ms. Collins told reporters who asked about the incident last month.
More recently, Ms. Collins took an even more personal swipe at Mr. Jackson and Ms. Pelletier, who have two grown sons together.
“I’m not going to bring up the fact that the mother of his two children is his second cousin.” Ms. Collins said during an interview with Politico. “I don’t know whether people know that or not.”
Mr. Jackson’s campaign denounced Ms. Collins’s comment but did not dispute the description of their relationship.
During a huddle with reporters, Mr. Jackson shot back: “She has been attacking my personal life, my children, stuff like that, because her record sucks.”
A few minutes later, he got back into his Dodge van to drive to the next campaign stop.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
