As Maine Democrats prepare to gather at a hastily scheduled convention in Bangor on Saturday, there’s little suspense around whom the party will tap to replace Graham Platner on the ballot in this must-win Senate race. Former state Senate leader Troy Jackson has garnered so many delegates that his main rivals for the nomination have all ended their campaigns.
But with just over three months to go until November’s vote, it remains unclear whether Democrats can entirely turn the page on the Platner debacle in time to mount a winning campaign against five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Mr. Jackson, a Platner ally who grew up in a logging family in rural northern Maine, is a progressive Democrat who started his political career as a Republican. Supporters say he can reach voters outside Democrats’ urban base and build a winning coalition in a state that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 but is far from a Democratic stronghold.
Why We Wrote This
Former state Senate President Troy Jackson is on track to become Maine’s new Democratic Senate nominee this weekend. But eleventh-hour candidacies frequently face big challenges.
Still, memories of Ms. Harris replacing former President Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee in July 2024 have underscored the challenges facing eleventh-hour candidates – from scaling up a statewide operation and war chest to forging connections with voters and bridging internal divides. Often, candidates who step in at the last minute are ones who were previously unsuccessful (Mr. Jackson came in third in June’s gubernatorial primary). And Senator Collins has proved an evasive target even in cycles when the environment favored Democrats.
The new nominee “gets the advantage of a fresh start, but they also start without having funds raised and a campaign focused on the Senate,” says Amy Fried, a professor emerita of political science at the University of Maine. Democrats face a well-funded opponent in Senator Collins, a moderate Republican who is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I would never bet against Susan Collins winning. She’s been able to do it so many times,” says Professor Fried.
In the town of Ellsworth, a “For Rent” rent sign now hangs above the shuttered Platner campaign headquarters. The former Marine and oyster farmer, once heralded as a rising star on the left, had weathered a string of scandals that drew national attention to this normally under-the-radar state, from a Nazi-linked tattoo to controversial Reddit posts. He quit the race in early July after an ex-girlfriend accused him of sexual assault (which he has denied).
The implosion of Mr. Platner’s campaign roiled Democrats in Maine and beyond, but perhaps nowhere more than here in Ellsworth, where many supporters have personal connections to the candidate or his family. At the Hancock County Democratic caucus over the weekend, where voters gathered at the local elementary and middle school to pick delegates for Saturday’s convention, many talked about the need to move on. But some were still fuming about how Mr. Platner had been abandoned by the party.
Claire Hoyt, a wholesale baker and Platner supporter, had worried that party leaders would try to box out Platner allies. “For the first days after Graham dropped out, it felt like that is exactly what was happening. … That’s what got everybody activated,” she says.
Now, though, she’s ready to volunteer for the new nominee, working toward the goal of defeating Senator Collins. In the back of her mind is the 2024 presidential nomination, and the various problems that stemmed from divisions within the party. “I’m hoping that we’ve all learned from what happened with Kamala and Biden and that we’re going to do better,” she says.
Other Platner supporters expressed unhappiness at what happened to him.
“We just dropped him; we didn’t give the guy a chance,” says Elaine Gerard, a retiree, who questions why his accuser waited until this month to go public.
Inside the school, Anne Hathaway, a Platner family friend, had put out a poster board on a table for Democrats to write supportive messages to Mr. Platner and his wife. “We still think the world of them,” she says.
Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor
Many voters here see Mr. Jackson, who served six years in the state Senate before running for governor this year, as picking up Mr. Platner’s progressive mantle. Two other losing candidates from the gubernatorial race, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former Illinois health director Nirav Shah, also briefly sought the Senate nomination but dropped out once it was clear Mr. Jackson was the overwhelming favorite.
While there was little daylight between these candidates on issues such as healthcare funding, progressive taxes, and federal immigration enforcement, the union-backed Mr. Jackson is perhaps the most left-wing. Some observers question whether his platform can win over enough independents and moderate Republicans to win statewide.
Maine voters do split their tickets, says Professor Fried. But ticket-splitters are usually not the white working-class men that Mr. Platner claimed to be reaching; most are middle-class women who vote Democratic but have cast ballots for Ms. Collins as someone they know and like.
Before he dropped out, polls showed that Mr. Platner was lagging behind Ms. Collins among voters without a college degree, Professor Fried notes. “I don’t think he got the support from some of the voters that he wanted to get.”
Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic consultant who works for progressive candidates but was not employed by Mr. Platner, sees the terrain differently. Mr. Platner might have been trailing Ms. Collins among non-college voters, but he was winning overall in most polls. “The question in electoral politics is always a question of margins. So he clearly was doing marginally well enough among working-class voters, with his greater strength among younger, college-educated voters,” he says.
Elections are also decided by turnout, says Mr. Longabaugh, who has worked with Matt Dunlap, the Democratic nominee for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, a swing district in which Jared Golden, a moderate Democrat, is not seeking reelection. This means exciting the Democratic base, something that progressive candidates right now are doing in Maine and other states. “I really don’t see a lot of sizzle or excitement among moderate, establishment, ‘go along [to] get along’ kind of Democratic candidates at this point,” he says.
That dynamic was apparent in June’s Senate primary, in which Mr. Platner received 156,000 votes in a state with about 1 million voters. His main opponent, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, who had been drafted to run by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, suspended her campaign when it became clear she couldn’t defeat a first-time candidate who was almost half her age.
Maine allows independent voters to participate in party primaries, which analysts say helped Mr. Platner run up the numbers. But only Democrats were eligible to vote for delegates to this weekend’s nominating convention, which officials say was necessary to comply with party bylaws.
Maine’s 24 counties are sending 500 delegates to the convention, alongside 101 state committee members. More than 19,000 Democrats registered to participate in the county meetings, some of which were held virtually.
Back at the Hancock County caucus, Karen Svenson, who works in coastal conservation and knows Mr. Platner’s mother, says she understands Platner supporters’ frustration. But she thinks it’s time to put those emotions aside and focus on winning in November.
“I was very disappointed in Mainers who decided Susan Collins was going to win when Graham Platner fell out. A lot of people threw in the towel,” she says. “I thought, ‘Wait, it’s the movement, not the person. We still have work to do.’”