In a refreshing change, Maine Democrats find candidate with an interest in winning the general election
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I have to say that Troy Jackson’s strategy of relentlessly attacking his Republican opponent is much more likely to work in a Clinton-Biden-Harris state than Graham Platner’s strategy of calling Democrats pedophiles, sometimes in ads that didn’t mention his opponent at all:
Democrats’ new Maine Senate nominee entered the general election with a very different focus than the man he’s replacing — one solely about Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Troy Jackson, a progressive fifth-generation logger from the northern woods of Allagash, spent almost the entirety of his 20-minute nomination acceptance speech on Saturday afternoon hammering Collins, from her 1990s pledge to only serve two terms to her history of voting with President Donald Trump “96 percent of the time.”
“Susan Collins and I both come from Aroostook County. But that is where the similarities end,” Jackson told the crowd of Democrats who voted for him to replace Platner on Saturday morning. “I know now, and I’ll know tomorrow, exactly who I work for. After 30 years in Washington, she definitely seems to have forgotten. For 30 years, she has told us she is concerned. But look, concern is not courage; and what she says in Maine does not erase what she does down in Washington.”
His approach is a welcome change for Democrats in Washington, who had complained that in the early days of Graham Platner’s general election campaign he spent too much time attacking both parties instead of remaining focused on attacking a Republican in a state that Vice President Kamala Harris won handily in 2024.
While Platner spent plenty of airtime focused on contrasting his beliefs with Collins’, he dedicated significant energy to hitting the whole political establishment, including members of his own party. Even some of his attacks against Collins — after he’d already won the Democratic primary — came with needling of Democrats.
“She has worked in politics longer than Joe Biden,” Platner said of Collins during his June primary victory speech, just before launching his first ad of the general election, which was focused on Jeffrey Epstein.
“It seems the only thing the party establishments can agree on is a love of Jeffrey Epstein, and a hatred of me,” Platner said in the ad.
The biggest handicap Jackson faces right now is that because Platner and his core team are hardcore factionalists who seemed to lose interest once the primary was over, his campaign starts at a major financial disadvantage. But Maine isn’t an expensive state to run in and he should be able to make that up.