When Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate nominee for Maine in this year’s midterm election, announced on July 8 that he was suspending his campaign and then formally withdrew two days later, many Republicans celebrated. A cascade of controversies, from his Nazi-linked tattoo to a sexual assault allegation he still denies, had shattered the campaign of the tough-talking, lumberjack-looking oyster farmer who’d pitched himself as a political outsider with deep Maine roots. Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), his earliest champions, turned on him. Though Republicans hadn’t landed the fateful blow, they still basked in the warm glow of what appeared to be an opportunity for incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) to regain a much-needed foothold in the race. But Republicans may have celebrated too early.
With Platner’s exit, Maine Democrats and party officials got the chance to reload behind a more professional version: Troy Jackson, the president of the Maine Senate from 2018 to 2024. A former logger with a progressive policy record, Jackson embraces a populist economic message that mirrors Platner’s own, calling for taxes on the rich and “Medicare for All.”
The response from Republicans to the candidate switcheroo has been illuminating. Within days of Jackson’s nomination, the Republican National Committee branded him a “Bernie Bro” bent on shoving “socialism down the throats of Maine voters.” Collins’s own campaign has been measured but no less pointed, casting Jackson as handpicked by party insiders and warning that his Medicare-for-All platform would leave low- and middle-income Mainers footing the bill.
Though Collins is taking the new nominee seriously, not everyone in Republican circles is convinced that Jackson is a tougher adversary than Platner. Lance Dutson, a GOP strategist who has worked on Collins’s past campaigns but isn’t involved in this one, argues the race has reset in Republicans’ favor. “People are going to be able to put his record up against Collins’ record. And there’s really no comparison between the two,” Dutson told NBC. The strategist noted that Collins, who is presently the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has brought “literally billions and billions of dollars” to Maine.
But what initially appeared like a lifeline for Collins, who had trailed Platner in polling and in the prediction markets for much of 2026, has quickly turned into an equally tough race for the five-term incumbent. A Public Policy Polling flash survey taken just before Platner’s exit found Jackson ahead of Collins by five points, 49 to 44. A nonpartisan University of New Hampshire poll in late July found Jackson up three, 49 to 46. And a Hart Research poll released in early August, which was conducted for the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC, put Jackson’s lead at four points, 49 to 45, with the pollster noting Collins is in “notably worse shape” than she was at a comparable point in her 2020 race against Sara Gideon. The prediction markets tell a similar story. On Polymarket, at time of writing, Jackson holds a measurable lead over Collins, with his contract trading at 70 cents to the dollar. On Kalshi, Jackson is trading at 65 cents to the dollar.
Regardless of what the polling data and betting markets say, Dutson has questioned whether Jackson’s progressive politics will play in rural Maine, telling NBC News that Jackson’s alignment with figures such as Sanders could be a liability outside the state’s metro areas. But Jackson has spent two decades disproving that claim, winning reelection to his rural Senate seat in Aroostook county, a district that has otherwise trended toward Trump, as recently as 2022. And there’s one especially consequential demographic Jackson may be better positioned to win than Platner was: women.
In Maine, women made up nearly 60 percent of total turnout in the 2020 presidential election, according to exit polling. That year, they backed former President Joe Biden by 23 points over Trump, but favored Collins by three points in her Senate race. While Collins has proved she’s capable of winning the women’s vote in Maine, Jackson enters the general election without the extraordinary personal baggage that ultimately made Platner vulnerable with precisely that demographic. Speaking with NPR on August 7th, Stacy Leafsong, an early Platner supporter, said Jackson “really needs to speak to the women in Maine, and really convince them that he’s going to advocate well for them.”
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That’s not to say Jackson doesn’t have some personal baggage of his own. In a report published late July, Maine Wire editor Steve Robinson claimed that Jackson and his longtime partner, Lana Pelletier, are second cousins and have two children together, based on genealogical records. The relationship is not illegal, as Maine law does not prohibit sexual relations or marriage between second cousins. The Maine Wire report also noted that such a relationship is not considered unusual in parts of rural northern Maine. Jackson’s campaign did not address the allegation directly, instead calling the attacks “shameful” and arguing that the Collins campaign “will do anything to distract from the fact that she votes with Trump 96 percent of the time and has sold out working people in Maine.”
So far, the controversy has failed to generate the sort of negative publicity necessary to implode Jackson’s campaign. Discussion over the allegations has remained largely confined to Fox News and social media. And when asked about the allegations this week, Senate Democrats brushed them aside, reaffirming support for Jackson’s campaign. “I haven’t heard of these reports,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said. “Troy Jackson is somebody who’s obviously in this fight for working people.”
With fewer than 90 days to go until the Maine general election on November 3, Collins still has time, and considerable funding, to close the narrow gap in polling. Her biggest obstacle at the moment may be the Republican Party itself, which is struggling to sell an unpopular war in Iran and is facing negative approval ratings on the economy. With the chasm between America’s monied interests and working people growing ever wider, the message of a former logger making the case for economic reform may become increasingly difficult for Maine voters to resist, second-cousin scandals notwithstanding.
