Troy Jackson Is Still Surprised That He’s Running for Senate
Troy Jackson insists on driving himself everywhere, even if he doesn’t know where he’s going. That was the case this past Saturday morning, when he got into his 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan and pulled out of a parking spot in Kittery, Maine, with an aide reading directions from the back seat. As Jackson turned onto the Maine Turnpike, with a stale cup of Aroma Joe’s coffee and a Killers CD in the console, he grabbed one of three pairs of sunglasses from the visor above the driver’s seat and started to tell me that running for office made him feel “scared to death.” As a labor activist, he’d learned that in “every action, every strike, somebody always gets made an example of—and that’s so that people will remember, so that they’ll be less likely to break ranks, to get out of line,” he said. Politics was no different. “You’re going to go to Exit 7,” the aide interjected. Anyway, he continued, at some point he became less afraid and decided to run for office—first as a Republican, and later as an Independent. Exit 7 came and went. He tried to swerve but couldn’t make it. “Coming back!” Jackson exclaimed, laughing heartily.
Earlier this summer, Jackson, a fifty-eight-year-old former logger and president of Maine’s state Senate, replaced Graham Platner as the Democratic Senate nominee running against Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent. Jackson accepted the nomination at a convention in Bangor, though on the campaign trail, he can occasionally sound as if he wishes he hadn’t. At a meeting with graduate-student workers in a co-op house in Orono, Jackson, who finished third in this year’s gubernatorial primary, emphasized that he didn’t expect to be the Senate nominee. “I didn’t know that I’d be the person,” he said. “I didn’t want to be the person, but I’m happy to be that person now with all of you because we really can do this.” At a town hall in Jay, he told about a hundred supporters that “it could have been anyone else.” Reading through his bio, he said, half jokingly, “I don’t want to make you have to listen to it again. . . . Obviously, I’m a fifth-generation logger. People are getting sick of me saying that.”
When Jackson finished high school in Allagash, a town near the Canadian border, his father was adamant that he shouldn’t continue in his family’s trade, but “I was an idiot, and I went to work in the woods,” he told the crowd. Throughout his career, he said, his critics seized on that background to deride him as a rube. “I went back to school at Fort Kent and finished with a 3.87 G.P.A. I’m a member of the National Honor Society. I mean, whatever,” he told me. “I don’t give a fuck what people think about if I’m educated enough.” Recently, Collins had referred in an interview with Politico to the fact that he and his partner were second cousins. “Me and Lana are consenting adults,” Jackson told me, adding that they have been together since they were in middle school. “I got two awesome sons that I’m so fucking proud of it’s not even funny, and that right there to me means that there ain’t nothing wrong with it.” He thinks that an implied classism runs through the attacks coming from Collins, a daughter of politicians, who grew up in the same county as he did. “She’s what I would consider management, and I’m the employee,” he said. “You know, with people like her, I should know my place.” Shawn Roderick, a spokesman for Collins’s campaign, pointed to Jackson’s twenty years in the legislature and his six years as state Senate president: “For him to pretend that he is a rank and file employee is ridiculous.”
Jackson’s self-effacing rhetoric might come from knowing his place with Mainers, who gave Platner more primary votes than any other Democratic Senate candidate in history. Dave Harvey, who attended one of Jackson’s events, said, “I think Troy’s got the same message” as Platner. “He certainly doesn’t have—I mean, Platner was a once-in-a-lifetime orator. This guy’s a hard worker.” Many supporters and allies have said that Jackson would have to work hard to match, let alone overcome, Collins’s fund-raising and enormous name recognition. But Jackson has notched multiple union endorsements, and there’s a sense that he could have cross-party appeal. “I think there are a number of Republicans—I’ve heard this anecdotally from people—that say, ‘Hey, you know, this guy’s worth considering because he’s speaking my language,’ ” Liz Shuler, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., who came to Maine to help canvass for Jackson, said. “And, to be honest, Donald Trump did the same thing, right?”
Tim Vitanza and Jay Porter are the kinds of Mainers whom Jackson might have an in with—both are three-time Trump voters who have grown dissatisfied with the President’s performance in office, particularly this year. “ ‘Drill, baby, drill’—how come he ain’t fucking drilling?” Vitanza said. Porter, a retired truck driver, liked the idea of having a nonpolitician in the White House, but he didn’t understand why Trump “had to have a statue of himself in every damn town.” “It’s been garbage,” he added. Both men live at the Blueberry Ridge mobile-home park, in Wells, which is owned by a real-estate holding corporation, and had come to the back yard of a neighbor to talk about the water issues in the community. (Brown liquid has been coming out of faucets and showers.) Vitanza was furious at how the company that he rents his lot from doesn’t seem to care to fix the problems, and yet the rent keeps going up. Jackson, addressing the residents from a plastic chair on the back yard’s deck, decried the greed of private equity and told them that he’d try to help; Collins has never shown up to their neighborhood, as far as they know. “It’d be nice to find somebody that gave a crap,” Porter said.
There was one thing holding Vitanza back from voting for Jackson, and he waited until the candidate was leaving to talk to him about it. “I’m a Republican. I’ve voted both ways. I work for the Maine Turnpike. I’m union,” Vitanza told Jackson, crossing his arms. “You don’t like ICE, you want to abolish ICE. Why?” “Well, because I think they’re just wrong right now,” Jackson replied. “I mean, we used to have Customs and Border Patrol do that.” What about “all these undocumented people who are here—you think, Oh it’s no big deal?” Vitanza asked. “No, I don’t,” he replied, raising his hand. Jackson thought ICE’s money could be invested elsewhere, and that the Border Patrol could do the job of conducting immigration enforcement. By this point, Jackson was surrounded by aides; it was time for him to go. He thanked Vitanza for being there, before adding, with a laugh, “Stay workin’, brother!”
It wasn’t exactly what Vitanza, who has many relatives working in law enforcement, wanted to hear. “I like ICE, I’m sorry,” he told me. Of the Border Patrol, he said, “Obviously, they’re not doing their job.” (Later, Vitanza saw a Collins ad that claimed that Jackson had raised taxes for seniors in the state legislature and told me that he wouldn’t vote for him “no matter what.”) Porter said he was keeping an open mind. “This is just the first date,” he said. But both agreed on one thing: Jackson had a better chance of winning than Platner did.
Platner, the combat veteran and oysterman whose Senate campaign unravelled after he was accused of various forms of misconduct, including sexual assault (which he denies), is credited with infusing the state’s middle-of-the-road electorate with enthusiasm for a progressive campaign. At a town hall in Jay on Saturday afternoon, Jayne Costa, a retired English teacher, told me that she thought the Democrats’ chances of flipping the seat would have “probably” been better if Platner had stayed in the race; she felt that the Party had gotten scared. The town hall, she added, would’ve had a bigger crowd if Platner was the host. “He drew in a lot of new voters, and he drew on a lot of young people, and that’s what we need,” Costa, who is in favor of revitalizing the town by putting an A.I. data center in an abandoned mill, said.
Jackson wants to convince his doubters that the messenger doesn’t matter as much as the message. “Look, all these things you care about are still right in front of us,” he told me. “They’re still on the table.” In Jay, he attempted to do that, touting how he would push for Medicare for All, how he “wouldn’t be opposed” to adding members to the Supreme Court, and how he “wouldn’t be opposed” to term limits. He got emotional as he spoke about spending little time with his late father because of how much he worked, and how the time that work took away from family seemed to him like “the biggest robbery I’ve ever seen.”
Sitting in the front row, a retired paper-mill worker named Linda Deane used her question to steer Jackson toward the dwindling days before the election. She and some guys who met at the union hall every day for coffee had been worrying about Collins’s attacks against him—and the possibility that they could sway voters. “When are you going to start pushing back on these attacks and setting the record straight?” Deane asked. Jackson rubbed his face. “So, I mean, it’s been real fun,” Jackson said facetiously, and the crowd laughed. “I’m not sure right now if I want to vote for myself, either. But honestly, I mean, I don’t know that, you know, we’re gonna answer them.” It was worth correcting the record on the trail, he said, but he wouldn’t be able to keep up with Collins’s spending.
Elsewhere, he could seem more sure-footed. Jackson has said that he won’t support Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to lead the caucus, and he described a meeting in Washington, earlier this summer, during which Schumer raised this with him. “ ‘I understand you’re not going to support me,’ ” he recalled Schumer saying. “Senator, I’ve been through enough leadership elections,” Jackson replied, shaking his head. “ ‘Well,’ ” he recalled Schumer saying, “ ‘We need to have Maine. I just want to work with you.’ ” Jackson said that he did, too. (Schumer did not respond to a request for comment.) Although Jackson wouldn’t have the seniority that Collins accumulated over thirty years, he believes that he will be able to wield power for working-class people in a closely divided Senate. Otherwise, “I don’t know that I’m super excited about going to Washington,” he said. “What I’m super excited about is standing up for people that I believe, you know, have been left behind by our federal government.”
Jackson isn’t a newcomer to politics, but he has never won a statewide race, let alone one as gruelling and nationally scrutinized as this one. On Saturday night, upstairs at the Baxter Brewing Company in Lewiston, Jackson sipped on a Moscow Mule and got on the dance floor at “labor karaoke” as soon as the jumping piano chords of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” came on. He was making his way out an hour later when a young man started chasing him with a phone, recording a video with the flash on. He screamed questions at Jackson, such as why he had endorsed a “communist” local official, or whether he would denounce Hasan Piker, the leftist Twitch streamer.
“I would love to know what your karaoke song is, Jacob!” a staffer accompanying Jackson said, addressing the heckler by name. “Wow! Thank you so much for coming to karaoke!” She had recognized him as a tracker—an operative hired by the opposition to create such spectacles as fodder for social media—and interposed herself between Jackson and him while also trying to shout him down. Jackson, seeming unbothered by the ruckus, made for his minivan and then drove away, honking twice. ♦