BANGOR — Maine Democrats had a little over two weeks to replace Graham Platner as their U.S. Senate nominee. They finished the job by noon on Saturday, formally nominating Troy Jackson at a convention lacking in suspense but replete with hallmarks of Maine’s topsy-turvy election year.
The gathering of some 600 delegates at the Cross Insurance Center capped off the party’s abbreviated process to pick a new challenger for Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent who became as much a focus of the convention as Jackson was. After Jackson, the Allagash logger and former Maine Senate president, swept county delegate-selection meetings last weekend, Democrats wasted no time in turning their attention to the general election just 101 days away.
“Today we turn the page,” Jackson, a union-backed populist in Platner’s mold who placed third in the Democratic gubernatorial primary last month, said in a speech drawing on his repeated themes about fighting for working-class Mainers.
It was his second time speaking in as many hours. The first time, he presented himself as one of two remaining candidates for the delegates to choose from — and took nearly double his allotted five minutes. Delegates elected him, 566 votes to 5, according to the state party chair, Charlie Dingman.
“It’s mostly a formality,” Keith Newman, a Democratic State Committee member and automatic delegate from Washington County, said of Jackson’s nomination before the voting. Newman said the withdrawal of all of Jackson’s major rivals to replace Platner “was not something I expected.”
Formality though it was, the convention featured many of the characters and motifs that have defined the state’s high-stakes election season, compressed into a glassy lobby and anodyne ballroom.
A former Platner volunteer wore a Platner campaign T-shirt, as many Democrats clung to the energy he galvanized before dropping out amid the fallout from a rape allegation he denies.
Devon Murphy-Anderson, the state party executive director who became well known in the last month for late-night direct-to-camera video updates, flashed her all-access pass at an unaware volunteer to enter the convention hall.
“We did it with the world watching,” she later said from the stage, thanking the state’s Democrats for contributing to the nominating process.
A Native American land acknowledgment by Dingman, the party chair, turned into a call for greater Wabanaki tribal rights; Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat absent from the convention, vetoed a bill to that end in 2023 and saw her Senate bid roundly rejected by Democratic primary voters earlier this year.
State Auditor Matt Dunlap, the Democratic nominee for Congress in Maine’s 2nd District, stood against the wall near the back of the room, near the press area. “It’ll be nice to have this over so we can put a little bit more of the public focus on our campaign,” Dunlap said.
On a morning of self-conscious party unity, at least among attendees, nothing — not even the adoption of a “credentials report” — was too small or abstruse for rousing applause. But the excitement showed especially at any mention of beating Collins, a five-term senator who fashions herself as an independent-minded moderate but who came under fire here for her still-strong voting record of aligning with President Donald Trump.
The crowd gave a polite reception to Jackson’s sole opponent at the convention, the little-known Caribou entrepreneur Saundra Pelletier, who joined in the attacks on Collins and distributed copies of a 16-page manifesto titled “WHAT I BELIEVE.”
“My superpower is reading the room,” Pelletier said, prompting murmurs in a convention hall destined not to embrace her as its torchbearer, after she was introduced by her brother, Troy — Troy Pelletier.
At a very different event the night before, in a ballroom in Washington, D.C., Trump had his mind on Maine.
“They nominated a guy with a Nazi tattoo. But don’t worry, Democrats, word is that Platner’s replacement, he throws bottles at women, this guy throws bottles — this guy’s another lunatic, by the way. Although I think Platner might’ve done surprisingly well, because we’re in the age of Trump,” Trump said Friday at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner rescheduled after an assassination attempt derailed this year’s original one. (Platner has said he got the tattoo without knowing of its Nazi links.)
Saturday’s program in Bangor appeared to take account of recent reporting on Jackson’s intensity in the state Senate, including the water bottle incident. Charlotte Warren, a former state representative whose 2021 clash with Jackson in Augusta was described in a Washington Post article, introduced Jackson as “passionate.”
In his victory speech after the convention officially adjourned, Jackson framed his progressive priorities around a resource that Platner often cited on the stump and that Maine Democrats have in short supply: time.
“We’re losing what little time we have with our families,” Jackson, 58, said in a speech in which he at times stumbled over his words.
“I spend all my time trying to catch up for life lost with my kids,” he continued. “And I see it, you know, with people everywhere. You know, they, they, they made it so hard that we’re always chasing something to try and put it all together, and our families suffer.”
In just over three months, Jackson will appear on the ballot against Collins, for the chance to spend the next six years shuttling to Washington, D.C.
After he left the stage, the delegates filed out of the convention hall, and some sang the union standard “Solidarity Forever.”