AUGUSTA, Maine — Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson was cruising toward the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination after dominating Saturday’s unprecedented county caucuses, falling just 11 delegates short of clinching the race.
The labor Democrat from Allagash is the closest thing to a one-to-one replacement for Graham Platner, whose insurgent Senate campaign collapsed this month after a Politico report detailed an ex-girlfriend’s allegation that he sexually assaulted her in 2021. Platner ranked Jackson his No. 1 choice on the ranked-choice ballot during this year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary.
Jackson was on the verge of clinching the nomination after building a delegate slate with almost no overlap with his three closest rivals. Former public health chief Nirav Shah, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former 2nd Congressional District candidate Jordan Wood spent the weekend drawing from a similar crowd of local activists.
“I think some of the other ones might have had to throw some people on at the end because I definitely know there’s some that are on theirs that are 100% committed to us,” Jackson told reporters in Augusta. “But that’s fine, you know. It is the process, and everything was late. They’re rushed, hurried, and so it is what it is.”
Jackson won at least 290 of the first 319 delegates decided across the first eight counties to vote for delegates this weekend. He won at least 148 of 149 in Cumberland County, all 44 delegates in Penobscot County and came close to sweeps elsewhere — at least 37 of 40 in Kennebec, 22 of 23 in Hancock and six of nine in Franklin.
The nomination still has to be finalized among the 601-delegate state convention in Bangor next Saturday, 500 of which were being picked by county caucuses on Saturday and Sunday as part of the quickly spun-up process to replace Platner. Delegates are formally unpledged, but no rival has shown anything close to Jackson’s organizational strength so far.
By Saturday, all four of the top candidates released their slates of preferred delegate candidates, ranging from 480 to 540 names statewide. But Jackson’s list shared only 10 to 20 names with any other single campaign. Bellows, Shah and Wood overlapped with each other by more than 100 names in some cases, signaling a high level of disorganization.
That overlap produced real confusion on the ground. Lobbyist Michael Saxl, a Bellows supporter, was on Shah’s slate. Michele Carey, an uncommitted delegate candidate in Franklin County, said she found herself listed on Bellows’ slate without agreeing to it.
“I never signed up for that,” she said.
Platner’s shadow hung over caucuses statewide, nowhere more visibly than in his home county. In Ellsworth, where Hancock County Democrats gathered under a bagpiper’s lead to open voting, attendees passed around a card for the crowd to sign expressing gratitude to Platner even as the party moved past him. In Franklin County, where roughly 150 people packed a University of Maine at Farmington lecture hall, one voter warned that abandoning Platner’s progressive policies risked losing to Collins entirely.
Not every county ran smoothly. Washington County extended voting after some participants’ landline-registered phone numbers caused technical problems. Voting was extended as Democrats were deluged with calls for technical help with the online voting module, including in Cumberland County, where chair Joseph Zamboni opened his caucus by calling it “a very extraordinary moment” bootstrapped by the party in just 10 days.
Eight more counties caucus Sunday, including York, Aroostook and Oxford, before the full delegate field is set ahead of the July 25 convention in Bangor.
BDN writers Sawyer Loftus in Bangor, Elizabeth Walztoni in Ellsworth, Kathleen Phalen Tomaselli in Calais and Kasey Turman in Farmington contributed to this report.
