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When Maine Democrats host a quasi-improvised convention of elected delegates at a combined conference center/minor league hockey arena to pick their party’s second nominee for U.S. Senate, it’ll be the race’s most normal thing that has happened to date. The outcome is a foregone conclusion: Troy Jackson, the preferred candidate of the left wing, is set to be officially ratified after his campaign team successfully mastered the jury-rigged process put into place after the Democratic nomination became vacant earlier this month.
That Jackson’s ascension by convention counts as normal is less a reflection of the process itself than a product of the preconvention roller coaster ride that brought Democrats to where they are now.
The chaos in Maine’s Senate race started last year with Janet Mills, the state’s septuagenarian incumbent governor, hemming and hawing about whether she wanted to run for a Senate seat Democrats needed to win to take over control of Congress’ upper chamber. In the meantime, her hesitation froze the field. Every other credible Democrat either ran for governor or didn’t enter the race at all.
There was one exception, a blue-collar oyster farmer and Marine veteran named Graham Platner. He seemed almost too good to be true when a posse of wandering left-wing political consultants recruited him to run. While Platner inspired a large grassroots campaign of progressives and was able to muscle Mills out of the race long before primary day, it turned out he was too good to be true. There were Roman catacombs with fewer skeletons than those in his closet. Finally, culminating with allegations of rape just days before the deadline, Platner withdrew from the race in a letter that ended with him expressing his opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and his support for a 2-year-old minor league soccer team.
Platner’s implosion gave Maine Democrats less than two weeks to pick a nominee to replace him. Quickly, the race became a consolation prize for Democrats who had recently lost other contests. (Among those who announced a campaign were three losing gubernatorial candidates and a losing House candidate.)
With the end goal of picking someone who could unite the party against Republican Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Democrats had an unenviable task. Their charge was to come up with a process fair enough to survive scrutiny of all but the most unhinged internet conspiracy theorists and simple enough that it wouldn’t scare off too many Democrats in the oldest state in the nation.
Here’s what they came up with: It started with each Maine county holding its own convention, open to all registered Democrats, to select delegates to this weekend’s state convention. Attendees would gather either in person or online to vote. (The rural counties got together in person. The more urban ones voted online.) The result was a process that borrowed from traditions long familiar to political aficionados, as well as more modern and mundane aspects, like an endless Zoom call that featured users asking repetitive questions in the chat.
Each county would elect a certain number of delegates, depending on its size and support for Democratic candidates. Tiny rural Piscataquis County got four delegates, whereas Cumberland, which includes Portland, had 149. In total, 500 delegates would be elected. (There were also 101 delegates composed of elected party officials to the Maine Democratic Party’s central committee.)
Needless to say, such a novel process produced much lower participation: 216,000 Mainers voted in the U.S. Senate primary on June 9. The county conventions, held last weekend, featured turnout that was less than a tenth of that. It was a summer weekend that required a far greater time commitment than casting a ballot. Further, it got complicated. Although it was easy for a resident of Piscataquis County to pick their four delegates, someone in Portland had 149 different slots to fill.
The upshot was that instead of a more community-minded gathering of citizens casting ballots for friends and neighbors, delegates were simply voted into the state convention based on whom they would support for the Senate. Campaigns scrambled to offer their own slates of delegates who they thought would be pledged to them.
The most complete was offered by Jackson, the third-place finisher in the gubernatorial race. Jackson, who campaigned heavily with Platner before the scandals, had the support of roughly 75 percent of the volunteers who rallied behind the now-disgraced former Senate candidate. A longtime ally of organized labor, Jackson also had Maine unions heavily organizing for him. His campaign took no risks either, reminding Mainers: “Vote for every name on the Troy Jackson delegate slate and no other names.” The result was a landslide. In some large counties, Jackson won every delegate at stake as a plurality of convention attendees simply voted for the populist Democrat’s slate. The majority of the other candidates dropped out, and, as with most such gatherings these days, the state convention in Bangor is now expected to be a pro forma coronation.
And so a nomination competition that featured a guy with a Nazi tattoo becoming an overnight political celebrity will end in a minor league hockey arena, but perhaps that’s not as bizarre as it sounds.
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After all, there is nothing more normal in American politics than a convention. In fact, the process far predates the modern primary and was long a staple of how parties chose candidates. Most states still hold conventions in one form or another, but the events have become increasingly vestigial. It’s rare that candidates are nominated through conventions, which are often opportunities for endless speeches—much like the quadrennial political conventions that national parties hold to ratify their nominees.
This could have played out differently had Team Jackson not cleared the field ahead of what is now a formality.
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A competitive convention would have been a delightfully exotic twist to such a topsy-turvy campaign in Maine. Instead of the mechanical rituals of the modern Election Day, it would have added a unique flavor to politics in 2026. H.L. Mencken wrote of national political conventions over a century ago: “One sits through long sessions wishing heartily that all the delegates and alternates were dead and in hell—and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour.”
Conventions, with their politicking and maneuvering, are filled with the exhilarating and preposterous: the horse trading, the revisitation of decades-old grudges among party regulars, and the general chaos of a process run by volunteers and party staffers barely familiar with Robert’s Rules of Order who are trying to manage the expectations of delegates who have never heard of any manual of parliamentary procedure.
But it was not to be. For once this cycle, the Maine Senate race just had to be normal.
