Biddeford’s Tragedy, Jackson’s Triumph, and the Road Ahead

Life and politics can turn on a dime, and we just saw both happen in Maine.

A little over a week ago Graham Platner announced his withdrawal as Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee.

After the political drama came an awful event, the shooting and killing in Biddeford of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian father legally in the United States, by an ICE agent who should have never had the power he did.

As the Associated Press detailed, the shooter was a disturbed person with “a history of terrifying and violent behavior.”

Besides the human impacts and the policy questions about how ICE operates and who they hire, this had political impacts.

As I wrote in a piece for MS NOW, the shooting “starkly shifted Mainers’ attention, and moved the focus of the Maine Senate race from Platner to Sen. Susan Collins.”

Mainers came out and protested, with many concentrating on Collins’ ICE record and her support for hugely higher funding without any real reforms.

Maine people drew from the same participatory traditions seen in Minnesota AND Maine during their winter ICE surges.

Collins responded “in her classic both-sides way.”

Meanwhile, “Mainers [were} rising up, speaking out and moving on” and they didn’t need Graham Platner to lead them.

Share

Last weekend every Maine county held nominating events for delegates1 who will select the new Senate nominee and wow. What happened was decisive.

Troy Jackson, the former Senate President, got his backers out, and organized delegates who support him into slates, and clinched the nomination.

It was such an overwhelming win that it led to a mass withdrawal of all the other candidates with followings. That includes Shenna Bellows, Dan Kleban, Nirav Shah and Jordan Wood.

So unless something totally unforeseen develops, we can expect Jackson to be Democrats’ nominee for Senate.

A lot was made here and there about Troy Jackson being like Graham Platner because of their shared progressive positions and concern for our skewed distribution of wealth and how that shaped policies and people’s lives.

That characterization missed something important. One was that Jackson has been out there making that case and doing the work long before Platner came on the scene. Besides that, their backgrounds were very different.

Jackson was an awful lot that Platner portrayed himself as but often wasn’t.

Troy Jackson is actually from the working class and understands in his bones what it means to not have much financially.

And instead of just saying he changed, Jackson acted on his new views over time, for instance moving from being anti-abortion rights to supporting an expansion of reproductive rights in Maine that Gov. Mills also championed.

Troy Jackson is the real deal.

I also saw a lot of ordinary Maine Democrats say they wanted someone, unlike Platner who was pre-vetted. And it sure seems that’s true about Jackson, since he’s had extensive experience, both in the community and the legislature.

It also makes it essential in these few days before Troy Jackson is officially made the nominee that he’s as transparent as possible.

It’s not that I expect any issues in Jackson’s background or documents. This is more of what’s said in some weddings about speaking now.

For, as we all know, Republicans will pull no punches in trying to reelect Sen. Susan Collins. Attacks will start soon and right now Collins and her allies have lots and lots of money waiting to fuel them.

What they probably don’t have though is the grassroots energy we’ve seen for Jackson and other Democrats and that also matters.

Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with historian Claire Potter, who has a great Substack and podcast, about the Maine Senate race. We discussed the Platner campaign and what the next nominee might do target Collins.

It was a far-ranging discussion and you can listen to it or read the transcript here.

Here’s a few tidbits.

On how feminism has changed and how that affected responses to Platner:

Feminists used to talk a lot about what our experiences were. Whether it was in consciousness-raising groups or whatever, people talked about what it meant to live in a female body and how they were treated by men, experiences that have included sexual harassment and too often, sexual assault.

I think a lot of the feminist movement is now professional and institutionalized. We focus on policies, or on these other things run by organizations. Somehow, we’ve stopped talking so much about the day-to-day experiences of women. There’s a lesson there, because I think the debate over Platner would have been different if feminism had been part of the overall conversation.

On how Maine Democrats should talk about Collins:

I think the line has got to be that she’s not the Susan Collins you liked before, that she’s done good things, but she’s not the same person. That’s a very different tone than “Susan Collins is a bad person,” which was the Platner line. Say it more in sadness than in anger…She’s voting with Trump more than 90% of the time…She’s not really using her power the way she said she would.

I’m looking forward to further conversations with Claire Potter and you can follow her at The Political Junkie.

This Senate primary, from start to finish, has been so full of characters and twists and turns it could be an epic poem or maybe an opera.

As I don’t have the skills for those, I’ll just say, with a blue wave election, it looks like a change is coming.

Because right now it looks like the Democratic party in Maine is unified and ready to get to work together.