National Review Online
Monday, July 27, 2026
A few weeks after the implosion of the Graham Platner
campaign, Maine Democrats have selected another candidate to challenge Senator
Susan Collins. To avoid the appearance of the party bosses’ imposing a new
candidate on voters à la Kamala Harris, they created a makeshift process, which
included a debate and a vote by delegates. The resulting convention, which took
place on Saturday, kicked off with a land acknowledgment
recognizing the Maliseet, Mi‘kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot tribal nations
as the original stewards of the State of Maine. Then, delegates nominated Troy
Jackson, a former state senate president and failed gubernatorial candidate.
In Jackson, Democrats decided on somebody who shares
Platner’s left-wing politics but — they hope — comes with less baggage. When
Jackson was running for governor earlier this year, he campaigned alongside
Platner. He supports
a government-run health care system to be branded as Medicare for All; he has
called for abolishing ICE; he wants to establish a federal right to abortion;
and he wants to cut off all U.S. support for Israel in the name of ending the
supposed “genocide in Gaza.”
Jackson’s radical ideas will provide plenty of ammo to
Collins, a Republican who has survived in a blue state for 30 years as a
centrist. Take his support for Medicare for All. The Urban Institute, a liberal
think tank, estimated the ten-year cost of a Medicare for All proposal
by Senator Bernie Sanders would be close to $40 trillion. But that was back in
2018, for the years between 2022 and 2031. Given inflation in the intervening
years, any fresh estimate would almost certainly be higher.
Regardless of what the updated numbers look like, the
broad trade-offs remain the same. Financing such an expensive program would
require significant tax increases on the middle class, something even Sanders
has conceded. Jackson, meanwhile, is also running on “tax cuts for the working
class.” It will be easy for Collins to tease out the natural contradictions in
these two priorities. Additionally, a Medicare for All plan along the lines of
Sanders’s would require the elimination of Americans’ current private insurance
policies, which would affect the majority of Americans who receive health care
through their employers, as well as the millions of senior citizens with
Medicare Advantage plans. The only way to contain costs in such a system would
be to impose harsher restrictions on access to care and limit access to
doctors.
It’s also not at all clear that Jackson is free of his
own baggage. In the Maine Senate, he was prone to bouts of anger, according to the New York Times, which recounted an
incident in which he threw a water bottle across the room during a heated
argument with a female state senator.
As the failed Harris switcheroo showed, nominating a
candidate who didn’t win popular support in a primary carries a risk. Jackson
came in third place in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, with the same
electorate that overwhelmingly supported Platner, who had identical policies.
That points to Jackson’s underlying weakness as a campaigner.
Donald Trump remains highly unpopular in Maine, and even
though it would be hard to credibly portray Collins as MAGA, she has voted with
the president enough times for Jackson and the Democratic ad makers to make hay
of it. It also doesn’t help to be running for a sixth term during an
anti-incumbent year. This is still likely to be a close race.
Still, a lot of smart people have lost a lot of money
over the years betting against Susan Collins.
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