NEW YORK TIMES: “Troy Jackson, A Progressive Brawler, Tries To Flip A Senate Seat In Maine”

State Senator Mark Lawrence to the New York Times: “When you’re in a political battle you want Troy on your side”

MAINE, USA — New reporting from the New York Times highlights fifth-generation logger, former Maine Senate President, and Democratic Nominee for U.S. Senate Troy Jackson’s path from the northern woods of Maine to the halls of the state legislature, rooted in his fight for organized labor and an affordable life for everyday Mainers. 

Read the story, or see highlights below: 

New York Times: Troy Jackson, a Progressive Brawler, Tries to Flip a Senate Seat in Maine

• At 19, he followed his father into Maine’s North Woods to become a logger. At 30, he helped lead a logging blockade at the border to protest powerful landowners hiring cheaper Canadian labor. Four years later, he was elected to the Maine Legislature, where he pushed a populist agenda over nearly two decades in office, including six years as Senate president.

• Mr. Jackson, whose working-class roots run much deeper, is now testing that premise as he challenges a five-term Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, in one of the most competitive and closely watched Senate races in the country.

• “I may not be good at very many things,” Mr. Jackson recently told a crowd at a former union hall in Jay, Maine. “I am very good at pushing back.” He cuts a striking contrast with Ms. Collins, 73, a genteel centrist who has been skewered by critics over the years for expressing “concern” over tough issues. Mr. Jackson, 58, doesn’t mince words…

• “He said, ‘I’ve got to tell it like it is,’” Mr. Baldacci recalled. “There’s an authenticity to him that’s really important.”

• When term limits ended Mr. Jackson’s career in the State Senate in 2024, Mr. Baldacci presented him with a framed copy of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again.” That quote, Mr. Baldacci said, “really explains who Troy is. He’s had to fight all his life.”

• Mr. Jackson, a fifth-generation logger, has described the 1998 blockade at the Canadian border as his political awakening. [...] “Troy realized the only way to change things is to do it from within,” said Hilton Hafford, one of the loggers by his side.

• “When you grow up, never expecting to go to college, never feeling like you fit in a suit, and never seeing yourself as anything but a working-class person, you certainly don’t expect to find yourself here,” he said as he presided over the opening of the 2020 legislative session as Senate president.

• He spearheaded groundbreaking legislation to provide child care subsidies, paid family and medical leave, and free school lunches.

• Mr. Jackson’s Senate colleagues chose him to serve three consecutive terms as president because, Mr. Lawrence said, “When you’re in a political battle you want Troy on your side. He’s very good in the trenches.”

• Mr. Jackson told The New York Times that he ran for the local post because he was upset about an “unfavorable” land deal quietly approved by town officials that became the subject of a lawsuit filed by other residents. Alison Bartlett, one of the plaintiffs and a high school classmate of Mr. Jackson, said she wasn’t surprised he would seek local office even while serving as Senate president. “This is his town,” she said. “It’s just as important to him as everything else, if not more.”

• Mr. Jackson offers plain-spoken empathy for the struggles of the working class […] “I think he speaks from the heart and like a normal person,” said Linda Deane, a retired mill worker who lives [in] Livermore. “What good is it to be a great orator if you’re not going to stand up for the people that you’re representing?”

• At the former union hall in Jay, where striking mill workers once gathered and a colorful mural of people holding hands graces the walls, Mr. Jackson spoke about his father bringing him as a child to a tense standoff between loggers and a powerful landowner. He called for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, bolstering Social Security, and establishing a universal health care program.

• This is a campaign powered by organized labor. Mr. Jackson’s young campaign workers run around in T-shirts that say “SOLIDARITY.” It was labor activists who hastily threw together the infrastructure to propel Mr. Jackson to the nomination; he now touts endorsements from dozens of unions.

• As a former logger with an associate degree from the University of Maine, Mr. Jackson would be “extremely rare” in the pedigreed halls of Congress, said Nick Carnes, a Duke University public policy professor. Mr. Carnes, who is tracking all of the general election candidates running for Congress, has identified only seven who went straight into politics from manual labor, clerical or service jobs. Mr. Jackson is the only Senate candidate in that category. “He’s someone you’d expect to run into at the hardware store,” said Matthew Beck, a Democratic state representative.

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