Troy Jackson insists on driving himself everywhere, even if he doesn’t know where he’s going. That was the case this past Saturday morning, when he got into his 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan and pulled out of a parking spot in Kittery, Maine, with an aide reading directions from the back seat. As Jackson turned onto the Maine Turnpike, with a stale cup of Aroma Joe’s coffee and a Killers CD in the console, he grabbed one of three pairs of sunglasses from the visor above the driver’s seat and started to tell me that running for office made him feel “scared to death.” As a labor activist, he’d learned that in “every action, every strike, somebody always gets made an example of—and that’s so that people will remember, so that they’ll be less likely to break ranks, to get out of line,” he said. Politics was no different. “You’re going to go to Exit 7,” the aide interjected. Anyway, he continued, at some point he became less afraid and decided to run for office—first as a Republican, and later as an Independent. Exit 7 came and went. He tried to swerve but couldn’t make it. “Coming back!” Jackson exclaimed, laughing heartily.
Earlier this summer, Jackson, a fifty-eight-year-old former logger and president of Maine’s state Senate, replaced Graham Platner as the Democratic Senate nominee running against Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent. Jackson accepted the nomination at a convention in Bangor, though on the campaign trail, he can occasionally sound as if he wishes he hadn’t. At a meeting with graduate-student workers in a co-op house in Orono, Jackson, who finished third in this year’s gubernatorial primary, emphasized that he didn’t expect to be the Senate nominee. “I didn’t know that I’d be the person,” he said. “I didn’t want to be the person, but I’m happy to be that person now with all of you because we really can do this.” At a town hall in Jay, he told about a hundred supporters that “it could have been anyone else.” Reading through his bio, he said, half jokingly, “I don’t want to make you have to listen to it again. . . . Obviously, I’m a fifth-generation logger. People are getting sick of me saying that.”
When Jackson finished high school in Allagash, a town near the Canadian border, his father was adamant that he shouldn’t continue in his family’s trade, but “I was an idiot, and I went to work in the woods,” he told the crowd. Throughout his career, he said, his critics seized on that background to deride him as a rube. “I went back to school at Fort Kent and finished with a 3.87 G.P.A. I’m a member of the National Honor Society. I mean, whatever,” he told me. “I don’t give a fuck what people think about if I’m educated enough.” Recently, Collins had referred in an interview with Politico to the fact that he and his partner were second cousins. “Me and Lana are consenting adults,” Jackson told me, adding that they have been together since they were in middle school. “I got two awesome sons that I’m so fucking proud of it’s not even funny, and that right there to me means that there ain’t nothing wrong with it.” He thinks that an implied classism runs through the attacks coming from Collins, a daughter of politicians, who grew up in the same county as he did. “She’s what I would consider management, and I’m the employee,” he said. “You know, with people like her, I should know my place.” Shawn Roderick, a spokesman for Collins’s campaign, pointed to Jackson’s twenty years in the legislature and his six years as state Senate president: “For him to pretend that he is a rank and file employee is ridiculous.”
