BANGOR, Maine — Hope Brogunier was visibly exasperated on Friday after watching Troy Jackson onstage for his final debate against Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME).
She was a die-hard Graham Platner supporter and still reeling from his removal from the Maine Senate ballot. Now, she was processing with horror that Jackson, his Democratic replacement, had struggled to knock Collins off-balance.
“I was just wincing,” said Brogunier, a retiree from Bangor who shook her head in disbelief that Collins was so well prepared. “I could barely stand it!”
“She is so good at getting ahead of the criticism, and, I mean, she was right there with her facts,” Brogunier added. “You’d be a doughhead if you couldn’t see it.”
It’s not that Brogunier doesn’t think Jackson, a former leader of the Maine Senate, is a good candidate for Democrats. She considers his working-class background as an Allagash logger “endearing” and, as a matter of principle, believes he’s committed to “helping people on the bottom of the pile.”
But the debate confirmed to her that Jackson wasn’t nearly as dynamic as Platner, an oysterman whose insurgent campaign in the Democratic primary was marked by large rallies and a certain Trump-like Teflon that made him nearly impervious to scandal.
“It was the first thing I thought of when the Democrats ditched Platner,” Brogunier said, speaking to the Washington Examiner in downtown Bangor. “Oh my God! Platner would have had her flat on the ground, running defensive.”
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To some extent, Jackson’s nomination in July represented a clean slate for Democrats, a chance to move past the rape allegations that precipitated Platner’s departure from the race. Platner maintains his innocence, but it was the last in a drip, drip of reporting that derailed his campaign.
Unlike Platner, Jackson doesn’t have a social media history that every Republican operative dreams of discovering. There’s also no Nazi-linked tattoo under his Carhartt vest.
Yet Jackson lacks what made Platner such a compelling candidate, too. His charm, his deep, gravelly voice. Politically, Jackson, a recent gubernatorial candidate who placed third in the June primary, is far less willing to go out on a limb on third-rail topics like Israel that animate the Democratic base.
After a rushed convention, Democrats settled on Jackson as a sort of consensus candidate, someone who shares Platner’s populist brand of politics without as many rough edges. Yet his performance in the three months since he took over the nomination has raised questions over whether he can mount as forceful of a campaign.
The team he’s surrounded himself with, many of them establishment-aligned operatives, is running a comparatively guarded campaign. And the times Jackson has veered seriously off-script have become political fodder for Republicans.
Days after their fourth debate, Jackson is still on the defensive about telling Collins to “shut up,” a comment that she has painted as sexist.
A titan of Maine politics
Collins, one of the longest-serving senators in Washington, is not without her own liabilities. She is running in a year of anti-establishment sentiment nationally, and Maine voters remember that she promised only to serve two terms and is now in her fifth.
As a swing vote in the Senate, Collins is vulnerable to Democratic reminders that, although she has an independent streak, she votes much of the time with Republicans.
For those reasons, Democrats are hopeful that 2026 could be the year that Collins’s gravity-defying career comes to an end. Polls show a close, margin-of-error race despite her repeated victories in a Democratic-leaning state.
Yet Collins’s experience is also her biggest strength, and if she wins in two weeks, it will be because Mainers want their sparsely populated state to punch above its weight, whether she’s aligned with President Donald Trump on certain issues or not.
In interviews with more than a dozen Maine voters, Collins’s role as the top appropriator in the Senate came up often, as did the 10,000 consecutive votes she’s cast since arriving there in 1997.
“I get a little antsy about term limits,” said Theresa, a 72-year-old registered independent who cast her ballot for Collins at an early-voting station in Bangor. “I think maybe that she’s been there a little too long. But she also has pull, and she does work for the state of Maine. She’s proved that. She’s there. She doesn’t miss a vote.”
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That’s not an argument to win over dyed-in-the-wool Democrats who believe most anyone with a “D” beside their name would be better than Collins.
It will weigh into the calculation of persuadable voters, though, and Republicans believe that Collins fights Jackson, who ended his two decades in the Maine legislature in 2024, to a draw on the career politician critique.
Each has inundated the airwaves accusing the other of corruption in their years in Washington or Augusta.
“I mean, if anybody is the establishment in Maine, it’s him,” said Lance Dutson, a Maine-based operative and former senior adviser for Collins.
Lingering mistrust
With Platner gone, Democrats have a fresh chance to shore up their base of voters. Kyle, a 38-year-old resident of Lewiston, said he was torn over Platner and the Totenkopf tattoo on his chest.
He might have left the ballot blank or even voted for Collins, calling it a 50-50 decision.
Platner’s exit from the race also brought a sense of relief to committed progressives who were willing to overlook the tattoo and other early scandals, but were deeply uncomfortable being asked to vote for an accused rapist.
“I personally was pretty ready and willing to dump him once a lot of the stronger allegations came out,” said Joseph Paul, a 32-year-old communications professional who attended Jackson’s debate in Bangor.
The urgency surrounding Platner’s removal — he was forced out days before the ballot replacement deadline — came with accusations that he’d been robbed of the nomination, and party leaders in Washington are still dealing with that fallout.
Brogunier, the Bangor resident, said she was so livid about the “undemocratic thing that the Democratic Party did in this state” that she considered changing her voter registration and knows friends who did.
But Democrats are hoping that Jackson serves as something of a tribute to Platner as someone who, on paper, has unmistakable similarities.
Instead of an oysterman, delegates picked a logger from a border town in Maine. Rhetorically, Jackson has centered his campaign on the same populist message of getting money out of politics and ending “forever wars.”
At a campaign event in Biddeford on Friday night, Jackson identified himself with the union workers who “put our blood, sweat, and tears on the line” to make money for the billionaire class and framed his candidacy as a challenge to the status quo.
A race with national stakes
The national weight of the Maine Senate race — a Collins loss would help deliver Democrats the majority and a check on Trump — is enough to convince at least some disaffected voters to come back to their party.
“The anger I have, and most everybody I know has, over the limp absence of congressional muscle … it’s dire, it’s serious, and I’ll do everything I can to change it,” said Brogunier. “And that means voting for Troy.”
Less clear is how universal that feeling is, or whether Platner’s exit has caused lasting damage for Democrats.
Paul, the 32-year-old communications professional, said he felt that Jackson was putting in the “legwork” to win over Platner voters. Jackson also benefits from the same surrogates who endorsed Platner and are regarded as progressive heroes on the Left.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the Vermont socialist who came close to winning the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, made a trip to Maine earlier this month and was quickly followed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
“I think he’s trying,” Paul said of Jackson. “I think in this country, it’s easy to attach a lot to singular candidates over movements. Trump, Bernie, Obama — and so, it can be hard when that particular candidate is gone.”
There was a time when Republicans viewed Platner as a genuine threat to Collins given the grassroots energy that surrounded his campaign. He was able to defeat the sitting governor, Janet Mills (D-ME), in the primary with an asymmetric campaign that leaned into his reputation as a political outsider.
“Platner was having campaign rallies like no one’s ever had in the history of the state of Maine before he blew up,” said Dutson, the former Collins adviser.
With Jackson, Republicans believe they’re navigating a more conventional race, a dynamic shift that is not lost on Maine voters.
Paul expressed concern that Jackson might play it too safe, and that his greatest strength — his working-class roots — are at risk of getting lost due to the operatives who have surrounded his campaign.
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“I would hope he follows that a little more in a place like Maine than whatever the likes of the DNC assemble,” Paul said.
“I would not place trust in Chuck Schumer to run an effective campaign in Maine,” Paul added. “He chose Janet Mills and look how that imploded.”