Unions Help Power Troy Jackson to Win U.S. Senate Nomination

On Saturday July 25, delegates at a Maine Democratic Party state nominating convention in Bangor voted 566 to 5 to nominate fifth generation logger, union member and former Senate President Troy Jackson as the Democratic nominee for US Senate to face Republican U.S. Senator Susan Collins in November. Troy has the momentum to take on Susan Collins. The most recent polling shows Troy in the lead, and the campaign has raised more than $3 million, including $2 million from over 30,000 donors within the first 24 hours of securing the official nomination.

“Susan Collins promised she would only serve two terms. She made that promise in the fall of 1996. That same fall, my father and I were watching the work dry up. By the next spring, we had to sell what we had to get out from under the debt. And I was just trying to figure out how to keep taking care of my family,” said Jackson in his acceptance speech. “Thirty years later, Susan Collins is still in Washington. So, I have one question: Who has she served? She has served Donald Trump. She voted with him 96 percent of the time. She helped him deliver enormous tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy on our backs. And she voted to confirm Kavanaugh and Gorsuch—the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.”

Troy’s political awakening happened through collective struggles with his fellow loggers against massive timber corporations in the North Woods. When politicians in Augusta and Washington D.C. wouldn’t listen to their concerns, he ran for the state legislature in 2000 to make the voices of his fellow loggers heard. He was first elected to the Maine House in 2002 as an independent and later switched to become a Democrat because Democrats supported collective bargaining rights for loggers. For twenty years, he served in both chambers, fighting for working-class Mainers and serving three terms as Senate President.

Troy had less than two weeks to mount his campaign to replace Graham Platner on the ballot, but he had strong and immediate support because the labor movement had already built a robust grassroots operation with 300 volunteers who canvassed in support of Troy throughout the state during the gubernatorial primary. As soon as Troy announced his candidacy, the Maine AFL-CIO and the broader labor movement sprung into action by texting, emailing and calling volunteers all over the state to sign up to become county delegate candidates, attend county caucuses and vote in support of a Troy slate. Nearly 4,000 Democrats across the state filed to run for 500 delegate slots to the state convention in Bangor. In total, over 17,000 Maine Democrats voted in county conventions. More than one quarter of the delegates elected to the state convention were union members!

Those delegates were not handed to us,” Troy told supporters gathered at the York County party meeting in Sanford on July 19, according to the NY Times. “We earned them because hundreds of hundreds of people organized their neighbors, made the calls, had the conversations and showed up.”

The convention was an inspiring and moving event with a huge outpouring of union members in attendance. We plan to keep this organizing energy up and mobilize thousands of union members, family members and allies to have worksite conversations, talk to their friends and neighbors and knock on thousands of doors as part of our campaign to send Troy Jackson to the US Senate.