SerpApi.Org
The Democrats’ prospects of wrenching back control of Congress had not looked better in years.
Maine’s Republican senator, Susan Collins, has kept a stranglehold on the state she first won in 1996, seeing off four Democrats in the decades since.
But polling since the start of the year showed her latest challenger, Graham Platner, a progressive Democrat, beating her by between 4 and 11 percentage points.
Then Mr Platner was forced from the race, his already scandal-ridden candidacy imploding as he was accused of rape, which he denies.
Insiders fear the former oyster farmer and veteran has caused enormous damage to the Democrats’ prospects, and that his self-destruction spells Ms Collins’s return to the Senate for her sixth term.
Republicans have a razor-thin majority in both the Senate and the House. For the Democrats to wrest this back in the Midterm elections, they need to gain a net of four seats in the Senate and five seats in the House. Ms Collins’s seat was considered a must-win.
And they think that Mr Platner’s soon-to-be replacement, Troy Jackson, might not be the man to repair the damage.
“I don’t know that he’s the guy I want on a debate stage against Susan,” one party source admitted.
After Mr Platner dropped out of the race on July 10, Mr Jackson, who had previously been president of the state senate, emerged as the clear pick to replace him.
He is an experienced politician with strong ties to the labour movement, and inherits a grassroots infrastructure assembled by Mr Platner.
But he has just a few months before the Midterm elections, when he takes on a veteran of 30 years. And his ties to the former candidate may yet hamstring his last-minute attempt.
The balance of power in the Senate is at stake. Maine is one of the four critical seats which must flip to enable the Democrats to retake control of the chamber in November’s Midterms. The party’s route to a majority is far harder without it.
Mr Jackson first ran for office in the early 2000s as a Republican while protesting against Canadian loggers coming to the US and being hired over native Maine workers.
Two years later, he ran as an independent candidate, before joining the Democrats in 2004, drawn in by the party’s backing of efforts to allow independent logging and trucking contractors to bargain collectively with landowners.
By 2008, he had been elected to the state Senate and between 2013 and 2014, he served as majority leader of the Maine Senate before Republicans regained control of the chamber.
But his ascent to national politics has been as meteoric as it is unexpected. It could be over almost as soon as it began.
“Jackson has been asked to put together a Senate campaign in 100 days or so, which is a very difficult thing to do,” said Brad Bannon, a Democrat strategist.
On the other hand, he “inherits the Platner grassroots infrastructure” which “mitigates it, to some extent”, he added.
Mr Jackson became the de facto Democrat nominee on July 19, when party rivals for the race dropped out.
That gives him 107 days to build and run a campaign: by coincidence, exactly the same number of days Kamala Harris had when she replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate for the 2024 presidential election.
Ms Harris eventually lost the election, including all seven battleground states, to Donald Trump, the US president. 107 Days later became the name of her book about the truncated campaign, which she argued had fatally undermined her chances.
The issue for Mr Jackson, entering the race so late, is “how far behind [he] is in terms of setting up his campaign operation and then also his fundraising operation”, said Mark Brewer, professor of political science at the University of Maine.
Prof Brewer added: “The entire election, he’s going to constantly be trying to play catch-up. It’s not going to be easy.”
Mr Jackson, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has raised $1m (£748,000) in under two weeks, according to Politico. The party is rallying around its candidate.
But he is vastly outgunned by Ms Collins, who has $11m on hand to fight the election. Democrats are already bracing for a barrage of attack adverts.
One potentially damaging liability is that Mr Jackson, once a prominent ally of Mr Platner, appeared numerous times with the disgraced former candidate. Many photos show them standing hand in hand in front of supporters.
“There are photos of Troy and Platner holding hands on a stage,” said one party source. “That’s going to be a f----ing attack ad. ‘Troy Jackson stood with rapist.’ That’s not exactly the headline you want in October.”
Mr Jackson was one of the first figures to distance himself from Mr Platner following the rape allegations.
At the same time, as many Democrats did, he was prepared to accept a chequered candidate who prompted intense controversy for his Nazi tattoo – Mr Platner insisted he was unaware of its meaning – and internet comments which critics decried as racist, sexist and homophobic.
However, a Democrat insider argued Mr Jackson was well-known in the state thanks to his decades in politics and that he could not be tarred as simply a Platner ally.
The Democrats’ once-commanding lead has collapsed. A University of New Hampshire poll shows the race in a virtual dead heat.
Back in May, its poll gave Mr Platner a 9-point lead. Mr Jackson’s lead currently stands at 3 points – with a 2.8-point margin of error.
Party figures also expect Ms Collins to attack Mr Jackson on his former pro-life beliefs and opposition to gay marriage, positioning herself to the Left of the challenger to try to soak up swing voters.
Twenty years on, his past pro-choice credentials remain so strong that Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the US, rated his support at 100 per cent.
“I think he got in many years ago on falsehoods, or a platform he didn’t really believe in, being pro-life or more conservative, and then... changed his ways,” said Katrina Smith, a Maine Republican.
Ms Collins’s position is far from secure, either. Mr Trump is deeply unpopular in Maine, and Midterms are generally seen as a referendum on the president. She is under pressure after a 26-year-old Colombian was killed in Biddeford, Maine by agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – an agency that she voted to fund.
But the Maine senator, once looking like a distant second in the contest, is now in an even fight. If she wins in November, as she has five times before, the Democrats will have only themselves to blame.
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