From the Woods to the Ballot
Troy Jackson and What Working-Class Politics Can Still Do
Workers Rising is an ongoing series about the people whose work keeps everything running, and about what happens when those people decide to organize. The loggers and dispatchers, the flight attendants and shrimp boat captains, the mechanics and teachers and nurses and ground crews. Each installment follows the work: who does it, who depends on it, who pays when something breaks, and what becomes possible when workers refuse to accept the terms. These aren’t just labor stories. They’re the foundation the rest of the economy stands on.
I. From Portland to Bangor
I first time that I heard Troy Jackson speak in person was on Labor Day 2025, at a Fighting Oligarchy rally in Portland’s Cross Insurance Arena. My mom and I were somewhere in the middle of the crowd of more than six thousand five hundred people, many of them wearing union shirts, and many of them were specifically there for Bernie Sanders, as Jackson wasn’t the headliner. He was one of several Maine speakers introducing the senator from Vermont. But when the fifth-generation logger from Allagash stepped to the microphone, the arena got quieter than it had been all afternoon. He talked about his father working sixteen-hour days in the woods. He talked about wages that hadn’t kept up with what a family needed to live. He talked about the political class in Augusta and Washington that had watched it happen and done nothing. None of us knew at the time that Jackson would eventually be his party’s nominee to face Susan Collins for the United States Senate.
Ten months later, on July 25, 2026, delegates at the Maine Democratic convention in Bangor voted 566 to 5 to make it official. Jackson took the stage as the party’s nominee. He spoke about the fall of 1996, when Collins was elected on a promise to serve only two terms, and the same fall his father had to sell what they owned to get out from under the debt. Thirty years later, Collins is still in the Senate, and Jackson has an important question for the voters of Maine.
Troy Jackson speaks during a demonstration outside of a federal immigration office in Scarborough, Maine, on July 14, 2026. Ryan Murphy/Getty Images
II. The Formation
Jackson grew up in Allagash, a town so far north in Aroostook County that it sits closer to Quebec than to any Maine city. His mother was sixteen when he was born. His father was a logger. His grandfather was a logger. His great-grandfather was a logger. His mother was a public school teacher. The town had about 250 people by the time Jackson was old enough to notice the local school closing and the young families leaving to find work somewhere else.
He became a logger himself. He worked eighty-hour weeks in the woods when the work was there, and watched wages fall behind what a family needed to live when it wasn’t. In the fall of 1998, at thirty-one years old, he helped organize a two-day blockade of the logging road at St. Pamphile, a remote border crossing in northwestern Aroostook County. Maine loggers had been watching corporate landowners import lower-paid Canadian workers to undercut their wages. An Associated Press photograph from that October shows Jackson glaring at Maine State Police troopers threatening him with arrest, standing shoulder to shoulder with fellow loggers Stacey Kelly and Hilton Hafford.
Maine loggers Stacey Kelly (second from left), Troy Jackson, and Hilton Hafford are threatened with arrest by Maine State Police if they continue to block access to Canadian woodsmen at the border at St. Pamphile, Quebec, Monday, Oct. 26, 1998. Photo by Robert F. Bukaty.
The politicians in Augusta and Washington promised to help. Then they didn’t. Two years later, Jackson ran for the state legislature himself, first as an independent and later as a Democrat, because Democrats supported collective bargaining rights for loggers. He won that seat, and he kept winning it, term after term, in a district that had turned solidly Republican around him. Fourteen years into his legislative career, he stood in front of a room full of loggers’ children and told them how his politics were formed:
“As if all the strength that he had in that little hand could counter generations of corporate greed that was keeping other young children in the St. John Valley from their parents. It was during those long Sunday nights that would turn into early Monday mornings that I stopped accepting things for the way that they were and started thinking about the way that they should be.”
III. The Incumbent
At the Bangor convention, Jackson delivered the line that has been traveling ever since: “Susan Collins is still in Washington. So, I have one question: Who has she served?”
His answer, in the same speech: “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.”
Collins has spent the summer trying to redirect the frame. “Year after year, Georgetown University has ranked me the most bipartisan member of the Senate,” she told News Center Maine. She has run on her chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee, pointing to $1.5 billion she has secured for 674 projects in Maine. She has called Jackson’s platform “the democratic socialist platform” and warned that his proposals will be paid for by middle and low-income workers.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, walks in the annual Moxie Day Parade in Lisbon Falls, Maine, on July 11. Scott Eisen / Getty Images.
The Georgetown ranking is real. So is the appropriations work. So is the fact that Maine residents send roughly $16 billion to the federal government every year and Collins returns about ten percent of it in the form of grants Maine has to lobby her office to secure. The transaction is the point. Maine gets fire department funding; the architecture gets Collins’s votes for the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, the tax cuts that starved federal revenue, the Iran war that spiked the fuel prices Mainers are now paying to heat their homes, and $70 billion in expanded funding for ICE, whose agents shot and killed a 26-year old Colombian man named Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on a Biddeford street on July 13. Legally authorized to work. The next week, protesters marched to Collins’s Portland office and chanted “Vote her out.”
Meanwhile, according to New York Times reporting, Elon Musk’s America PAC plans to spend $120 million to protect Republican Senate seats. Jackson’s response on Facebook: “You don’t get to buy the government you want. We don’t want his dirty money in politics.”
IV. The Machinery and the Movement
Consider the machinery arrayed against Troy Jackson. Susan Collins has eleven million dollars in the bank and has been running for statewide office in Maine for thirty years. The Senate Leadership Fund, the top Republican Senate super PAC, has pledged more than forty million dollars to the race. Elon Musk’s America PAC is spending nine figures across GOP Senate races. Analysts project that nearly four hundred million dollars will be spent on ads in this single Senate contest, in a state of 1.4 million people. That works out to roughly eleven hundred dollars in ad spending per Maine voter.
Consider what Jackson has built in response. He has raised three million dollars, two million of it from more than thirty thousand small donors in the first twenty-four hours after his nomination. The Maine AFL-CIO endorsed him along with nearly two dozen affiliated unions. The Maine People’s Alliance, a member-led progressive organization with tens of thousands of members, endorsed him alongside a slate of fifty-two down-ballot candidates. The 300 volunteers who had spent the summer canvassing for Hannah Pingree’s gubernatorial campaign redeployed to Jackson’s Senate race within days of the ballot switch.
At the July 25 convention, nearly four thousand Democrats had filed to run for five hundred delegate slots. More than seventeen thousand Mainers had voted in county caucuses to elect them. More than a quarter of the state convention delegates were union members who had run for their slots and won them. “Those delegates were not handed to us,” Jackson told supporters at a York County party meeting the week before the vote. “We earned them because hundreds of hundreds of people organized their neighbors, made the calls, had the conversations, and showed up.”
That is a different kind of political power than money. It is slower to build, harder to measure, and impossible to buy. It is what the Jacobin writer Branko Marcetic recently described as “something the Left often discusses but rarely sees: a working-class politician who emerged from workplace organizing struggles and used his power to advance pro-worker policies.” And it is what Jackson meant when he told the convention hall in Bangor: “This movement is not from the left. It is not from the right. It’s from the bottom, and we are rising.”
Seen in Maryland July 28th.
The mobilization has already spread beyond Maine’s borders.
V. What Working-Class Politics Can Still Do
Jackson goes into the final hundred days as the underdog, but not by as much as the money would suggest. Recent polling shows him leading. Collins’s approval in Maine has slipped as the state has absorbed the costs of the war she voted to support, the tax cuts she voted to pass, and the ICE funding she voted to expand. Trump’s approval in Maine sits at 39%. Kamala Harris carried the state in 2024. The Republican strategy of tying Jackson to Graham Platner has to contend with the fact that Jackson has spent twenty years in the Maine legislature, has won reelection in a Trump-voting district term after term, and has an actual legislative record on collective bargaining, healthcare and rural investment that Platner never had time to build.
Not everyone on the left is enthusiastic. Publications from the Trotskyist tradition have documented what they read as a pattern of nationalism in Jackson’s labor politics, and his voting record includes positions on cultural issues that his platform has since moved past. These are real concerns raised in good faith, and the disagreement about whether working within the Democratic Party is strategically effective or ultimately containing is an old and honest debate on the left. On the ballot in November, however, the choice is Jackson or Collins. It is not Jackson or an imagined alternative.
While Jackson may already have this teacher’s vote this fall, he will have to keep earning every other one, Democrat, Republican, and independent alike, one conversation at a time, the way he earned the delegates at the convention.
One of the analytical threads this Workers Rising series has been building all year has argued that the architecture is designed to make working-class political power nearly impossible to assemble. The Spirit Airlines workers found this out at three in the morning on May 2. The Bayou La Batre shrimpers found it out in the boatyards. The gig workers found it out in their inboxes. But in Maine this summer, seventeen thousand people voted in county caucuses. Four thousand ran for five hundred delegate slots. And a fifth-generation logger accepted a nomination he built through worker organizing, not party sponsorship. Which ultimately leads to a deeper question: If a fifth-generation logger can win a Senate seat from Susan Collins, what other structures could working-class organizing rearrange?
References
Crosse, J. (2026, August 1). Union bureaucracy, DSA rally behind Troy Jackson after collapse of Graham Platner campaign. World Socialist Web Site. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/08/01/sflu-a01.html
Davis, E. (2026, July 13). Hundreds protest fatal ICE shooting in Biddeford. Maine Morning Star. https://mainemorningstar.com/2026/07/13/hundreds-protest-fatal-ice-shooting-in-biddeford/
Epstein, J. (2026, July 26). Democrats Reset the Maine Senate Race. Now Comes the Tricky Part. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/us/politics/jackson-collins-platner-senate-maine.html
Hirschkorn, P. (2026, July 25). Sen. Collins calls new Democratic US Senate nominee Troy Jackson ‘hyper-partisan’. News Center Maine. https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/politics/senator-susan-collins/senator-susan-collins-democratic-us-senate-nominee-troy-jackson-hyper-partisan-maine/97-b806b385-4dd0-4748-a46d-53c168283ba2
Kapur, S. (2026, August 1). Troy Jackson launches his first general election ad in Maine Senate race, criticizing Susan Collins. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2028-election/troy-jackson-launches-general-election-ad-maine-senate-susan-collins-rcna590380
Marcetic, B. (2026, July 15). Troy Jackson’s politics are rooted in Maine Logger struggles. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2026/07/maine-jackson-logging-workplace-struggles
Miller, K. (2026, July 25). Troy Jackson wins the Democratic nomination to challenge Sen. Susan Collins. Maine Public. https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2026-07-25/troy-jackson-wins-the-democratic-nomination-to-challenge-sen-susan-collins
Mistler, S. (2026, July 29). Troy Jackson is about to go under the national microscope. Here’s a look at his past. Maine Public. https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2026-07-28/troy-jackson-is-about-to-go-under-the-national-microscope-heres-a-look-at-his-past
Popat, S. (2026, August 1). Upheaval in Maine and another 100-day campaign - can Democrats pull it off? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/01/troy-jackson-maine-senate
Staff, W. (2026, August 4). Senate candidate Troy Jackson calls out Elon Musk over supposed plans to help Sen. Collins. WGME. https://wgme.com/news/local/maine-senate-candidate-troy-jackson-calls-out-elon-musk-over-supposed-plans-to-help-senator-susan-collins
Steinmetz, C. (2026, August 3). MPA endorses Jackson, Pingree, Dunlap more than 50 progressive state candidates - Maine Beacon. Maine Beacon - A project of the Maine People’s Alliance. https://mainebeacon.com/mpa-endorses-jackson-pingree-dunlap-more-than-50-progressive-state-candidates/
Unions help power Troy Jackson to win U.S. Senate nomination | Maine AFL-CIO. (2026, August 3). Maine AFL-CIO. https://maineaflcio.org/news/unions-help-power-troy-jackson-win-us-senate-nomination
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