A process to choose a new Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine that began as a messy free-for-all has turned into a coronation for Troy Jackson, a progressive in the mold of Graham Platner, who was forced from the race 12 days ago.
Over the weekend Mr. Jackson’s supporters swept the county meetings to select delegates to the state convention, according to the slate released by his campaign, seizing command of the two-week sprint to choose an opponent for Senator Susan Collins, the state’s five-term Republican incumbent.
The gatherings provided quick clarity to a state convention that could have been chaotic and spared Maine Democrats myriad risks inherent with standing up a nomination process in less than three weeks.
Mr. Jackson, a former state lawmaker, built such an imposing advantage on Saturday that he delivered what amounted to a victory speech on Sunday morning before the day’s delegates were selected.
“Those delegates were not handed to us,” he told supporters gathered at the York County party meeting in Sanford, Maine. “We earned them because hundreds of hundreds of people organized their neighbors, made the calls, had the conversations and showed up.”
Yet Mr. Jackson’s triumph also points to some new challenges Democrats might confront.
Mr. Jackson, who has never been known as a smooth orator, ran a lackluster campaign for governor, placing third last month. He is a progressive in the mold of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, on track to face the most moderate Republican in the Senate. He has little experience raising the huge sums required to run a battleground Senate campaign and has in the past disparaged some of Maine’s biggest Democratic donors.
And Maine Democrats, after watching their first Senate nominee’s campaign implode, are on the verge of hitching themselves to another man who has not faced a serious vetting in the national glare of a battleground Senate campaign.
The Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to formally declare a replacement for Mr. Platner with the secretary of state.
At the state convention, set for this Saturday in Bangor, the new nominee will be decided. Delegates, who ran on their support for Mr. Jackson, are not required to vote for any specific candidate.
Still, Mr. Jackson’s organizational dominance over the weekend means that, barring yet another political calamity for Democrats in Maine or another unexpected twist, they are well on their way to nominating him as their Senate candidate.
Such was the scale of Mr. Jackson’s victories at the Saturday meetings that before any Sunday sessions began, his chief progressive rival, Shenna Bellows, the Maine secretary of state, ended her campaign. By dinnertime, the top moderate in the race, Dr. Nirav Shah, the state’s former public health director, also suspended his campaign and endorsed Mr. Jackson, as did Dan Kleban, a local beer magnate, and Jordan Wood, a former congressional aide.
“When Graham Platner stepped aside, Maine Democrats had eighteen days to do what usually takes a year,” said Bev Uhlenhake, a former Maine Democratic Party chairwoman. “They built a process from scratch with full transparency. No backroom deal. No delay. Just a party that showed up when it mattered focused on one imperative — beating Susan Collins.”
Democrats seeking Maine’s Senate nomination have until Monday night to submit signatures to qualify for the convention ballot. Dr. Shah’s campaign submitted his petitions last week, and he intends to remain on the ballot at the convention, an aide said Sunday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.
Mr. Jackson, a former president of the Maine Senate, had significant structural advantages heading into the weekend meetings.
He was the only Senate candidate with significant endorsements from labor unions, which in Maine do not represent large numbers of voters but which brought a political organization others could not match on the abbreviated timeline for selecting a nominee to replace Mr. Platner.
And while Mr. Platner did not make an endorsement in the race, Mr. Jackson was most ideologically aligned with him. During his run for governor, Mr. Jackson won endorsements from Mr. Sanders and Maine’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Some Democrats hope Mr. Jackson’s quick rise heralds an end to a tumultuous chapter in Maine politics. Mr. Platner, an oyster farmer and political neophyte who was drafted into a Senate campaign that briefly turned him into a national progressive icon, survived news cycles about his offensive online posts, his tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol and accusations that he had been physically threatening to a former girlfriend.
A rape allegation made by another former girlfriend to Politico and during a CNN interview on July 6 — which Mr. Platner has denied — caused his support to evaporate. There was just a week before the deadline for Mr. Platner to withdraw his name from the ballot.
Maine Democrats designed their replacement process to provide maximum democracy on an abridged schedule. In the end, it served as an exercise in old-school machine politics, with Mr. Jackson’s supporters from labor unions using a superior organization to elect delegates from his slates.
“Unions are very good at disciplined organizing, and this was highly, highly disciplined organizing,” said Matt Schlobohm, the executive director of the Maine AFL-CIO, a federation of more than 200 unions in the state. “We were pulling from a core set of 300 volunteers who had just gone and knocked on doors for Troy in the primary.”
Mr. Jackson’s top rivals cleared the field for him and declared it time for Democrats to coalesce around him.
“This has been an unprecedented nominating process, compressed into days instead of months, and I’m grateful to every volunteer who worked around the clock for this movement,” Ms. Bellows said. “That energy is exactly what we need to beat Susan Collins in November — and Democrats don’t have a day to waste in unifying around that shared goal.”
Dr. Shah pleaded with Democrats to unite behind Mr. Jackson.
“Susan Collins will not be defeated without a united Democratic Party,” he said. “We cannot unite without treating one another with respect. No matter whom you supported in this race, I urge us all to remember that in the weeks ahead.”
Never in modern political history had a state party tried to run a competitive nominating contest on such a short timeline.
When President Joseph R. Biden Jr. ended his 2024 re-election campaign, Democratic National Committee members anointed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him without opposition. Senate candidates who have died or quit their campaigns after winning primaries have been replaced by state party committees.
Just this month, when Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died, President Trump urged the state’s Republican governor to appoint Mr. Graham’s sister to the seat (the governor agreed) and endorsed her in a special election to replace him on the November ballot.
Ms. Collins is the only incumbent Senate Republican running for re-election this year in a state that Mr. Trump lost in 2024. The speed at which Mr. Jackson consolidated support shocked his rivals and supporters of other candidates in the race.
Kristen O’Neill, a teacher from Portland who backed Mr. Platner and then volunteered for Ms. Bellows, said the condensed process left her without time to research any of the delegates and alternates on her ballot in Cumberland County.
“How was I supposed to vote for 173 people without putting hours and hours of work into it?” she said. “What happened was that these slates were created and we were told to support a candidate. The whole system just did not work.”
Bayliss Wagner contributed reporting from Topsham, Maine, Sydney Cromwell from Sanford, Maine, and Tim Balk from Dover, Mass.
