What a Troy Jackson vs. Susan Collins Maine Senate race matchup might look like

In the nation’s most competitive Senate election contests, the candidates have been lobbing attacks for months. Polls have been tracking general election matchups for over a year.

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And then there is Maine’s Senate race, which has been upended in the last two weeks following the departure of Graham Platner, who dropped out following allegations of rape.

Now Maine Democrats appear poised to swap in former state Senate president Troy Jackson in his place this weekend. Like Platner, Jackson was also endorsed by Bernie Sanders when he ran unsuccessfully for governor a month ago.

Which raises the question: With nearly 100 days to go, what can we expect from this high-profile Senate contest with a different candidate? What would it even look like?

There are some clues. Let’s go through them.

1. A race not defined by personalities, but personas

Neither Collins nor Jackson have, as the kids say, rizz. To say it another way, no one is walking into this contest excited to vote for either candidate. No one is placing a bet on Kalshi suggesting that Jackson, 58, or Collins, 73, is going to be president someday.

But both candidates do stand for something. In Jackson, voters can back a solid, union progressive who will be a useful vehicle for Democratic angst against Collins. For Collins, it’s the idea that she isn’t your typical Trump Republican (she has never voted for the guy to be president), and that she has the seniority to bring serious money back to Maine. She has the receipts to prove it.

Since they are defined more by personas than personalities, expect this race to go where the Maine Senate race did six years ago: It will be defined largely through hundreds of millions of dollars in ads, not rallies or some massive grassroots campaign.

As it is, both Jackson and Collins like this system and likely won’t push back much. Collins likes it because she has a financial advantage in this race so far, with she and her allies already reserving roughly double the ad spending of Democrats at this point. For Jackson, the point is to just be a generic Democrat who can glide to victory in a largely Democratic state in what is expected to be a good Democratic year.

There is no need for either candidate to rock the boat any further.

2. A LOT of talk about ‘The County’

We are about to hear and learn a lot about Aroostook County, the extremely rural, extremely northern, and one of the poorest counties in all of New England. It’s also the largest county by size east of the Mississippi, larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Given all that, Mainers simply refer to Aroostook as “The County.”

Collins was born and grew up in Caribou, the largest city in Aroostook County. Both of her parents served as the city’s mayor.

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Jackson was born in the county, in Fort Kent, and grew up in Allagash, where he still lives.

In an election year where affordability is front and center, expect both candidates to emphasize their humble roots in The County.

Indeed, Collins was just back there over the weekend, walking (and sometimes jogging) in the annual Potato Blossom Festival in Fort Fairfield.

While Collins can talk about her roots in the county, Jackson can also point out that he has won several terms in the Legislature there, despite his district also voting for Trump by double-digit margins.

3. The only X factor is Jackson’s story

If midterm elections are a referendum on the sitting president, well, every Mainer knows who Donald Trump is and likely has a strong opinion about him one way or another. If every election is actually about the incumbent seeking reelection, then after 30 years, opinions about Collins are similarly baked in, in ways that Collins or Democrats really cannot control either (though her favorability rating has dipped some in the Trump era).

So that leaves the only truly fungible thing left in the contest: how people learn about and perceive Jackson. At the moment, he is only a known quantity among those in Maine politics, but basically a blank slate for everyone else.

Expect Republicans to throw the kitchen sink at him in negative ads, trying to define him as some nutty progressive. One line of argument is already emerging: that Jackson has a temper problem. And expect Jackson to try to get ahead of that by defining himself through ads and other means.

But as quickly as he can, Jackson wants to make the race about Trump and Collins. One flaw with the Platner campaign is that it was a race almost entirely defined by him — whether it was his passion, which created the largest grassroots campaign in Maine history, or one controversy after another.

Collins will no doubt try to recreate that dynamic any way she can. But first she needs to define Jackson as unelectable.

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