The Indypendent66%
Report from Maine: Why Troy Jackson Prevailed in Race to Replace Graham Platner on Senate Ballot 70%
By Elsie Carson76%
7/20/2026, 10:44:52 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Politically Left Leaning Bias, Negativity Bias, and Confirmation Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 30% saturation with 131 hits. Analysis detected 1,309 faulty-reasoning hits from 437 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 57% and a BS Rank of 70% (7,802 of 25,564 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 69.50% of the article peer group.
Troy Jackson absolutely dominated the county caucuses held across Maine yesterday and is virtually certain to replace Graham Platner as the Democratic candidate for U.S.
Senate.
Why did it go down this way?
1.
The process was designed to reward organization and discipline, the sorts of things that unions tend to do well.
Jackson, a fifth-generation logger and former union leader before entering politics, is the union candidate and once they understood the way the game was going to be played, the unions (and the campaign organizers) got to work.
They created a slate of delegates and mobilized their rank-and-file voters to vote the slate.
Game over.
2.
They had more voters because Jackson is the candidate of Platner, and Bernie Sanders, etc.
Jackson inherited the momentum of the socialist-inflected faction of the Democratic Party, the voters that have become utterly and totally alienated from the party establishment.
At this point that “faction” is the majority of voters participating in Democratic primaries, at least here in Maine, but also throughout the country.
The irony that Jackson is himself part of the establishment (former President of the state senate) is mitigated by his genuine working class roots.
3.
In addition to this ideological affinity for Jackson, a lot of people also feel that he stands the best chance of defeating Susan Collins.
He will do much better in the more conservative 2nd congressional district in northern Maine than either Shah or Bellows would have done, or at least that is the sense that a lot of us have.
The energy that Platner tapped into was real, and a lot of us here in Maine were energized by his politics, and the policies for which he advocated.
It wasn’t a cult of personality that drove people to Platner, it was a deep-seated revulsion against the ruling class politics of the Democratic Party establishment and the corruption of our entire political system.
It was, and is, a desperate desire for Medicare for All, an expansion of labor rights, tax fairness, standing up to our Tech overlords, and opposing genocide.
Jackson is in alignment with all of this.
He may not have the charisma that Platner had, but this was always going to be up to us, not up to a savior.
No one is coming to save us except us.
Onward!
Mark Read was an activist and educator in New York City for more than two decades.
He returned to his native Maine in 2020.
This article originally appeared on his Substack page .
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