Troy Jackson, the former Maine State Senate President, allegedly threw a water bottle that struck a female colleague during a dispute. That's the man Democrats just tapped to replace Graham Platner — who dropped out of the U.S. Senate race earlier this month after sexual assault allegations.
So the upgrade plan was: swap out the guy accused of assault for the guy who throws objects at women. Brilliant.
The Washington Post reported that Jackson "yelled and cursed at fellow state lawmakers," based on interviews with more than 20 people. Several of the confrontations involved women. Jackson's version of the water bottle incident is that he threw it at the floor in frustration, not at anyone. The female colleague on the receiving end apparently remembers it differently.
Two-thirds of Democratic delegates committed to backing Jackson by Sunday ahead of a convention vote scheduled for Saturday, which tells you exactly how deep Maine's Democratic bench is. Their previous nominee, Platner, won the primary in June. He was out by mid-July. Shenna Bellows, Maine's Secretary of State, had already withdrawn from the primary. So had Nirav Shah, the former state public health official. Jackson was essentially the only warm body left.
But the temper isn't even the most interesting part. Steven Robinson, editor-in-chief of The Maine Wire, flagged a mortgage problem that has the geometry of fraud. In 2019, Jackson purchased a home in Augusta — 230 miles from his district in Allagash — using an FHA loan. FHA loans require the borrower to swear the property is their primary residence. Jackson swore it was. Meanwhile, his state ethics filings listed Allagash as his primary residence.
"Both of those things can't be true," Robinson said.
The Maine Wire first reported the mortgage documents in 2023. Nobody in Maine's political establishment followed up. Nobody in the legacy press dug in. The story sat there for three years like a loaded mousetrap.
Robinson offered a prediction that should make Jackson's new supporters nervous. "I don't think that this will be the most devastating or the biggest story" about Jackson, he said on the Megyn Kelly Show. He also put the broader situation in perspective: "Think about how much it took in order for actual assault allegations [against Platner] to become credible." If the party needed that level of evidence to act on Platner, imagine the threshold for acting on Jackson — a man they're choosing voluntarily.
The national Democratic apparatus is already lining up behind him. Congressman Ro Khanna endorsed Jackson. Bernie Sanders' Our Revolution network is in his corner. The pitch is that Jackson is a fifth-generation logger, a working-class populist who can challenge Susan Collins, who has held her Senate seat since 1996. The reality is that he's the emergency replacement for a candidate who imploded, and the party didn't have time to vet him beyond "is he currently under indictment."
The counter-argument from Democrats is that the water bottle story is, as Robinson himself acknowledged, "a he said-she said thing." But when the Washington Post — not exactly a right-wing opposition research shop — independently interviews 20-plus people about a politician's temper and publishes a feature about it, the "he said-she said" defense starts sounding like the kind of thing you say right before the next story drops.
Maine Democrats had a candidate accused of sexual assault. They replaced him with a candidate accused of throwing things at women, who may have signed contradictory sworn documents about where he lives, and whose own allies concede there are more stories coming.
That's not a reset. That's a reload.
