ALLAGASH, Maine (AP) — Troy Jackson stood alongside a small group of loggers deep in the northern Maine woods and stared down State Police troopers who threatened to arrest them.
The lumberjacks had used their trucks to block access to the Quebec border in protest of Canadian loggers who were stealing their jobs by working for less. The blockade, which took place nearly 30 years ago, failed to stop the problem, leading Jackson to decide that he needed to try another way.
“He realized that the only way to change, to change it from the inside, was to be involved,” said Hilton Hafford, a logger who stood with Jackson at the blockade.
That moment set the fifth-generation lumberjack on a path into politics, eventually making him Maine’s unlikely Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. He faces longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins in one of a handful of races that could determine control of the chamber in November.
Jackson’s campaign has focused on his ties to Aroostook County, a sprawling, wooded region known as “The County” to Mainers. It’s where Jackson, 58, says he watched hard-working people struggle to get ahead, fueling his fight against billionaires and corporations. It also is the place that has elected Jackson to the Legislature while supporting Republican Donald Trump for president.
Defeating Collins, a five-term incumbent who has survived other efforts by Democrats to unseat her, will not be easy.
Jackson is a last-minute replacement for Graham Platner, the initial nominee who exited the race after a sexual assault allegation that he denied. Jackson has accused Collins of looking out for herself instead of Maine and he criticized her vote that paved the way for the U.S. Supreme Court to end the nationwide right to an abortion. Collins, 73, who is also from Aroostook County, has accused Jackson of being too liberal for the state.
Speaking to Maine Democrats while he accepted the party nomination last month, Jackson pointed to his logging background and humble upbringing in a rural county as critical to shaping his desire to fight for the working class.
“What I am is a guy from northern Maine that’s a logger,” Jackson said.
The evolution of a liberal lumberjack
Aroostook County, among the poorest in the state, is thinly populated but so large that it could easily contain both Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Tucked in the northern tip of the county is Jackson’s hometown of Allagash, where pavement turns into the logging roads and where Jackson went to work as a lumberjack at 19.
Jackson said he worked long, dangerous hours. It was not unusual to wake up at 2:30 a.m. for a 12-hour shift on a job that often did not offer health insurance.
“Everyone in that profession works hard for our families. We did follow the rules. But the harder we worked, the more that companies took from us,” Jackson said during his nomination acceptance speech at a party convention in Bangor. “And further behind we would fall.”
Read More: How Troy Jackson went from Maine logger to Democratic nominee for Senate
