Today he is a progressive Democrat calling for “Medicare for all,” the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a federal right to abortion.
But Troy Jackson got his start in politics as a Republican who was opposed to abortion rights and same-sex marriage.
Mr. Jackson, who is poised to become his party’s new nominee for Senate in Maine after Graham Platner’s departure, has completed a remarkable evolution on social issues since he started organizing fellow loggers in the state’s northern tip in the 1990s.
As his political ambitions rose, Mr. Jackson, a former president of the Maine Senate, kept pushing his economic populist message. But he shed many of the socially conservative positions that aligned with his rural district in favor of more liberal positions on abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
After being given a perfect rating from an anti-abortion group early in his political career, Mr. Jackson more recently received a series of 100 percent ratings from Planned Parenthood’s Maine chapter. In 2023, he helped enact a new Maine law that allows abortion at any stage of pregnancy, as long as a doctor deems it necessary.
“I’ve made mistakes early on in understanding” the issue of abortion, he said on Monday in an interview with The New York Times. “Regardless of this U.S. Senate race, I’m really, really proud of how I’ve turned that around and, you know, done the right thing. I mean, I was wrong.”
Now his political record is about to face intense new scrutiny. Democrats are expected to nominate him at a convention on Saturday after his quick consolidation of support from party delegates over the weekend forced his leading rivals to withdraw.
Mr. Jackson’s personal history and temperament will also be under a microscope — including an episode in which he is said to have thrown a water bottle during an argument with a female colleague.
Awaiting Mr. Jackson in the general election, if he does win the nomination, is Senator Susan Collins, a five-term Republican who has carefully curated a reputation as one of the Senate’s few remaining moderates. Both parties see the race as crucial to their hopes of controlling the chamber.
Democrats have been eager to seize on Ms. Collins’s 2018 vote for the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett M. Kavanaugh, who went on to help overturn Roe v. Wade. Mr. Jackson’s own record on abortion could complicate that line of attack.
So far in his fledgling Senate campaign, Mr. Jackson has sought to define himself less on social issues than on economic populist grounds. Ms. Collins, he told supporters, is the one who drifts politically while he sticks to his principles.
“Maine deserves a senator who will fight like hell,” he said on Sunday at a rally in Sanford, Maine. “Not one who waits to see which way the wind is blowing.”
Ms. Collins’s campaign declined to comment.
Railing Against Inequality and ‘Corporate Greed’
Mr. Jackson’s political story began in 1998, when he organized fellow Maine loggers against an effort to hire Canadian workers to do work on the American side of the border.
He ran for the Maine State House as a Republican in 2000 and lost, and then ran again as an independent two years later and won. The Bangor Daily News called his victory over an incumbent Democrat “the major upset of the 2002 elections.” In 2004, he ran for re-election as a Democrat and won.
Mr. Jackson successfully ran for the State Senate in 2008 and held the seat until 2024, except for a two-year hiatus after a failed bid for the U.S. House.
Since the start of his political career, Mr. Jackson has appeared to be driven by economic populism. Among Democrats, he was ahead of his time, touching on many of the themes that would animate the presidential campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont — for whom Mr. Jackson worked in 2016 — and later the campaign of Mr. Platner.
When Mr. Jackson ran for Congress in 2014, he delivered a speech at the Maine Democratic Party’s convention that would not have been out of place at a Sanders presidential rally. He criticized free-trade deals, which he said had been bad for American workers; lamented that the Affordable Care Act had been “watered down”; and called for a “single-payer, universal health care system that we deserve.”
“I’m running because of income inequality, poverty, unfairness, corporate greed and political cowardice,” he said. “I’ve known these things my entire life.”
He raised less money than his Democratic rival and ended up with 29 percent of the primary vote, placing a distant second.
‘Conflicted’ on Abortion
In that campaign, Mr. Jackson faced attacks over his abortion record.
In 2003 and 2010, he had received perfect scores on his voting record from Maine Right to Life, which opposes abortion rights, according to Project Vote Smart, a nonpartisan research group. In 2011, he was the only Democrat in the State Senate to vote in favor of a bill that would have given legal standing to a fetus in the event of an attack on a pregnant woman. So-called “fetal personhood” measures have long been a priority for the anti-abortion movement. Mr. Jackson also favored legislation that would have required women seeking abortions to wait 24 hours before terminating their pregnancies.
“I was always conflicted,” Mr. Jackson, who grew up Catholic, told The Times on Monday. “I had a hard time getting to a place I felt comfortable. But as time went on, I had a lot of conversations with people.”
By 2017, as Mr. Jackson ascended to a Democratic leadership post, he aligned himself with the rest of his caucus on abortion rights. Then, he opposed a fetus “personhood” bill similar to the one he had previously voted for.
When he was sworn in as Senate president in December 2018, becoming the state’s second-highest-ranking Democrat, he was starting to earn high marks from abortion rights groups. In 2019, he backed several measures favored by abortion rights activists, including a bill to increase access for low-income women.
“I do feel comfortable that now he’s a strong supporter,” Leah Coplon, an abortion provider in Maine who serves on the board of the National Abortion Federation, said on Monday. She added of Republicans, “They can throw whatever mud they want at his past record, but Mainers are smart.”
Mr. Jackson condemned what he called the Supreme Court’s “devastating” 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade — but at the time he told the news outlet Maine Public that he remained uncomfortable with abortion.
Mr. Jackson’s political journey on abortion also prompted attacks during his unsuccessful campaign for governor this year.
“Mainers just can’t trust Troy Jackson on abortion,” said one ad paid for by a political action committee called the 314 Action Fund. It had endorsed another Democratic candidate, Dr. Nirav Shah, who also joined the Senate race after Mr. Platner’s exit but suspended his bid over the weekend.
Mr. Jackson denounced the ad as misleading.
He has also faced criticism for his vote in 2009 against a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in Maine. He has expressed regret for that vote — on Monday he called it “my worst vote ever” — and in 2024 he earned a 100 percent rating from Equality Maine, a gay rights advocacy group.
The Water Bottle Episode
Some of Mr. Jackson’s colleagues from his tenure as president of the Maine Senate, which lasted from 2018 to 2024, recalled that at times he could be quick to anger.
During a disagreement at the State Capitol four years ago over a bill to lower the costs of prescription drugs, colleagues recalled, he lost his temper with a legislative colleague.
Mr. Jackson got into a heated argument with Heather Sanborn, a Democrat who was then a state senator, according to four witnesses, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the politically charged encounter. Lowering prescription drug costs was one of Mr. Jackson’s top legislative priorities, they recalled.
Frustrated that he was not getting his way, Mr. Jackson flung a half-empty water bottle across the room. Two witnesses said they recalled the plastic bottle hitting a wall; another thought it hit a table. All three said that they were certain the bottle was not aimed at Ms. Sanborn and that it did not make contact with her or anyone else. They added that Mr. Jackson later apologized to her and to his fellow Senate Democrats.
Craig Hickman, a Democratic state senator who saw the episode, said Mr. Jackson “had an anger spell and he regretted the outburst.”
He added: His behavior wasn’t OK, but he apologized for it.”
Mark Lawrence, another Democratic state senator who was there, said, “It was like a baseball player throwing their glove in frustration.”
But others who served with Mr. Jackson were troubled by his outburst. They said that Ms. Sanborn, teary and shaken, left the State Capitol immediately. Ms. Sanborn, who now represents utility consumers as the Maine public advocate, declined requests for comment.
Mr. Jackson said on Monday, “I’m not going to apologize for being passionate on those things.”
“I shouldn’t have thrown it, but I was passionate,” he added. “Do I wish I’ve never yelled or anything like that? Sure.”
But he added, “I’ve seen all kinds of other legislators do that, too, not that that’s right either.”
Bayliss Wagner contributed reporting from Portland, Maine, and Sydney Cromwell from Sanford, Maine.
