David M. Shribman

NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

FRYEBURG, Maine — Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Except this one has a bad temper.

Troy Jackson, the new Senate candidate from Maine, was born three years before The Who’s Pete Townshend wrote a rock anthem that spoke of taking “a bow for the new revolution” and of the impulse to “smile and grin at the change all around.” Its title was “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and the riff about the new and old bosses has real meaning as Democrats gird for the task they have undertaken — and failed on — five earlier times: to keep Republican Susan Collins out of the Senate.

Having been fooled once — by Graham Platner, whose progressive Senate candidacy imploded amid a series of inexplicable personal actions and, then, sexual assault allegations — they’re hoping not to be fooled again. Now they’re contemplating sending Troy Jackson, 58, a onetime state Senate president and thus an experienced political figure, into battle against the only Senate Republican running for reelection in a state lost by Donald Trump in 2024.

But whoa there! When it comes to policy positions, Platner and Jackson seem almost like twins, separated at birth: End wars. Tax the rich. Dismantle the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Medicare for all. Charge Israel with “genocide.” Establish a federal right to abortion.

The Platner campaign was a disaster, just as Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said it would be. This time, Schumer, regarded among Democrats hereabouts as the principal defender of a feckless, useless and clueless status quo, stayed out of the process to select a Platner successor. Actually, he was all but ordered out.

The result: Rid of a rebellious oyster farmer, the state party that once thrust forward such solid citizens in regulation dark suits as Edmund Muskie (governor, senator, presidential contender, secretary of state) and George Mitchell (judge, Senate majority leader, peace envoy to Northern Ireland and the Middle East), chose a rebellious fifth-generation logger who prompted a 1998 international incident at the Canadian border by staging a flamboyant woodsmen’s blockade. At least by moving from seafood to forestry, the Democrats retained the symbolic folklore of the state’s identity.

“This is going to be an adventure,” G. Calvin Mackenzie, emeritus political scientist at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and co-author of the 2008 “The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s,” said in an interview. “He doesn’t look establishment. He looks like the guy who plows your driveway in the winter. But he commanded respect in Augusta, and Democrats will line up behind him comfortably. He’s completely in line with what Democrats want now — not George Mitchell, not [former Republican senator and defense secretary] Bill Cohen. He is what he is. That’s a good sell this year.”

The political environment here is inflamed over the fatal ICE shooting of motorist Joan Sebastian Duran Guerrero this month, a development that has nudged the progressive movement, led by figures like the fiery-tempered Jackson, out of the fringes and into a mainstream consensus that rendered Collins’ call for ICE to “cease all non-urgent vehicle stops” too little, too late. Democrats rushed to remind voters that she voted to confirm Donald Trump’s two Homeland Security secretaries, first Kristi Noem, then Markwayne Mullin.

For all the solid-citizen political figures from Maine, the state long has had an independent streak. It’s actually had two Independent governors since James Longley moved into the governor’s mansion in Augusta. One of those onetime Independent governors is now Sen. Angus King, who, though not unfamiliar with the comfortable contours of a well-tailored business suit, is in the happy habit of going his own way. That’s a trait, as his 21 years in top positions here show, much admired in a state whose motto is “Dirigo,” the Latin term for leadership, paired on the state flag with the North Star, which early Maine mariners used to navigate their way across angry seas.

Meanwhile, the specter haunting Maine Democrats — who earlier this year made it clear Schumer’s choice for the nomination, Gov. Janet Mills, lacked the left-oriented daring required for the times — is the example set by Kamala Harris, who carried Maine by 7 percentage points.

The awkwardness of the process to replace Joe Biden after his disastrous debate performance, and the lateness of the nomination of Harris, combined to help doom her candidacy. Jackson essentially clinched his nomination by winning a majority of county caucuses in balloting last weekend — with exactly the number of days (107) Harris had to start up her 2024 presidential campaign.

“He’s got a similar platform — no foreign wars, taxing billionaires — as Platner, but he’s been vetted the way Platner wasn’t,” Rep. Ro Khanna of California, who endorsed Platner before disavowing him, said in an interview after an appearance in New Hampshire the day Jackson’s eventual nomination became apparent. Khanna, a leading progressive voice, was there planting the early seeds of a likely 2028 presidential campaign based on the themes he, Platner and Jackson share.

But Jackson, if elected, would be no more a traditional member of the “millionaire’s club” of the Senate than John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator who eschews dress shirts, favors dress shorts and is known for his oversized hoodies. Like Fetterman, he’s a rebel, and three pictures of him on the index page of his website show him in a baseball cap. It does not bear a MAGA message. But one of them has a “B” in Old English font, which everyone here knows symbolizes the Boston Red Sox, beloved in these parts, and thus is an unmistakable one-of-us symbol, even for a man who lives 433 miles from Fenway Park.

Jackson, a former anti-abortion Republican, lives in the congressional district that, because of Maine’s peculiar system, gave Trump a single electoral vote in all three of his elections — an unanticipated possible advantage for the Democrats. He’s from the tiny settlement of Allagash, population 234 — about a half of 1% of the number of fans who’ll be present in Fenway Park to watch the Sox play the Blue Jays the afternoon that Jackson is to be formally nominated.

A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.