Troy Jackson, Shenna Bellows, and Nirav Shah all bring different qualities to a showdown with Susan Collins.
by Gabrielle Gurley July 9, 2026 (Prospect.org)
There had been an uneasy expectation in Maine political circles that something else was going to drop with Graham Platner. After this week’s rape allegation, his swift downfall is not surprising. The harbormaster of Sullivan has joined the sad and mostly male parade of American politicians who operate under the conceit that their past transgressions will never outpace them.
But eventually, on Wednesday night, Platner stepped aside. And the question now turns to who will replace him, through a statewide convention in a couple of weeks, as the Prospect has reported.
Maine is a very small state when it comes to politics: The political players all know each other well. Unless there are the darkest secrets among the major contenders, the skeletons in those closets have already smashed to the floor. The knowns are known.
The politician who can generate the same kind of excitement that the charismatic Platner did doesn’t exist in Maine. His candidacy had already fueled infighting between progressives enthused by the new entrant and allies of Gov. Janet Mills. That competition has no winner in the conventional sense and will complicate the campaign over the next few months—if not completely blow it up. Which means that the next candidate must have the skill set to squelch the Democratic civil war and wage the uphill battle of defeating Susan Collins.
All three meet the first prerequisite for a candidacy under least-best circumstance: statewide name recognition.
One entrant, Maine state Rep. Valli Geiger (D-Rockland) says she has Platner’s backing, a dubious honor for the Mid-Coast Mainer given his deep tarnish. (The Platner campaign has a different story.) Another person with traction is Maine Beer Company co-founder Dan Kleban. He dropped out of the Senate race early on. “I’ve spent years talking to Mainers over a beer in our taproom and throughout the community … I’m ready to fight for Mainers and bring a new generation of leadership to Washington,” he said in a Wednesday afternoon statement. Jordan Wood, a former House staffer and third-place finisher in the Second Congressional District, is reportedly interested, but like Geiger lacks a statewide profile.
The major contenders competing for the Senate slot, therefore, boil down to three former Democratic candidates for governor. There’s Troy Jackson, the former state Senate president; Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state; and Dr. Nirav Shah, former head of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who directed the state’s COVID-19 response.
All of them meet the first prerequisite for a candidacy under least-best circumstance: statewide name recognition boosted by their primary campaigns for governor. The question is whether a deflated, angry voter and volunteer base can be invigorated by one of them to defeat a senator who should be on a course to retirement.
The Jackson campaign’s “Draft Troy” movement is well under way. The former Senate president from the tiny hamlet of Allagash, population 237, in Aroostook County in the North Maine Woods, is a logger on his fifth pacemaker who never had health insurance until he served in the legislature. He had been endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders for governor—and now by Sanders’s Our Revolution group for the Senate. He’s the most Platner-esque of the trio, and has been serving up robust critiques of “the system” that makes life difficult to impossible for working Mainers for decades. (He has said that he would not want Platner’s endorsement.)
His top campaign planks rested on confronting the housing crisis, lowering child care costs, and restoring tribal sovereignty to the state’s Wabanaki Nations.
I interviewed the sharp, plain-speaking Jackson in the Before Times, when he won his state Senate seat by a slim three percentage points in 2016. After the presidential election, he told me why Donald Trump won.
On trade: “Donald Trump understood that so many people feel like they are losing what they have in life because of bad trade deals and things like that. I flat-out don’t believe that he will do anything to help in that regard. But he made it a huge issue. He was very adamant that he was going to change those trade deals.”
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On the far right: “What the far-right has done so well is that they have convinced people that, when they are struggling, don’t ever look up at where the problem actually is, keep your eyes down on those less fortunate. It’s not the guy who gets $40 million in some type of government program that didn’t do shit to produce any jobs. It is not the people on Wall Street that completely screw up the economy that we had to bail out. It’s those bums down there who are getting $500, $600 a month on TANF. Get rid of them and your life is going to be better.”
Of the five major Democratic candidates for governor, Jackson, Bellows, and the eventual winner Hannah Pingree—the former Speaker of the Maine House—formed a pact all agreeing to rank each other. Maine uses ranked-choice voting for many of its elections.
In the legislature, Jackson had the reputation as a difficult colleague, with a fair share of failures to communicate with other lawmakers and the governor’s office. Some allies of Mills have categorically dismissed his run for governor, exhibiting more than a hint of snobbery toward the sharp, plain-speaking Mainer. Given the tenor of the times on Capitol Hill, he might fit right in.
Bellows has tussled with Collins before. After stepping down as executive director of the ACLU of Maine, she was the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, running against Collins in 2014. The senator rolled over her in a landslide. She rebounded after a stint in the Maine Senate, becoming secretary of state in 2021.
Bellows has emerged as a solid defender against multiple Trump administration threats. The secretary of state shrugged off the Justice Department’s latest voting lawsuit, demanding the state’s “complete and unredacted” voter rolls. The U.S. District Court in Maine dismissed the case in May. The Justice Department’s most recent lawsuit centers on the secretary of state’s refusal to provide undercover license plates to ICE and other Homeland Security agencies. “We don’t have secret police in a democracy,” Bellows said in a statement, “and covert civil immigration enforcement is not something Maine will facilitate. If the DOJ wants to sue us over that, we’ll see them in court.”
In her campaign for governor, Bellows evoked Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, a Mainer and the first woman cabinet member in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. She called for “A New Deal for Our Economy” that would “lower property taxes on primary residences, cut utility costs, boost our housing supply, and provide opportunities for new businesses and entrepreneurship. And we’ll pay for it by making the wealthy pay their fair share.”
She grew up in Hancock, north of Bar Harbor, in a family that did not have electricity and indoor plumbing until she was in the fifth grade.
Whether Shah, who would be the ultimate outsider candidate, can make inroads over the clamoring for Jackson or Bellows remains to be seen. He did secure the most first-choice votes in the first round of ranked-choice voting in the governor’s race, amid heavy spending on advertising.
Shah earned very high marks for his stewardship of the state’s COVID-19 response and has struck all the right notes on Medicare for All. However, he’s also a transplant born and raised in Wisconsin with only seven years in Maine, a tough résumé in a state that measures Maine-ness in generations, not years.
A flash poll that the Platner campaign inexplicably conducted this week found that Jackson held a 49-44 lead on Collins, with Bellows and Shah up on Collins by an identical 47-45 count. Mills and Wood tested far behind the Republican incumbent.
Whether any of these candidates or some sleeper pick can stand up to the ruthless gentility of the Susan Collins machine is the quandary that the state party leaders must quickly figure out. Maine Democrats need a unifier who can heal the wounds gouged by the Platner fiasco. If the new candidate can keep the spotlight on Susan Collins’s deficiencies, Democrats are well placed to make a stand. If the Democratic Party’s machinations and the deficiencies of their new standard-bearer take over the headlines in the weeks ahead, it’s going to be a very long winter in Maine.
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Gabrielle Gurley
Gabrielle Gurley is a senior editor at The American Prospect. She covers states and cities, focusing on economic development and infrastructure, elections, and climate. She wins awards, too, most recently picking up a 2024 NABJ award for coverage of Baltimore and a 2021 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication urban journalism award for her feature story on the pandemic public transit crisis. More by Gabrielle Gurley
