Politics
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AUGUSTA, Maine — Lobbyist Tony Buxton was surprised to see his name on Troy Jackson’s preferred slate of Democratic U.S. Senate delegates. Nobody from the Jackson campaign had called to ask.
“I just put my name in. I didn’t talk to Troy,” he said, noting his endorsement of the campaign and a $100 donation.
Buxton is one of thousands of Mainers who filed to run as delegates ahead of county caucuses on Saturday and Sunday that mark the next step in the Maine Democratic Party’s compressed effort to replace Graham Platner on the ballot against U.S. Sen. Susan Collins in one of the nation’s biggest elections this November.
The caucuses will narrow down more than 3,700 delegate candidates down to 500 people who will join the party’s 101-member state committee at the July 25 state convention that will make the pick. Campaigns are trying to stack these unprecedented county meetings with their candidates as well as a high volume of supporters to get them elected.
Three former gubernatorial candidates — Jackson, a former Maine Senate president, former public health chief Nirav Shah and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows — are among 12 Democrats seeking the nomination but have emerged as front-runners in the nomination scramble.
But Jackson’s operation built the most visible delegate organization of any campaign so far. His campaign is the only one to list slates of preferred delegates in all 16 counties ahead of nominating meetings scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, a mix of in-person and virtual gatherings that will winnow thousands of delegate candidates down to 500.
The Jackson, Shah and Bellows campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on their delegate strategies. In a video, Jackson strategist BJ McCollister instructed supporters to vote for the campaign-endorsed slate of 500 people, saying they were the most likely to reliably support the candidate and show up in Bangor.
Another 170 delegate candidates say they will back him as well. One of them, Anthony Emerson, a Portland progressive activist, said Jackson’s campaign called to confirm he’d signed up as a delegate but never followed up about joining the official slate before it was released without his name on it.
“Probably hurts my chances of being elected,” Emerson said, although he added that the snub won’t change how he plans to vote at the convention that will be decided by elimination-round voting: Jackson is his first choice, Bellows his second and Shah his third at a state convention.
Janet Jamison, an Oxford County commissioner candidate from South Paris, took a different path to her own candidacy that had nothing to do with any campaign’s delegate operation. She initially backed Jackson in the governor’s race before Shah won her over in person.
She described watching Shah speak at a town hall in Oxford County before the June primary. By the time Platner collapsed this month following an ex-girlfriend’s rape allegation, she’d already decided who she wanted next, calling him “probably the best positioned” to weather a difficult campaign against Collins.
“Here’s a brown man that won the Dem thing in Oxford County,” Jamison said of the runner-up and first-round leader in the gubernatorial primary. “That’s pretty phenomenal.”
Bellows’ delegate operation has been less visible than that of Jackson or Shah. Frank O’Hara, a former state government official from Hallowell, said he signed up as a delegate candidate supporting her but did it on his own without coordinating with the campaign.
His wife, a Shah supporter who is not running, had been contacted several times about the caucuses by that campaign.