Robert McBreairty Jr. has spent some 60 years harvesting timber in Maine’s northern woods. Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Troy Jackson worked for him more than a decade ago.
But when Jackson calls himself a logger in his campaign ads, it rankles the 82-year-old Fort Kent contractor, who said he could never vote for Jackson.
“Oh, it pisses me off,” McBreairty said. “He was not a logger. No. A logger, back when we called loggers, loggers, they took a chainsaw and went in the woods and cut down trees and lived it.”
The woods are the core of Jackson’s pitch against U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican seeking a sixth term in next week’s election. But Jackson, who lives in Allagash, has not reported income from logging since 2012 and has spent the past decade earning money from labor unions and political organizing, records show.
His campaign said he has kept logging “intermittently.” Ethics filings showing his sources of income and past BDN coverage illustrate how he moved in and out of the woods over more than two decades, much of it in lean years for his family and for logging in northern Maine.
The hardest stretch came in the fall of 1998. As he and his father were giving up a $300,000 delimbing machine they could no longer find work for, Jackson helped lead loggers in a blockade at the Canadian border, protesting landowners who hired bonded Canadian crews over Mainers and launching himself into politics.
His father, Joe Jackson, told the BDN that November that his log truck had sat parked since February for lack of work. He and his son had been paying $6,700 a month on the delimber before selling it.
The protest came as the industry in northern Maine was being remade. In 1994, paper and other forest-products companies owned 59% of the land held by Maine’s major timberland owners, according to a 2005 study by the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences. By 2005, their share was just over 15%, while financial investors grew from 3% to nearly 33%.
The work also changed. Crews of chainsaw cutters and skidder drivers gave way to contractors running machines that could cost $500,000 apiece. By the early 2000s, machines handled 90% or more of production on Maine’s large timberlands, a 2004 legislative study found.
Loggers on those jobs competed with Canadian crews brought in under a federal program for temporary foreign workers. Canadians could often work for less because of the exchange rate. As late as 2009, logging companies typically sought about 600 of those waivers a year.
When he first ran for the Legislature in 2000 as a Republican, a BDN profile described the 32-year-old as a “former logger” who had moved from Allagash to attend the University of Maine at Fort Kent. He lost that race but won a House seat two years later as an independent.
From 2006 through 2012, while he was a state lawmaker, he listed northern Maine logging contractors as employers on his annual state ethics filings, including McBreairty. In 2012, he wrote in a candidate questionnaire that he still ran a delimber, a machine that strips felled trees, when the Legislature was out of session.
Writing as Senate president in a 2019 BDN column, Jackson said the blockade was what drove him, “a fifth-generation logger, to run for office.” In the same column, he wrote that “those of us who work in the woods” knew what the industry needed. He championed a law letting loggers and wood haulers bargain collectively. The next year, he filed a federal labor complaint accusing the government of failing to protect Maine loggers from Canadian competition.
By then, he had not reported logging income for eight years. His 2013 filing lists only the Legislature, and logging never shows up again. Lawmakers only have to disclose income sources worth at least $2,000, so smaller jobs would not appear.
McBreairty said both Jackson and his father ran a delimber for him. That is a far stretch from holding a chainsaw, he said. Jackson told the BDN in September that some people don’t consider him a true logger because he ran machinery.
Hilton Hafford, an Allagash logger who joined the blockade and has known Jackson since he was a kid, said the line between running a machine and wielding a chainsaw disappeared from the industry long ago, and that the critics are holding Jackson to a definition nobody else in the woods is held to.
“Troy Jackson realized that the only way to change anything in any industry was to change it within,” Hafford said. “And to change it within, you had to be part of the political world.”
Jackson’s campaign said calling himself a logger “speaks to his background and identity,” and the candidate does not claim to be currently employed as one.
“Taking on other work doesn’t erase that history or the lessons he carries with him,” campaign spokesperson David Farmer said.
After Jackson lost the 2014 Democratic primary in the 2nd Congressional District, his work largely turned to labor and political organizing, working for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign before organizing for the International Association of Machinists from 2018 to 2020 and working for the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades from 2020 to 2024.
His association with the machinists got attention in 2020 after Jackson co-authored a letter to Bath Iron Works, whose workers the union represents, saying lawmakers could reconsider a tax break over hiring practices they disagreed with. At that time, he said his job was organizing loggers but that none had unionized.
From 2021 to early 2025, he also worked part time raising money for Food and Medicine, a progressive, labor-aligned Brewer nonprofit group that grew out of a wave of mill closures in the early 2000s. He beat its goals for an annual Thanksgiving meal drive, Jack McKay, the group’s executive director, said.
Jackson’s U.S. Senate financial disclosure filed earlier this month shows he made $85,000 from labor groups in 2025 and $58,000 so far this year, nearly all of it consulting fees from the machinists and the painters’ union. The rest of last year’s total, $5,100, came from the Eastern Maine Labor Council, which McKay also leads.
The machinists paid him through August, weeks after he entered the Senate race. The campaign said he no longer consults for either union. Neither his campaign nor the two unions responded to specific questions about his work for them.
Some of that money ran through Jackson Associates, a company Jackson incorporated in June 2021 while saying it was for construction and land management. On his state ethics filings, it was called a logging and forestry business. His campaign said the company was set up to manage Jackson’s own land but has made no money doing that.
Jackson’s credentials have become a target in the campaign’s final week. A new Collins ad features retired sportscaster Bill Green saying “we’re not talking about buying a cord of wood” in the election, and “Troy doesn’t have the tools he needs to be effective.”
He filmed a response Tuesday calling the ad “out of touch” given high heating costs. Last week while casting an absentee ballot in Portland, he flipped a reporter’s question about why the race was so close onto Collins.
“I guess I’m wondering why she’s not beating me by more,” he said. “Why is this logger from Allagash being competitive with you? I think that says a lot more about her record than it does about mine.”
BDN writer Elizabeth Walztoni contributed to this report.
