Maine Senate swap-in Troy Jackson once joked I wouldve ran as a communist

WASHINGTON — Talk about waving a red flag.Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson once joked that he could have run for office as a full-blown communist, while attempting to rationalize to voters why he started off as a Republican.

Jackson, the replacement for disgraced oyster farmer Graham Platner, explained to a room full of Cumberland County voters in 2017 that during his early days as an elected official, he was desperate to get into power.“It’s no secret when I ran for the legislature in 2000, I was a Republican,” he said at the time.“And I had no idea.

All I cared about was getting into the legislature because that seemed to be the place that I could fix some of the problems that were happening in my area.”“I would’ve ran as anything, I would’ve ran as a communist,” he added to laughs.“I just wanted to get to a place to do something to help the people in my area.”The former lumberjack kicked off his political career as a Republican with an unsuccessful run for the Maine state House in 2000, when he lost to Democrat Marc Michaud in a close race.Two years later, he tried again, this time as an Independent, and successfully beat Michaud.

He officially became a Democrat about two years later and went on to lead Maine’s state Senate from 2018 through 2024.“Everyone in my community at the time told me that, ‘You’re crazy, you’re running as a Republican when you’re a Democrat.’ I didn’t know,” he said.

“What I felt very much in my heart was that government was standing in the way of prosperity.” During his early political career, Jackson held very conservative beliefs on abortion, gay marriage, immigration, and more.Ironically, now he is running on a platform pushing for a massive expansion of government.

In 2016, Jackson served as the political director for Sen.Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) presidential campaign in Maine. Four years later, he also led Sanders’ Maine operation in 2020, cultivating a friendl...