Editors at National Review Online examine Maine Democrats’ new candidate for US Senate.
A few weeks after the implosion of the Graham Platner campaign, Maine Democrats have selected another candidate to challenge Senator Susan Collins. To avoid the appearance of the party bosses’ imposing a new candidate on voters à la Kamala Harris, they created a makeshift process, which included a debate and a vote by delegates. The resulting convention, which took place on Saturday, kicked off with a land acknowledgment recognizing the Maliseet, Mi‘kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot tribal nations as the original stewards of the State of Maine. Then, delegates nominated Troy Jackson, a former state senate president and failed gubernatorial candidate.
In Jackson, Democrats decided on somebody who shares Platner’s left-wing politics but — they hope — comes with less baggage. When Jackson was running for governor earlier this year, he campaigned alongside Platner. He supports a government-run health care system to be branded as Medicare for All; he has called for abolishing ICE; he wants to establish a federal right to abortion; and he wants to cut off all U.S. support for Israel in the name of ending the supposed “genocide in Gaza.”
Jackson’s radical ideas will provide plenty of ammo to Collins, a Republican who has survived in a blue state for 30 years as a centrist. Take his support for Medicare for All. The Urban Institute, a liberal think tank, estimated the ten-year cost of a Medicare for All proposal by Senator Bernie Sanders would be close to $40 trillion. But that was back in 2018, for the years between 2022 and 2031. Given inflation in the intervening years, any fresh estimate would almost certainly be higher.
Regardless of what the updated numbers look like, the broad trade-offs remain the same. Financing such an expensive program would require significant tax increases on the middle class, something even Sanders has conceded.
