The clouds, piled in a dark heap over the Blueberry Ridge mobile-home park in Wells, Maine, looked like they would open up any minute. Residents sat in neatly arranged folding chairs behind a double-wide trailer, waiting for Troy Jackson, the state’s Democratic Senate candidate, to appear. Meanwhile, campaign staffers buzzed around like hornets out of a nest, freshly kicked. I was seated at the periphery, flanked on the left by two pockmarked fake deer—3-D archery targets—and on the right by an elderly chain-smoker who politely angled her cigarette away from me as she talked. She told me that she didn’t know much about Jackson but was going to knock on doors for him anyway. “He seems like he’s down-to-earth,” she said. “That he’s one of us.”
Jackson is one of them. He’s a fifth-generation logger born to a 16-year-old high-school dropout, and, as he is fond of repeating, he grew up as a “poor kid in a town full of poor kids.” At one time, he lived in a mobile home. A slick banner on his campaign website declares: Mainer By Birth. Logger By Trade. Senator for the People.
I’d come to Blueberry Ridge to see Jackson, who replaced Graham Platner as the nominee in July, after Platner resigned due to multiple scandals. The park was bought by a real-estate-investment company in 2021, and a group of residents has claimed that the new owners have made life there more expensive and worse. Now the group is pushing for a rent cap, and Jackson was there over Labor Day weekend to show support. When he addressed the crowd, his voice was measured but tinged with what sounded like genuine frustration. “The greed that’s happening right now in this country, that people in mobile-home parks are feeling, is like something I’ve never seen,” he said. Jackson marveled at a mason jar of muddy tap water that got passed around, apparent evidence of the park’s deteriorating living conditions. He seemed to be in his element, and after the event was over, he stayed to shake hands and talk about the travails of mobile-home life until his staffers pulled him away.
[Read: One morning of controlled chaos in Maine]
The next stop on his tour that day was People’s Inclusive Welding, a school in South Portland whose mission is to provide a “safe and supportive environment for underserved and underrepresented communities to learn a skilled trade.” There, Jackson watched a torch demonstration, surrounded by the language of hyper-progressivism: a metal slab emblazoned with the text WHAT’S YOUR SAFE WORD?; a door covered in dozens of stickers with radical messages (SOLIDARITY MEANS WEARING A MASK and DESTROY ALL BORDERS); a gigantic mural, painted the colors of the trans flag, proclaiming BLM and ACAB—an abbreviation for “All Cops Are Bastards.” He seemed to instinctively edge away from the mural as a local-news outlet snapped photos of him.
The contrast between these two events—one at a trailer park populated mostly by retirees, the other at a shop catering to progressive urban tradespeople—reflects the tensions in the Jackson campaign as a whole. Jackson seems to be attempting to pair a left-leaning, economically populist package with “woke” cultural ideals, which working-class voters tend to reject. Jackson’s unsuccessful run for governor earlier this year was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and Bernie Sanders, who affirmed his support for Jackson’s Senate bid and has appeared at campaign events on his behalf. Several labor unions have also endorsed Jackson. He supports Medicare for All, bans on congressional stock trading, tax cuts for workers, and tax hikes for billionaires. He also favors restricting assault weapons and abolishing ICE. As a state senator, he voted in favor of trans women being housed in women’s prisons, and of qualified trans teens receiving treatments such as hormone therapy without parental consent; he voted against a ban on trans women’s participation on women’s sports teams. In 2023, he co-sponsored legislation to allow later-term abortions after fetal viability.
On economic issues, Jackson is in sync with the working-class and rural voters he says he is championing. Sixty-three percent of Americans without a college degree and 76 percent of those who make less than $50,000 a year say that the government should be responsible for ensuring health-care coverage, for example. On cultural matters, however, Jackson is out of step with many of those he claims to be giving a voice to. Most Americans without a college degree say that protecting gun rights is more important than gun control, and that guns make the country safer. These Americans are also more likely than college graduates to express negative views about illegal immigration. Likewise, a majority of people making less than $50,000 a year or who did not go to college say that abortion is morally unacceptable, whereas those making more than $100,000 or who did go to college say the opposite.
On gender identity, majorities of Americans without a four-year college degree say that gender transitions are morally wrong, that trans people should play on sports teams that match their birth sex, and that being trans is not an innate condition but is instead caused by social factors. Similar trends play out in Maine, where people without a four-year college degree are more likely than people with a degree to view illegal immigration as a serious problem, and where trans women’s participation in women’s sports is unpopular across the electorate. (I asked the Jackson campaign for an interview so that he could elaborate on his views, but it refused multiple requests.)
Despite its down-home signifiers and KICKING ASS FOR THE WORKING CLASS T-shirts, the Jackson campaign’s pairing of leftist economic populism with progressive cultural stances fits seamlessly into the broader professional-class insurgency roiling the Democratic Party. This movement, which some have referred to as a Democratic “tea party,” appears animated by a theory of persuasion that one might call “left maximalism.” The tacit wager of left maximalists, including Jackson, seems to be that enough working-class voters will stomach unpopular left-wing cultural policies provided that a candidate also supports popular left-wing economic positions.
This strategy has shown some signs of success lately, as evidenced by the DSA-endorsed candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier’s surprise primary win in New York City’s Thirteenth Congressional District, one of the poorest in the state. She managed to unseat an incumbent establishment opponent despite arguing that deportations are wrong under any circumstance and that national borders and prisons should be abolished—views that are not exactly common among the working class. Similarly, before Platner’s collapse, he used a left-maximalist approach to win his primary. It remains to be seen, however, whether left maximalism will fly as a general-election strategy in Maine. Winning will require Jackson to hold together a coalition that includes both college-educated residents of prosperous coastal cities and towns, and the rural, socially moderate, working-class voters Democrats have been alienating in recent years.
The frictions in the Jackson campaign’s platform call to mind the work of Daniel Bell, a mid-20th-century sociologist who once described himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.” In his 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Bell argued that capitalism had started to undermine itself. As Bell observed, capitalism took root in the United States during the 19th and early-20th centuries, when the country’s social life was defined by puritanical moralism and the Protestant work ethic. Americans saved money, prioritized the public good, toiled mostly without complaint, and were disinclined to acquisitiveness.
But after World War II, he wrote, thrift and public spiritedness were displaced by consumerist individualism, which focused on permissiveness, pleasure, and the self. Writing during a decade of economic crisis and high inflation, Bell warned that unfettered capitalism would weaken important institutions, cultural values, and social bonds—and ultimately lead to a society as unstable as it was selfish. If Bell was right to spotlight the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” in the 1970s, the cultural contradictions of anti-capitalism may well prove to be one of the most potent political conundrums of the 2020s: The American left has produced an environment that alienates many working-class people from candidates espousing economics designed to benefit them.
[Read: Why do rich kids love socialism?]
Jackson, apparently trying to manage these contradictions, is acting as though he can be everything to everyone. One minute, his team is launching a folksy ad, set at a backyard barbecue, about loggers paying more taxes than billionaires. The next minute, the campaign is dropping a side-eye-emoji’d social-media clip of the candidate sassily sipping boba tea beside a Pride flag. Depending on your perspective, this mishmash is reflective either of a politician who is trying to represent all Mainers, or of a man whose cultural politics sit uneasily alongside those of the working-class electorate—not to mention his own past beliefs. When Jackson first (and unsuccessfully) ran for state office in 2000, he did so as a Republican. By 2002, he was an independent, and by 2004, a Democrat. Yet even after changing his party affiliation, he voted against same-sex-marriage legislation in 2009, and received a perfect score from an anti-abortion group, Maine Right to Life, in 2010. By 2017, though, Jackson had done an about-face. He eventually began receiving accolades from pro-choice organizations for his support of abortion rights. Jackson, who was raised Catholic, has described abortion as an issue he has long wrestled with, and has said that he was simply persuaded that his prior views were wrong.
It is more than possible that Jackson’s pivot did come from a sincere change of heart, rather than from a cynical calculation about the concessions necessary to succeed as a Democrat. And the mixed messages of Jackson’s current campaign are not irreconcilable. Jackson can court the Rural Flannel-Wearing Tree Cutters and the Urban Boba Wokes at the same time, and perhaps he really will win enough of each for the Maine electoral math to work out in the Democrats’ favor. Polling shows a tight race, and the Iran quagmire, Donald Trump’s subbasement approval rating, and rising heating-oil prices in advance of the Maine winter are unlikely to do his opponent, the five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins, any favors. But what may work as a matter of immediate tactics is not necessarily a strategy for fundamentally reshaping the demographics of the Democratic Party within the state, or outside it.
Cultural politics, not economic politics, are the left’s primary barrier to winning back the working class. Left maximalists tend to treat the working class as a junior partner rather than as their primary constituency. Progressive urban professionals may get the economic and social politics they want, while rural and working-class voters are asked to compromise their moral and cultural belief system in exchange for promises of health care and an increased minimum wage.
[Read: The blockbuster that captured a growing American rift]
After Jackson departed Blueberry Ridge, I stuck around the backyard to talk with some residents. One was a union tinsmith and lifelong Democrat who told me he doesn’t care about culture-war issues and is more worried about how labor is being fleeced. Another was a tollbooth worker and three-time Trump voter who was dismayed that the president he’d voted for had done so little for the little people. He seemed ready for something different, and sympathized with Troy Jackson’s anti-corporate politics, but said that he could never vote for Jackson because of his stances on immigration and gender issues.
Progressives may wonder why a Mainer whose trailer park is allegedly being wrecked by an investment firm would care more about immigration policy than affordability issues as he decides which candidate to support. But one could also ask the opposite question: Why are highly educated leftists, and politicians such as Jackson who appeal to them, often unwilling to give even an inch on social issues? If socialists and populists—even blue-collar leftists such as Jackson—are so wedded to progressivism that they do not compromise with the working class, the question is not simply whether such a left can win. The question is whether it truly remains left at all.