Few things have been certain in the mad dash for Maine Democrats to replace Graham Platner as the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate.

Platner’s withdrawal on July 10, after an ex-girlfriend said he raped her, jumpstarted a fast-moving process like nothing seen before in modern Maine politics. 

State law gave Democrats roughly two weeks and hardly any guidance on how to devise the process for selecting a replacement. The situation was beset with uncertainty from the get-go, as party leaders sought legal advice and worked to develop the framework before Platner had officially withdrawn from the race, even accusing his campaign of trying to influence the process before he relented to overwhelming calls to step aside.

Maine Democrats unveiled a mutli-step process that will conclude with a nominating convention on Saturday, July 25, where 601 delegates will choose the replacement candidate who will take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins in a general election that could help determine control of the U.S. Senate. 

Just last week, a dozen different people had declared their candidacy for the race and it appeared that Saturday’s convention could be a long, multi-round affair with a collection of recently defeated Democratic primary candidates and lesser-known political newcomers making their case at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor. 

But after last weekend’s county-level nomination meetings produced 500 of the delegates from around the state, at least one thing has become increasingly clear: Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson has all but locked up the nomination.

Jackson, who finished third in last month’s Democratic primary for governor, used a quickly developed network of support across Maine’s 16 counties to dominate the county delegate nomination process. While the state party’s rules for the nomination convention process are clear that county delegates are not pledged to a specific candidate, Jackson and some other candidates each formed their own slate of would-be delegates who signaled to county voters that they would support a particular candidate if chosen for the statewide convention. 

A sort of winner-take-all scenario emerged at the county nominating meetings this past weekend, with Jackson’s slate crowding out others and indicating that he likely already has a majority of the 601 delegates who are attending Saturday’s convention. All but one of the other candidates, biopharmaceutical executive Saundra Pelletier, have since dropped out, many have put their support behind Jackson, and his campaign has already said it is “turning its full focus toward defeating Senator Susan Collins this November.”

Given these developments, Saturday’s convention looks primed to be a Jackson coronation rather than a prolonged competition. But, like so much in recent weeks, the future is not entirely set in stone — and some voters and candidates have raised questions about whether the party’s approach has been as transparent and inclusive as promised.  

Not technically pledged 

Maine Democrats’ next U.S. Senate nominee will be chosen by the 500 delegates who emerged from the county-level process, along with 101 delegates automatically drawn from the party’s state committee. And while Jackson appears to have support from a majority of the delegates, they are not formally pledged to him.

The county-by-county delegate results made available by the Democratic party do not clarify whether each individual delegate was part of a particular candidate’s slate, so there is no official party information stating that Jackson has majority support among the delegates heading into the convention. But by cross-referencing the county results and Jackson’s county delegate slates on his website, that majority support becomes clear. Jackson has the support of at least 456 of the 601 delegates, according to an analysis by The Bangor Daily News.

Jackson was not alone in adopting the slate approach, with other candidates such as former Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Nirav Shah and current Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows releasing their own lists. 

Given the party’s rules, Rick Langley, an Augusta voter and Shah supporter, did not expect to see the process evolve the way it did with designated candidate slates. 

“I think our expectation was, and there was even some guidance, I think, out there originally that said at the first step, you’re kind of pledging to go as an open-minded delegate to Bangor, and to make a thoughtful choice there,” Langley said in an interview this week after the county nomination process.  

Both he and his wife attempted to get nods as Kennebec County delegates in Augusta last Saturday as part of Shah’s slate, but did not receive enough votes to be selected. 

“And then it kind of shifted. At some point there was this kind of locked in commitment, which makes sense that the campaigns would have wanted to know that we’re sending folks who are our hardcore kind of supporters,” Langley said. “But there was a fair amount of confusion about that.”

At least one of the former candidates felt campaigns’ efforts to build slates of delegates was out of step with the party’s rules for the process. Paige Loud, who previously ran in the Democratic primary for Maine’s Second Congressional District and initially put her hat in the ring to replace Platner before exiting the Senate race, criticized the process as a “deeply unserious spectacle” when dropping out last week.

“I had a lot of supporters reach out to me and ask if I was gonna have a slate, before I had decided to drop out,” Loud said in an interview this week. “And I was like, no, the [Maine Democratic Party] clearly in their rules stated that delegates should be going to the convention with an open mind, and prepared to represent their community, not a candidate.”

Despite the assumption that Jackson will be the nominee, one other candidate has kept her name in the ring. Pelletier made clear in a Friday press release that she is not stepping aside in the race. And she pointed to the party rules about delegates not being pledged to any particular candidate. 

Pelletier also released a 12-page document titled “What I believe” that outlined her policy positions on a host of issues. 

“No candidate can claim victory before the delegates have voted,” Pelletier said. “I respect the delegates far too much to accept that the decision has already been made for them.”

Loud credited the party for its “constant communication” with the candidates and said it largely did a good job explaining the rules, but fell short when it came to clarifying that delegates are not pledged. 

Despite the concerns and confusion from some, University of Maine political science department chair Mark Brewer didn’t see an issue with how the slate process played out.

“All the candidates were trying to line up supporters in advance of those caucuses,” Brewer said, stressing that none of the delegates are formally bound to a specific candidate. “They could still show up there on Saturday and vote however they wanted to.”

Brewer credited the party for standing up its nomination process so quickly ahead of the Monday, July 27, deadline to name a replacement. And he credited Jackson’s campaign for its commanding performance in the county nomination meetings. 

“Jackson’s team just did a better job than everybody else’s,” Brewer said. 

Why use this process?

The Maine Democratic Party has said it has aimed for an open, fair and transparent process. But over the past several weeks it has faced questions about why it chose the county delegate and state convention approach, and why it left unenrolled voters out of the mix, among other things. 

A party spokesperson declined a Maine Monitor interview request this week to discuss several process questions, citing time constraints as party officials prepared for the convention. The party also failed to answer questions in writing, pointing instead to its website.

While the website provides details on a number of process points, it does not offer clear answers as to why the party chose this convention-based process rather than other selection methods, why unenrolled voters were not included in the process despite being able to vote in the June primary, whether the slate process lined up with the rules about delegates not being pledged to candidates and why ranked-choice voting was expressly prohibited in the delegate selection process. 

The party website says the decision to exclude unenrolled voters “was made on advice of legal counsel to be in accordance with Maine law,” but doesn’t provide any specifics about what those legal barriers might be. 

And when explaining why a snap primary election wasn’t possible in this case, the party website said the process “has been created in accordance with Maine state law and the realities of the timing constraints we are under,” without explaining the party’s thinking on the convention-based approach compared to other options. 

Brewer, the political science professor, explained that there are four basic options to select a candidate depending on the scenario: A primary election, a caucus, a convention or an appointment by a smaller group of party officials. 

Primaries are the most participatory of the options, Brewer said, but re-doing this Democratic Senate primary would not have been possible legally, the Maine Secretary of State’s Office had already made clear. 

Brewer noted that caucuses, where the party administers an open meeting or vote, are “significantly more participatory” than conventions that feature a select group of delegates, and some observers have wondered why Maine Democrats didn’t choose to employ a statewide caucus to allow a broader swath of voters to weigh in on Platner’s replacement. 

Instead, as Brewer explained, the Democrats settled on a process that blended the two, with county-level caucuses and then a state convention. 

Jason Savage, the executive director of the Maine Republican Party, has watched his Democratic counterparts navigate this unprecedented moment. 

“Initially it was a little bit of sympathy,” Savage said, explaining his reaction. “And then things got really interesting because they didn’t really try to go back and create a process that looked like the original primary.”

If Maine Republicans faced a similar scenario, Savage said he expected they would favor a direct caucus vote to try to include as many original voters as possible. And he said that the state GOP would seek to avoid amplifying the influence of “a smaller cohort of insiders,” likening the automatic inclusion of the 101 party committee members to a form of “superdelegates.” Savage said his party would likely require its state committee members to be chosen as delegates just like everyone else, rather than receive an automatic bid in a convention scenario. 

“I really think we would have gone back to more decentralized caucuses and let the votes that happened there be representative of the total,” Savage said. “I don’t think you can go back and get every single person who voted to vote again. But I think you should do your best to try to give them the opportunity, and that comes with its own challenges.”

Some of those challenges include ballot security measures, the cost of having law enforcement on site and the logistical headaches of conducting decentralized caucus votes across the state. But as Savage pointed out, there are going to be logistical headaches in a statewide nominee replacement process no matter the approach a party takes. 

Replacement candidates at the county and state legislative levels are a common occurrence, and Savage speculated that the Maine GOP could take the model of what they already do for those replacements and scale it up for a statewide vacancy. 

Savage said Maine Republicans will probably develop their own written replacement plan for a statewide race vacancy in the next two or three weeks. 

It’s not just Republicans who think Democrats could have taken a different approach. Loud, the former Democratic candidate, took issue with the exclusion of unenrolled voters and thought the party would have been better off taking a random selection of primary voters as their delegates for the convention. 

While Brewer was impressed with the process Democrats stood up on short notice, he thought the matter of unenrolled voters being left out of the process was a legitimate complaint, though he wasn’t sure if party bylaws prevented that inclusion from the start.

“I can’t think of any instance where a political party has invited independent or unenrolled voters to participate in its convention or caucus process,” Brewer added. 

Langely, the Shah supporter, was disappointed that ranked-choice voting wasn’t incorporated into the nomination process after years of use in certain Maine elections, though he understood it would have been logistically complicated. 

Convention logistics

The process will come to a head this weekend, with the nominating convention getting under way Saturday morning in Bangor. The doors open at the Cross Insurance Center at 8 a.m. and the event begins at 9 a.m. 

The convention is open only to credentialed delegates, staff and members of the press, which the Maine Democratic Party said is for safety reasons. The event will be livestreamed, according to the party, and will conclude by 12 p.m.

Details on the party site indicate that the two remaining candidates, Jackson and Pelletier, will both have an opportunity to address the delegates at the convention. Delegates will vote in rounds until one candidate gets a majority, and given that there are only two candidates left in the race, it should only take one round to produce a winner. 

Once the nominee is chosen, the party has until 5 p.m. on Monday to submit the name to the secretary of state’s office. That final step will conclude a statewide primary process the likes of which Maine has never seen before. 

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.