On the Monday after the Fourth of July, Jordan Wood was visiting the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, in the North Dakota badlands, when his iPhone started blowing up. Wood, a good-governance activist and a former congressional staffer, had been a candidate in Maine’s Democratic primary for Senate, before dropping out to run in the primary for an open U.S. House seat instead, a race he’d narrowly lost a few weeks earlier. Now, during his first real vacation in more than a year, friends back home were relaying a rumor that Politico was on the verge of publishing a damning story about Graham Platner, the populist oysterman turned politician who, despite a slew of earlier damaging stories—about a Nazi tattoo, offensive Reddit posts, and mistreatment of ex-girlfriends—had, in June, won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary with seventy-two per cent of the vote. After Politico published its story, in which an ex-girlfriend of Platner’s accused him of sexual assault, Wood decided that Teddy Roosevelt could wait. He cut his vacation short and headed back to Maine. Three days later, after Platner announced that he was ending his Senate campaign, Wood announced that he was re-starting his.

The following week, I met up with Wood at his house, a brown-shingled Cape Cod that sits on a bluff above the Androscoggin River, in Auburn, about forty miles north of Portland. Wood, who is thirty-six, paced around his living room—which was doubling as his campaign war room—in a moisture-wicking T-shirt, running shorts, and ankle socks. His husband, Jake Lipsett, who co-founded the Democratic digital-fund-raising firm Mothership, sat in a lounge chair and worked on a laptop, refreshing the Maine Democratic Party’s website to monitor who Wood’s opponents would be. The filing deadline was at five o’clock that afternoon, and the field was becoming increasingly crowded. Three candidates who’d lost in Maine’s Democratic gubernatorial primary the previous month—Maine’s secretary of state Shenna Bellows; the former state-Senate president Troy Jackson; and Nirav Shah, a former public-health official—were already in. So was Dan Kleban, a brewery owner who briefly ran for the Senate seat last year. But most of the new entrants were people whom Wood had never heard of. “Who’s Ashley Webb?” he asked Alex Obolensky, the campaign manager for Wood’s Senate and House campaigns, who was now sitting on Wood’s living-room couch. “No one knows,” Obolensky said. Wood replied, “Welcome to the clown car.”

Platner’s march through the Senate primary—from which he drove out not just Wood but, more impressively, the state’s term-limited governor, Janet Mills—had confounded establishment Democrats in Maine and in Washington, D.C.; now, after resigning themselves to a candidate they despised in a must-win contest this November, they were being given an unexpected mulligan. But Platner’s downfall had left many of the progressive insurgents who’d fuelled his rise distraught—and even more distrustful of the political system than they’d been before. (In an angry eleven-minute video announcing his withdrawal, Platner, who denied the allegation of sexual assault, had accused “large forces” of working against him and complained that the “corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury, and executioner.”) The challenge confronting the candidates seeking to replace Platner—not to mention the Democratic muckety-mucks—was how to reinvigorate, in two weeks, a movement that had taken Platner nearly a year to build.

The state Democratic Party had called a special convention for July 25th, in Bangor, in which six hundred and one delegates would pick a new candidate to face Susan Collins, Maine’s five-term Republican Senator, in November. A hundred and one of the convention’s delegates would be members of a state Democratic committee; the other five hundred would be chosen in caucuses at the county level the weekend before the convention, on July 18th and 19th. Wood and his team were working the phones to try to get his supporters to run for delegate. They left no stone unturned. “We just need more people to sign up to be delegates in Waldo and Knox counties,” Wood said, in a call to his father, who is the pastor of a Congregational church in Camden that serves both counties. “So I was hoping you and Mom could text the folks that go to church that you’re friends with, whoever you’re comfortable with, that are supportive. Do you have the sign-up link to be a delegate? I assume you’ve signed up?”

With other potential delegates, Wood had to strike an uneasy balance, arguing that he was the candidate best suited to continue Platner’s political project, while distancing himself from the scandals that torpedoed Platner’s campaign. Talking to a state-House candidate, he said, of his opponents, “They’re all saying, sort of publicly, ‘I support one hundred percent of Graham’s agenda,’ and I’m, like, Do you, though? Do you even know what that agenda is?” He added, “I was running for U.S. Senate before Graham, and I was talking about Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, AIPAC, the need for Medicare for All.” In other conversations, Wood boasted that, at the outset of his first Senate campaign, he had paid thirty thousand dollars to be vetted by a political-research firm. His only tattoos, he noted, were of a seashell and the 2008 Obama-campaign emblem. The fact that he’s gay was also an asset: “We’ve done polling, actually, and voters trust gay candidates more than straight candidates, and my theory is that they know gay candidates are being honest with them about themselves.”

In the midst of all of this private politicking, public tragedy struck. On the morning of July 13th, an ICE agent in the coastal city of Biddeford, Maine, shot and killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant in his mid-twenties whose car the agent had tried to stop, after mistaking him for someone else. (As it turned out, the ICE agent and Wood had gone to the same middle school. “It’s a small, small state,” Wood told me.) The next day, Wood addressed attendees at a vigil for Guerrero in Lewiston, just across the Androscoggin River from Auburn. Wearing his campaign-trail uniform—Oxford shirt, solid-color tie, khakis, Blundstone boots—he stood inside of a gazebo in a downtown city park and quoted Saint Augustine: “ ‘Hope has two beautiful daughters.’ One is anger at the way things are, and we have a lot of anger at the way things are. But the second is courage—the courage and determination to make things better, and we need to hold on to courage.”

Bellows also spoke at the vigil. At one point, she mispronounced Guerrero’s name; later, she talked so much about the Senate race that a heckler shouted, “This is about Joan! Not about your campaign!” Wood called Bellows’s speech “laugh-out-loud cringey.” But he was more energized by how the shooting had shifted attention away from Platner—and toward what’s at stake in the race. “We were in mourning after this primary debacle,” he told me. “But, after Monday morning, it was, like, O.K., we got to pick ourselves back up. We got to beat Susan Collins. She could have stopped this. It just moved people to refocus on why this election matters, and that’s what people are talking about.”

When Wood wasn’t working the phones or attending vigils, he was preparing for a televised debate scheduled for July 16th—two days before the start of the county caucuses—in Portland. Standing behind a lectern and facing a laptop perched on the mantel in his living room, he workshopped his opening statement and answers to various questions with his debate coach, Reed Adamson, who was Zooming in from Oregon. “Jordan, you ate your Wheaties last night!” Adamson said. “Great job!”

The debate’s host, News Center Maine, had originally invited just Bellows, Jackson, Shah, and Wood—all of whom had received at least twenty per cent of the vote in their respective primaries, in June—to participate, but Jackson, the former state-Senate president, protested that the debate should be open to all twelve declared candidates. He said that it was about respecting the democratic process; Wood suspected that Jackson, who is not a particularly gifted orator, had ulterior motives. “He wants it to be as many people up there as possible so he won’t be scrutinized,” Wood said.

In the end, News Center Maine compromised. It would host two separate, back-to-back debates: one featuring Wood and the other original three candidates, informally dubbed “the big-kids’ table,” and a second featuring Kleban, Webb, and two additional candidates, referred to as “the little-kids’ table.” Instead of one ninety-minute debate, each one would be sixty minutes—meaning that, while Jackson wouldn’t have a crowded stage, he’d at least have less time on it.

Some of the candidates seemed eager to debate—in part to promote their candidacies but also to promote themselves. The News Center Maine event “could be one of the highest-viewed Senate Democratic primary debates in the country,” Wood said. He was even more jazzed that CNN had announced it would host another debate the following week, two days before the convention in Bangor. “Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, who do the Presidential debates, are going to be moderators,” he marvelled. But there was, admittedly, something odd about having televised debates when the contest was ultimately going to be decided by just six hundred and one people—who, presumably, would have the opportunity to speak directly with the candidates themselves. Wood seemed to acknowledge the disconnect. In a call with a state representative who was running to be a delegate, he’d made a detailed, granular case both for his candidacy and against his opponents’. After hanging up, he told Lipsett, “I think I convinced her. She said, ‘I just want the best candidate to beat Susan,’ and she seemed sold by the argument. The only problem is, I don’t have the time to make that argument in the debate or on TV. It’s very insider-y.”

An hour before the first debate began, the eight candidates gathered in a greenroom at the News Center Maine studios, in Portland. Webb, a transgender singer and writer, kept to herself, eating a piece of pizza with a knife and a fork. Wood, Jackson, Shah, and Kleban glad-handed, recounting where they were when they first heard the news that Platner was likely finished. Bellows sat in an adjacent office, flipping through a briefing binder. Mike Redding, the station’s news director, told the candidates that, unlike the gubernatorial and House debates that News Center Maine had hosted earlier in the year, all of which were recorded, this one was going to be broadcast live. “No cussing,” he reminded them. “Troy, that’s not going to be a problem for you, right?”

Jackson, a fifth-generation logger from Aroostook, Maine’s northernmost county, was a pro-life Republican before becoming a pro-choice Democrat. He was known in Augusta for both his fiery temper and his populist positions, such as supporting universal school meals and stopping the closure of Veterans’ Homes locations in rural Maine. During his gubernatorial campaign, he was endorsed by the Maine Democratic Socialists of America, as well as by Bernie Sanders, and he often campaigned with Platner. He was more authentically working class than Platner—who was the child of a wealthy lawyer and a restaurateur—but he was also much less charismatic. (He finished in third place in the gubernatorial primary.) “There’s a lot of people that are energized to get universal health care and take on corporations,” Jackson told me. “The issues aren’t Graham’s. They aren’t mine. But we can still do this and get the government we deserve.”

In the debate, Jackson and the other candidates managed not to curse, but that might have been their greatest achievement. Shah—who rose to prominence in Maine during the COVID-19 pandemic, when, as the director of the state’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, he gave regular televised briefings—was the most polished speaker; but, having spent the past year running for governor, he seemed unfamiliar with some federal issues. After attacking Collins for being a rubber stamp for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, one of the moderators reminded Shah that she’d opposed his nomination. Jackson also seemed uncomfortable at times with the details of the new office he was seeking. Responding to a question about a program he would cut in order to bring down government spending, he answered that he’d end “the war in Iran”—which isn’t a program and, as expensive as it is, constitutes only a pittance of the federal budget. Wood knew the federal issues, but, despite hitting his marks in debate prep, his presentation was halting, and he never managed to distinguish himself onstage.

Bellows was a disaster. After accusing Collins of not doing more to oppose Trump’s foreign policy on Venezuela, one of the moderators noted that she had voted for a war-powers resolution limiting what Trump could do in the South American country. “Forgive me,” Bellows replied. “A week ago, I was on vacation.” In the greenroom, Elizabeth Dickerson, one of the little-kids’-table participants, buried her head in her hands. “Oh, Shenna,” Dickerson said. “She just lost the race.” Commenting on the debate on his live stream, the leftist political activist Hasan Piker lamented, “They’re all so rizz-less.”

Two days later, not long after sunrise, Wood pulled his Chevy Tahoe out of the driveway of his second home—a contemporary farmhouse in the midcoast town of Bristol—and began what would be a two-hundred-mile round trip, as he visited three county-caucus sites across the state. He was optimistic about what lay ahead. “I do think Maine is probably the best state you could ask to do this,” he said. “We have a small population and a highly informed, very engaged electorate with a culture of democracy and holding town meetings.” He thought that New Hampshire and Vermont could probably pull it off, too. “But Massachusetts?” he said. “That would be a clusterfuck.”

His first stop was an elementary and middle school in the town of Ellsworth, where the Hancock County Democrats were holding their caucus. Hancock is Platner’s home county, and his presence loomed large. A man wearing a tartan plaid suit and playing the bagpipes tried to enter the school, only to be turned away by a Party volunteer. “I played for Bernie in 2016!” the man shouted. “I’m going to play for Graham!” Inside, a piece of butcher paper, with “To Graham & Amy” written in big letters at the top, sat on a table for people to leave messages of support for the former candidate and his wife: “We are 4EVER grateful for what you have done”; “We still support you!”; “You are the leaven that started this dough rising! We couldn’t bake the bread without your power.” I asked a blue-blazered middle-aged man named Joseph Kennedy if he thought Platner was right to drop out. “Well, let’s just say that if I had a choice between a convicted sex offender and Susan Collins,” he replied, “I’d still vote for the convicted sex offender.”

Kennedy was one of two hundred and twelve Hancock Democrats running for twenty-three delegate spots, plus five alternates. More than a thousand Hancock Democrats had signed up to vote. The big-kids’-table candidates all attempted to create delegate slates, with varying degrees of success. Shah’s included several people who were actually supporters of his opponents. So did Wood’s. Bellows was circulating at least two different slates—an official roster of names that was being passed out from her campaign table, and an apparently unofficial second list, written by hand on the type of stationery used for grocery lists, which was being circulated by the candidate’s mother. “Shenna’s mom came up to me and said, ‘I put you on the list,’ ” Michael Nickerson, a Bellows supporter, told me.

Only Jackson, it seemed, understood how to put together a slate. At his campaign table, volunteers wearing “I’M HERE FOR TROY” stickers on their shirts handed out pieces of paper with twenty-three names and a note at the bottom of the page that read “VOTE FOR EVERY ONE ON THIS SLATE AND NO OTHER NAMES.” When Hancock County Democrats voted, later that day, Jackson delegates captured all twenty-three delegate spots.

Wood’s next stop was the Augusta Civic Center, where Kennebec County Democrats were holding their caucus. There, I talked to Jackson, who was greeting supporters by his campaign table. He wore a short-sleeved checked shirt, shorts, and a baseball hat that bore his name and the words “Hell No to the Status Quo.” Knowing how quickly the gubernatorial candidates had had to pivot to the Senate campaign—some Bellows supporters had put duct tape over the words “For Governor” on their yard signs—I asked if the hat was left over from his other campaign. “Yeah, it is,” he said. “But it’s pretty much my life.” He said his goal was to cinch the nomination this weekend. “I’m an organizer at heart,” he said. “We do feel like we’ve got a really good shot here.” In Kennebec, Jackson supporters won all forty delegate spots.

Wood’s final stop of the day was Wiscasset Middle High School, where the Lincoln County Democrats were holding their caucus. He ran into his mom and dad, who live in Lincoln and had indeed signed up to be delegates, although they hadn’t had much success in persuading their friends to do the same. As the scale of Jackson’s victory became apparent, Wood tried to argue that there was still hope; Jackson’s delegates weren’t required to vote for him at the convention. “I wouldn’t want anyone on my slate if they were only voting for me,” he said. “I wouldn’t even say my parents are fully committed to voting for me.” As it turned out, he didn’t need to worry about that. Although Jackson’s supporters won only seven of Lincoln County’s fifteen delegate spots—one of his worst performances that weekend—Wood’s mom and dad were not elected, either.

The next day, as Jackson continued to rack up huge delegate counts at the remaining eight county caucuses, his opponents ceded to reality. Bellows, Shah, Kleban, and, finally, Wood all either ended or suspended their campaigns and endorsed or indicated support for Jackson. CNN, meanwhile, announced that it was cancelling its debate. The gathering of the six hundred and one delegates in Bangor this Saturday will be less of a convention than a coronation. ♦