Three Potential Replacements for Graham Platner

Following allegations of rape from a former partner, an accusation that itself follows a sequence of major scandals that threatened to doom Graham Platner’s campaign, the veteran announced the end of his Senate campaign. We are now left to wonder what Democrat will replace him as the nominee to take on Susan Collins in one of the most important Senate races this cycle. 

Of the Democrats in the running, the three that have received the most buzz are the three runners-up in the gubernatorial primary: Troy Jackson, a former president of the Maine Senate, Shenna Bellows, Maine’s current secretary of state, and Nirav Shah, former director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. In a must-win state for Democrats eager to flip the Senate, the decision of the Maine Democratic Party, which must pick a candidate by July 21, could not carry higher stakes.

Troy Jackson

Troy Jackson’s political origins are dissimilar to virtually every other Democrat in America: in the 1990s, he led a blockade against large landowners in Maine, alleging that they illegally hired Canadians to undercut the wages of native loggers. Jackson, whose father was also a logger, then parlayed the support he received from this protest into getting elected to the Maine State House as a Republican in 2000, becoming an independent two years later and joining the Democratic Party in 2004.

As president of the Maine Senate for six years, Jackson led the upper body as major bills would head to Governor Janet Mills’s desk. These included legislation to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, provide family and sick leave to Maine workers, and guarantee free lunch to all K-12 students—the last being a pillar of Jackson’s campaign. 

The former Senate president could be the most electable option—according to a survey conducted on Tuesday by Public Policy Polling commissioned by what remains of the Platner campaign, Jackson leads Collins by five points, while Shah and Bellows are tied.

Jackson endorsed Bernie Sanders for President in 2016 and 2020, which would make him the only member of the Senate to do so (Oregon’s Jeff Merkley endorsed Sanders in 2016 but stayed neutral in 2020). The Democratic Socialists of America endorsed Jackson in his gubernatorial run, the Sanders-aligned Our Revolution has thrown their support to Jackson as a replacement for Platner, and prominent (formerly) pro-Platner commentators like Emma Vigeland and Ryan Grim have indicated that they would do the same. 

That however segues well into what very well might be Jackson’s largest weakness, which is that the vortex of scandals that have subsumed Platner make close associations with him a disadvantage. It’s worth noting that at a gubernatorial primary debate, one of the first things that Jackson said distinguished him from his competitors was his early support for Platner:

Right out of the gate I have supported—up until today I have been the only candidate that actually came out and supported Graham Platner. Now, I would imagine, probably everyone has, but I was looking for a change candidate right from the start and I came out and supported Graham because I wanted somebody to change the system in D.C. … That’s what this race is about, is changing that status quo.

Shenna Bellows

Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, was raised in a family so poor they often didn’t have electricity or running water. Bellows made her working-poor background center stage in her candidacy for governor. After graduating from Middlebury College, she was an executive director of the state ACLU and then a state senator between 2016 and 2020, where she successfully passed legislation to improve addiction recovery services and assist victims of financial fraud. She’s been Maine’s secretary of state since January 2021.

In her current role, Bellows is most famous for her attempt to bar Donald Trump from the Maine primary ballot in 2024, arguing that his support for the January 6 insurrectionists rendered him ineligible under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Bellows reversed this decision after the Supreme Court ruled, in response to Colorado making the same choice, that states could not determine eligibility under Section 3 without the explicit assent of Congress. 

If there is a candidate who has the strongest democratic mandate to serve as Platner’s replacement, it could be Bellows—although she placed fourth in the first round of balloting in the gubernatorial primary, according to data compiled by John Cluverius, Director of Survey Research at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Center for Public Opinion, she actually would have gotten the most number of votes after the actual winner of the race following ranked choice voting.

Bellows’s greatest weakness is likely one of electability: though she was elected to the Maine Senate, she had already lost to Collins by almost 40 points in 2014. Now, past is not prologue—2014 was a Republican wave year, and 2026 is on track to be the polar opposite. Moreover, ticket-splitting has declined significantly in the past 12 years; for reasons beyond the purview of this article it’s simply harder for someone like Susan Collins to win over Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters than it used to be.

Nirav Shah

Nirav Shah, a son of Indian immigrants and alum of the University of Chicago’s Law School and Pritzker School of Medicine, was the second-place candidate in the state’s gubernatorial primary. Shah worked as an advisor to the Cambodian Health Ministry and was appointed as director of Illinois’s Department of Public Health in 2015, soon becoming embroiled in controversy following allegations that he failed to tackle a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak at a veterans’ housing center. Illinois’s senators Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin both called on him to resign.

Following this, Shah was appointed as Maine’s CDC head, with his tenure overlapping with the COVID-19 pandemic. Shah largely built his gubernatorial campaign on this experience, enjoying enormous praise as the Pine Tree state consistently had one of the lowest mortality rates in the country. Shah then became a senior official in the U.S. CDC and a professor at Colby College.

Shah’s greatest strength is without a doubt his four years as Maine’s top health official. He earned plaudits across the state for his handling of the crisis, and such credentials may very well be an asset in an election where healthcare is one of the few issues where most voters trust Democrats.

His greatest vulnerability, and what will likely give the most pause to the state party, is his lack of an electoral history—unlike Jackson and Bellows, Shah has never won an election, and last month’s primary was the first one he had actually run in. That greenness is especially a liability for a candidate angling to run against Susan Collins, who’s spent 30 years running above the partisan baseline of the state and whose rabbit-out-of-a-hat victory in 2020 was a major shock to many Democrats. 

Though there are a handful of other candidates that have expressed interest or announced that they are going to seek the Democratic nomination, Jackson, Bellows, and Shah are the three most likely to secure enough support to replace Platner. Given that it is virtually impossible for Democrats to flip the four seats they need to win control over the Senate without Maine, those deciding on who to replace Platner should do so with full knowledge of the record and reputation of each serious prospect.

Feature image is Troy Jackson by ArenLeBrun, Shenna Bellows from her campaign, and Dr. Nirav D. Shah from his CDC page.