The 12-year-old boy from Allagash was excited to go with his father to the picket line.

It was 1981, and local loggers on strike were hoping to talk with Jim Irving of the massive Irving conglomerate in Canada and Maine. Times were changing, and they were worried about mechanical harvesting cutting into their paychecks.

The boy noticed the northern Maine loggers were laughing and joking. Then, Irving drove up, got out of his vehicle and delivered an ultimatum: go back to work at your current wages, or else I’m going to replace you with Canadians in the morning. The lighthearted banter between the loggers quickly turned into yelling, screaming and swearing.

It scared the boy. His father, along with most of the other loggers, would end up accepting the status quo and returning to work.

Decades later, the boy named Troy Jackson recounted that memory. He realized how his father, Joe, must have been feeling.

“He couldn’t say anything,” Jackson told a reporter on a recent weekday before meeting with electricians at their union building in Lewiston. “You lose your sense of pride, your sense of dignity.”

That feeling stuck with Jackson as he grew up to be a logger himself, then a state lawmaker.

What his father lost that day informs Jackson’s drive to be Maine’s next governor.

Jackson, now 57, has the life story and experience to make him a serious candidate for statewide office, but making it to November is not guaranteed. This year’s gubernatorial field vying to succeed term-limited Gov. Janet Mills is crowded and wide open. Some polls have put Jackson as high as second or as low as fifth in the five-person Democratic primary.

But he feels his roots in northern Maine and record of winning election after election in a pro-Trump part of the state as a progressive make him stand out. So does his past, his waking up at 2 a.m. for 18-hour days as a logger; his protests to try to improve conditions for him and lower-income workers.

“That wealth inequality and that power differential is something I’ve had to deal with my whole life,” Jackson said. “And that is what has probably shaped me more than anything.”

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

Troy Dale Jackson was born June 26, 1968, to a 16-year-old mother, Colleen McBreairty, in a Catholic family in Maine’s St. John Valley. Jackson’s father and mother got married young and “separated so many damn times” throughout Jackson’s childhood, he remembered. They officially divorced around the time Jackson was in middle school.

He attended the later-shuttered Allagash Consolidated School, playing any sports the tiny high school offered, and shot pool with his dad in his spare time. He later earned an associate’s degree in business from the University of Maine at Fort Kent.

His logger father and teacher mother didn’t want their son to go into logging, but he couldn’t stay out of the woods. (“I missed a lot of school,” Jackson said with a chuckle.) He rode in his father’s logging truck as a kid before starting as a logger himself at age 19.

In 1998, about a decade later, Jackson helped lead a weeklong blockade along the Quebec border to try to keep out the Canadian loggers their American counterparts felt were driving down pay rates. Jackson and his peers mostly blamed large American landowners for favoring the Canadian contractors. It felt like his dad’s experiences were repeating themselves.

There were 90 loggers on the Maine side who were supposed to help, but only 15 showed up to block the Canadians from driving across three border checkpoints during the week, Jackson recalled.

By Friday, officials whom Jackson and his fellow loggers felt had to that point ignored them — including Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and Democratic Rep. John Baldacci, asked the loggers to meet with them in Fort Kent.

The meeting was meant to calm tensions. Jackson called it “bullshit.” Negotiations went nowhere. After the loggers tried to continue the blockade the following Monday, it ended with them being banned from that land.

“That was government basically just telling everyone that (we’re) just scumbags,” Jackson said in his trademark St. John Valley accent.

Additional labor actions happened in Augusta the following year, but all those protests brought little change from policymakers, so Jackson ran for the Legislature as a Republican in 2000. Jackson said he had “no concept of parties” but he knew the Bush family had ties to Maine and respected that, so that’s why he started in the GOP.

He lost the rural Maine House of Representatives race for the district that was still heavily blue at the time to the Democratic incumbent, Rep. Marc Michaud. In 2002, he tried again as an independent and beat Michaud.

Jackson switched to the Democratic Party before his 2004 reelection, feeling aligned with lawmakers in that party who pushed to allow independent logging and trucking contractors to collectively bargain with landowners.

He has stuck with the party ever since, while Aroostook County shifted right and backed President Donald Trump in his three presidential elections.

He rose to the Maine Senate in 2008 and beat Republican opponents over the years in the northern part of the state that increasingly turned red. In 2018, he became Senate president. Except for losing an Allagash Select Board race by six votes in 2023, Jackson has a near-spotless record running as a progressive in Trump country.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re progressive or not. People will elect you if they think that you’re fighting for them,” Jackson said. “And they know I have been.”

RUNNING TO THE LEFT

Jackson, who is endorsed by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and an array of labor unions, is running for governor on his populist legislative accomplishments.

He was behind a childcare overhaul in 2023 that expanded childcare subsidy eligibility to families making 125% of the state’s median income and that doubled the average monthly stipend for childcare workers, among other changes. As governor, he says he’d push to make childcare free for that income group — about $145,000 for a family of four. It would cost about $350 million per year.

He touts a 2018 bill requiring brand-name prescription drug companies to make their drugs available in Maine to generic producers, which became law without former Republican Gov. Paul LePage’s signature. And Jackson points to a measure he sponsored in 2019 to create a prescription drug affordability board, allow the wholesale importation of prescriptions and make other reforms. Mills signed that one into law.

Perhaps more than any other candidate, he is running against his Democratic predecessor’s legacy. He frequently butted heads with Mills, bashing her for vetoing his 2021 effort to ban drugmakers from enacting “excessive” price increases to certain prescriptions.

Though Mills approved a 2% tax on incomes above $1 million in her final state budget after previously opposing it, Jackson said the millionaire’s tax doesn’t go far enough. He would bump it up to a 4% surtax as governor and repeal LePage’s income tax cuts that lowered the top rate from 8.5% to 7.15%.

“The wealthy elite … are going to be fine,” while working-class residents have been “getting the shaft,” Jackson said earlier in April.

“(Working-class residents) are the people that I worry about,” Jackson said. “That’s my special interest group that I’m going to fight for.”

He wants to double Maine’s Earned Income Tax Credit to nearly $3,500 for families with three or more kids. (Jackson himself has a partner and two adult sons.) He says he would create a Department of Housing Affordability and consider surcharges on homes worth more than $1 million. And he would implement his long-sought “Buy American, Build Maine” effort that echoes Trumpian rhetoric by requiring state contracts to use domestic goods and give preference to products made in the state.

His views have evolved over time on certain issues. For example, Jackson went from identifying as anti-abortion in 2012 to saying he had a pro-abortion rights stance by the time of his 2nd Congressional District primary bid in 2014. (He lost the race to Democrat Emily Cain.) And on gun control, Jackson went from having a National Rifle Association endorsement to supporting new Democratic-backed limits, particularly after the 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston.

Jordyn Rossignol, of Caribou, has gotten to know Jackson well over the years. She saw Jackson’s dedication to tackling challenges firsthand while owning her childcare center that eventually closed in 2023 after succumbing to financial pressures. Rossignol, who is 37 and now in the process of taking over her mom’s dance studio, said “what you see is what you get with Troy.”

“I’ve seen him cry multiple times,” Rossignol said. “He definitely is passionate about what he is doing, and he cares.”

READY TO FIGHT

Jackson has worked across the aisle with Republican lawmakers and fought with governors from both parties. He’s not shying away from fights now.

That was exemplified by Jackson debating Republican Bobby Charles, who has led the GOP field in several polls. The one-on-one matchup got heated, with Jackson calling Charles a “little man” and Charles claiming Jackson was complicit in welfare fraud.

Jackson has spent years “trying to fight for the little guy,” said former state Sen. Bruce Bryant, a Democrat and retired mill worker in Rumford who overlapped with Jackson in the Legislature.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont hugs Troy Jackson after Jackson introduced Sanders at his Fighting Oligarchy rally at the Cross Insurance Arena in Portland on Sept. 1, 2025. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)

“He’s not going to be intimated by big money,” Bryant said. “He’s not going to be intimidated by big corporations because he’s been fighting them all his life.”

Jackson and his campaign have a lighter side, too. They’ve used social media and Reddit to interact with voters and let them get to know the candidate and his mother, for example, in a more intimate way.

Jackson seeks to win over not only Democrats in June but also voters of various stripes in November. He is the voter that Democrats have lost to Trump: white, male, no bachelor’s degree. Jackson believes he can get that voter back by showing him a positive vision of government.

He comes back to thinking about his father and all the time away from home the old man spent while working as a logger.

“Now it just feels like people are working a couple jobs,” Jackson said. “And why can’t people have time with their grandkids, with their kids, go to a basketball game, go fishing? It’s not being lazy. … We have to put more money in people’s pockets so that they can just spend a little bit more time with family), because you can’t get that back.”