Troy Jackson, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, speaks during a demonstration outside of a federal immigration office after a man was fatally shot by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, on July 14, 2026 in Scarborough, Maine. Getty Images

Here Maine goes again.

The state’s new far-left contender for the Democratic Party’s US Senate nomination is a faux populist with a wicked reactionary streak.

Until five minutes ago, his immigrant-hating, anti-abortion platform was so extreme it would spook even the staunchest Republican.

He’s a local pol so desperate to make it in the big leagues that he’s cosplaying as a progressive working man unafraid to get his hands dirty.

He is Troy Jackson, fifth-generation Maine logger and wannabe US senator, and he’s got the Bernie Sanders seal of approval to replace accused rapist Graham Platner on the Democrats’ midterm election ballot.

Influential Dems are betting the chance for a Senate majority on a 58-year-old former radical right-winger who’s transformed himself into a socialist darling.

“He was a logger by trade so he’s got that Maine log man in him,” enthused former political operative Kurt Bardella.

But while some see a sexy macho man, I smell an abject phony.

On the surface, Jackson seems to check all the necessary boxes to defeat GOP Sen. Susan Collins — as Platner appeared to do, before his campaign crashed and burned.

Union member? Check.

Virile manual laborer? Ditto.

Yet from where I sit, he’s a blow-with-the-wind, say-anything-believe-nothing fake who’s out for nothing but personal gain.

And those are his good points.

Jackson’s legislative history is marked by obsessions with those he viewed as job-stealing immigrants, as well as a scary preoccupation with what women do with their bodies.

He first rose to political prominence in 1998, when he led a blockade aimed at keeping Canadian workers from crossing the US border.

He was a Republican then, but the anti-immigrant and nationalist rhetoric he pushed was excessive even for the GOP.

And long after he found opportunity as a Democrat, he continued banging the anti-immigrant drum.

Until recently, he’s moaned about seeing “countless foreign loggers cross the border every single day to work in our forests.”

As a state senator in 2022, he authored legislation restricting non-Americans from coming to Maine for employment, even if they had legal work permits.

But when he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for governor this year, the whiplash was stunning.

Jackson transformed virtually overnight from dedicated xenophobe into sworn enemy of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The newly woke Jackson suddenly condemned federal immigration agents as members of a “rogue agency,” and laid out a series of aggressively pro-immigrant, anti-ICE policy proposals.

Jackson’s “ICE Action Plan” proposed establishing “safe zones” throughout Maine where state troopers could prevent ICE agents from performing lawful deportations, and would have barred using state resources to assist in federal immigration arrests.

As a Republican, Jackson failed to win a seat in Maine’s legislature in 2000; he became an independent in 2002 for another election attempt, then switched to the Democratic Party two years later.

But it’s far from clear when or whether his leftward political metamorphosis took hold.

In 2009, as same-sex marriage earned approval from people all over the political spectrum, Jackson voted against marriage equality in Maine’s state Senate.

He maintained for years that abortion should be illegal even when a mother’s life is in danger, excepting only cases of rape and incest — views that even many on the right find over-the-top.

In 2011, he voted for a bill that would have declared a fetus a person, and in 2013 he supported mandatory abortion “counseling” for women seeking pregnancy terminations.

But while once he received “perfect” ratings from Maine Right to Life, in recent years he’s made an abrupt about-face to please Planned Parenthood.

As president of the state Senate, he was a principal sponsor of a bill allowing abortions after fetal viability if deemed medically necessary.

Jackson has blamed his old views — many of which he claims to have scraped off in the last decade — on his Catholic upbringing.

I guess that means he’s outed himself as a man willing to leave lifelong moral convictions in his rear-view mirror to get ahead.

But has he?

This guy changes positions like Madonna changes costumes.

How can voters know if Jackson will sign on for the next politically fashionable bandwagon that offers him greater status and power?

Last week, Sanders’ group Our Revolution, founded by the Vermont senator after his unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid, announced it would throw its “full organizing machine” behind Jackson, stating he had “spent his life in the fight working people are asking for.”

That’s working people — excluding Canadians and pregnant women (pregnant people?).

And ICE agents.

And anyone else who doesn’t line up with Jackson’s agenda of the moment.

You’d think the Democrats could do better.

But as the Platner debacle demonstrated, judging character is not this party’s strong suit.