CARIBOU — About 5% of Maine residents populate the vast northern reaches of Aroostook County. The share of the state’s current major-party U.S. Senate nominees who are from here, though? 100%.

The fact that Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, and Troy Jackson, her new Democratic challenger, originated in the same part of the state might be a mere triviality if this were any county.

But Aroostook — called “The County,” even in other ones — encompasses more land than four states. It epitomizes Maine’s resplendently rural, uncommonly old, economically bumpy, proudly northern nature. And, after two decades of favoring Democrats for president, it swung to the right when President Donald Trump first ran, making it a testing ground for working-class voters’ allegiances to the Republican Party or openness to returning to a Democratic Party now fronted by one of their own.

Democratic Senate nominee Troy Jackson and Republican Sen. Susan Collins. (Photos by Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer and J. Scott Applewhite/Assocated Press)

Jackson was quick to note the geographic overlap in a speech after Maine Democrats nominated him to replace Graham Platner, a fellow progressive populist.

“Susan Collins and I both come from Aroostook County,” he told the party convention in Bangor, “but that is where the similarities end.”

Not quite.

Each of their families has played a part in the lumber industry, a pillar of the county’s economy — Jackson’s as loggers, Collins’ as owners of a lumberyard.

“Certainly you could, in effect, say we’re both from a family of loggers,” Sam Collins, 68, the senator’s younger brother and president of S. W. Collins Co., said in his office in Caribou, referring to a period when the company employed loggers.

Both Senate nominees’ ancestors have been at it for some time. Jackson frequently calls himself a fifth-generation logger, and Sam Collins, wearing a short-sleeved buttoned shirt with his company’s logo, said he’s its fifth-generation leader.

And both have intertwined their different Aroostook County backgrounds with their political personas and pitches to Mainers in the run-up to a Senate election seen as crucial for either party’s control of the chamber.

For Jackson, 58, it’s all about Allagash, his humble town of fewer than 250 residents that, in location and reputation, might just be Aroostook County’s Aroostook County. He represented it and numerous nearby towns in Augusta for two decades in total.

“Troy’s roots in Allagash shaped everything about why he entered public service and who he has fought for throughout his career,” his adviser BJ McCollister said in a statement. “He grew up in a working-class logging family, saw firsthand what happens when powerful interests take advantage of rural communities, and became involved in politics by standing up alongside fellow loggers.”

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins rides with musher Jonathan Hayes, of Saint David, at the start of the 250-mile competition on Feb. 28 at the Can-Am Crown International Sled Dog Races in Fort Kent. (Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer)

Susan Collins, who has long lived in Bangor (in Penobscot County) and at 73 calls herself a “County Girl,” at least on social media, ties her upbringing here to the reliability she wants to project after nearly five full terms in the Senate. Each of her parents served as mayor of Caribou, and her father, like others in the family before him, served in the state Legislature.

“Growing up in northern Maine, in Aroostook County, I learned the values of hard work, perseverance and keeping your commitments,” she said in a speech in the Senate chamber around her 10,000th consecutive roll-call vote. In a statement provided by a spokesperson, she also highlighted her power over federal appropriations, which have included nearly $200 million for Aroostook County in the past five years.

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Collins has won a majority of votes in Aroostook County in each of her five prior Senate elections, all against opponents from farther south. Her share of the county’s vote increased over the first four to a remarkable peak of 78% in 2014 before dipping to a still-formidable performance of 67% in 2020.

But the county, whose population has declined steadily for decades, favored the Democratic nominee in every presidential election from 1992 to 2012, before Trump entered politics.

The subsequent shift toward Trump stood out most in the St. John Valley, a region stretching from Allagash eastward along the U.S.-Canada border, which was once a Democratic bastion.

The substantial number of Acadian and other French-heritage residents had gravitated toward Democrats in the early 20th century due to their involvement in labor unions, opposition to prohibition and resistance to English-only education mandates, according to Patrick Lacroix, the director of the Acadian Archives at the University of Maine at Fort Kent.

Maine loggers Stacey Kelly, second from left, Troy Jackson, and Hilton Hafford are threatened with arrest by Maine State Police if they continue to block access to Canadian woodsmen at the border at St. Pamphile, Quebec, on Oct. 26, 1998. (Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press)

Aroostook County partisans on each side have different theories about which way the political winds are now blowing above the woods and potato fields — and how the Senate candidates are using their roots.

Lucien Daigle, a first-term Republican state representative from Fort Kent, represents a part of the St. John Valley that had two veteran Democrats as its state lawmakers as recently as 2022; one was Jackson. He doubts voters in the area will focus much on candidates’ backgrounds.

“The views up here align way, way, way more with the Republican platform,” Daigle, a 72-year-old retired dentist, said in an interview on his back patio. “People are starting to look at policy more than personality.”

If anything, he said, some locals take issue with Jackson’s constant identification as a logger, a trade he took up in his youth but has not practiced full time in years. Collins “doesn’t associate herself with, say, a potato farm or this or that; she just grew up in The County,” Daigle said.

Shelly Mountain, a former chair of the county Democratic committee and a delegate who helped pick Jackson at the convention, said she’s seen Republican enthusiasm cooling during Trump’s current term. His war in Iran has led diesel prices to spike, no small matter for businesses like her family’s logging truck operation, based in Mapleton. (Since April, Collins has voted to curtail the war.)

Collins, after decades in Washington, “feels distant now,” whereas Jackson is “relatable to working-class people,” Mountain said. “He can get a lot of support in Aroostook County.”

As a national debate about the meaning of authenticity in politics rages on, James Melcher, a political scientist at the University of Maine at Farmington, said Maine has a special flavor: the advantage of the north.

“This is one of the few candidates you could possibly run who’s from farther north than Susan Collins is,” he said. “Not that I think that his being a little farther north will help him, but it avoids one of the things that I think wasn’t helpful for Sara Gideon six years ago.” (Gideon, the 2020 Democratic Senate nominee, grew up in Rhode Island and lives in Freeport.)

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Sunset colors a field and traffic heading east on State Route 89 near Caribou in 1997. (Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer)

No matter that appeal, some doggedly independent — and disillusioned — Aroostook County native residents don’t care if, or resent that, a candidate came from close to home. In 2023, Jackson, then Maine’s top state senator, lost an election to be an Allagash selectman.

Inside Caribou’s sole McDonald’s on Tuesday, Wilfred Martin, a 91-year-old retired businessman, said he sees both Collins and Jackson as career politicians who have benefited from their long tenures in elected office. But Collins is “the only game in town” for a conservative like him, Martin said.

In Presque Isle, Paula Shaw, 64, who runs a home decor and gift shop on the quiet main drag, called herself a “Republican in name only” who wants the Senate to flip to Democratic control because she is worried about the country’s direction and the Iran war.

“We’re concentrating as a country on not the working man,” she said, and Jackson “knows, obviously, the working man, the working class.” Shaw said she was considering voting against Collins for the first time.

The competition for voters like Shaw over the next three months is already taking shape as a well-funded fight with high stakes for both parties and no warm County feelings.

Sam Collins expects the election to be as acrimonious as any.

“Unfortunately, The County is not above it,” he said.