Maine Dem Senate pick Troy Jackson attacked romantic rival, ‘pushed around’ girlfriend Lana Pelletier in 1988: police report

A guy busts down a door, hits another man, and shoves around his own girlfriend in the process. That's not a footnote from someone's wild youth we're talking about here. That's the kind of police report that follows you for the rest of your life if you're an ordinary person applying for a job, let alone running to represent Maine in the United States Senate.

Troy Jackson has spent years positioning himself as the workingman's candidate, the guy from the north woods who understands regular people. Fine. Regular people also understand that decking someone during a "late-night rampage" and pushing your girlfriend around isn't a character quirk, it's a red flag. If this were a Republican candidate, every outlet that buried this story on page whatever would be running it above the fold with a countdown clock to Election Day.

Democrats love to tell us character matters, that temperament matters, that how a man treats women in private tells you something about how he'll treat power in public. We happen to agree with that standard. We just notice it only gets applied one direction. Maine voters deserve better than convenient amnesia about a 1988 police report just because the timing is inconvenient for the party that wants this seat.

Nobody's saying a man can't change in three decades. But if Jackson wants to run on trust, he owes voters an honest accounting of that night, not silence and hope the story fades before November.