Maine senate hopeful Troy Jackson endorses Karl Marx-loving ex-DSA co-chair who implied Jesus was a communist

Troy Jackson didn't just wave off the Graham Platner mess, he doubled down and put his arm around someone who spent years running the DSA and telling audiences Christ was basically an early organizer for the proletariat. That's not a slip of the tongue at a rally. That's a considered choice about who you want standing next to you when you're asking Maine voters for a Senate seat.

Here's what strikes us: Maine is not a state that runs on Marxist theory. It runs on lobstermen, loggers, small contractors, people who work with their hands and don't have patience for lectures about surplus value. Jackson knows this state. He grew up in the timber industry in Aroostook County. So this wasn't an accident or a staffer's bad judgment call. It was a deliberate signal to a certain wing of the party that he's their guy, even if it means embracing rhetoric that reduces the founder of Christianity to a talking point in a class-struggle seminar.

That's the real story here, not just the Platner scandal fading into the background noise. Democrats in rural, working-class states keep making this bet: that ideological purity with the activist base matters more than sounding sane to the people actually casting votes. Maine has punished that bet before. Jackson just made it a lot easier for his opponents to remind voters exactly what he's chosen to stand for.