August is not even out, but the closing days of summer are offering a preview of the upcoming wildness of the US midterm elections. While US president Donald Trump opened his week by embarking on a slanging match with Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney, his vice-president JD Vance spent Monday in the heart of Maine undertaking some regional election campaigning. The visit produced blowback.
Among the subjects Vance touched on during a speech in Brewer was the fatal shooting, on July 14th, of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian living and working in the state, by a federal immigration agent following an encounter in Biddeford.
Angus King, Maine’s long-standing independent senator, later said he was told by homeland security officials that Guerrero had “weaponised” his car before being shot, a rationale King believes lacked credibility. The immigration agents present were not wearing body cameras.
Vance acknowledged that while many Mainers are “so worried about the situation”, he asked that they retain “a little bit of perspective” and argued that the administration can “absolutely investigate every shooting and we will, but we can also secure our border and ensure that poison stops coming into our country”.
RM Block
The point was part of Vance’s broader contention that the Republican border successes were responsible for a 20 per cent drop in overdoses across Maine in 2025, and that rents were falling for the first time in a decade because “we got people who shouldn’t be here the hell out of our country”.
On Monday evening, Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate replacing Graham Platner, who resigned his candidacy following a series of sexual assault allegations, posted a video response to the vice-president’s call for perspective.
“JD Vance is a dirtbag,” Jackson said by way of opening.
“There was a young man who had a social security number, he had a job, I mean, he had a life. He had a family. To come here and say, ‘Have some perspective’? You ought to have some damn perspective. I mean, you don’t even know what the hell’s goin’ on. You got a rogue agency that’s going around, pulling people out of homes.”
In some ways, Jackson has slipped easily into the large void left by Platner’s controversial exit: he’s a Maine Senate veteran who came to prominence by leading a logging blockade in the late 1990s and is moderately conservative to left-leaning on issues ranging from abortion (he opposed the overturing of the Roe v Wade ruling but remains “uncomfortable with abortion”) to healthcare, to Ice (he believes the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should be abolished). While the death of Guerrero generated a muted national response, it is hardening into one of the key election issues for a Maine Senate seat that is perceived as critical to the overall Senate balance of power.
“I want to know: What are you doing about it, Susan?” Jackson said, addressing his Republican opponent, senator Susan Collins, in his video.
“She gave them an additional $70 billion to pull this shit off. We lost a person that JD Vance seems to not give a shit about. And that should piss us all off. So I want to know: Do you agree with JD Vance dismissing the killing of this young man?”
Collins had responded to the killing of Guerrero by announcing her request that body cameras for Maine immigration enforcement officers be issued as a priority. But several protests have been held outside her office since Guerrero’s death.
Jackson had cross-endorsed Platner when they were both campaigning during the Democratic primary, but called on his opponent to relinquish his candidacy after several news organisations carried interviews with women accusing Platner of sexual misconduct and violence.
However, he is presenting himself as a natural successor, in both the salty language and dressed-down demeanour. Collins, for her part, has maintained the air of regal distance with which she observed the rise and equally dramatic fall of Platner, declining invitations to engage in combative retorts and relying on her experience of winning all Senate races since she was originally elected in 1996.
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Platner’s manifesto had been based on a spirited and compelling argument that the system of which Collins is a three-decade member had abandoned Mainers, whether urban or rural, Republican or Democrat. Interestingly, it was a position Vance himself sought to occupy on his day-trip to Vacationland.
“It’s not just a two-year or four-year process,” the vice-president said of the administration’s attempt to resurrect the US’s moribund manufacturing heartland.
“Think about this. Our country was plundered over a generation. Our goal is to reverse a consensus that has screwed over communities like this for decades. I gotta be honest. It was Republicans and Democrats that did it together. For 40 years places like Brewer were told that it doesn’t matter. That it doesn’t matter if we make things here in Maine or 5,000 miles away with foreign workers. Think about this. The people who were supposed to be running our country, the people who were supposed to care for this community – they said we were stupid and stuck in the past if we wanted manufacturing right here in communities like Brewer.”
Polling – notoriously unreliable throughout the Senate primaries – reflects narrow leads for both Jackson and Collins. But the overall picture is further complicated by the lingering resentment among a significant contingent of Platner supporters who believe he was forced out of the race through unproven allegations.
Sunday’s Portland Press Herald carried an opinion piece calling for the former candidate to file paperwork that would enable him to stand as a “write-in” candidate (the deadline for this was Tuesday and Platner did not put his name forward), arguing that his presence on the ballot would “result in alienated voters actually going to the polls who would otherwise stay home”.
Vance’s chief aim of visiting Brewer was to advocate for Paul LePage, the former state governor and current Republican candidate for the Congressional seat which will be vacated by Democrat Jared Golden. The 44-year-old Golden announced his decision to step down citing frustration with an ineffectual Congress and several threats of violence levelled against him and his family. It was notable that Collins, who has been critical of the latest chapter of the Trump administration’s trade war with Canada, decided to skip Vance’s visit.
“Whenever I’m in Maine, I’ve got to give Susan a little bit of crap because, as you know, Susan is the most independent member of the United States Senate,” Vance noted, before praising her for doing an “amazing job” in advocating for Maine.
Whether the vice-president’s visit has advanced her chances of maintaining a remarkable Senate run is a different matter.
