Maine Democratic Senate nominee Troy Jackson built his campaign on fighting "high-priced lobbyists and corporate greed", but his own son collected nearly $200,000 in lobbying fees from the very chamber Jackson presided over during his final year as Senate president.
Chace Jackson, 35, partnered at a lobbying firm founded by his father's former chief of staff and billed nine clients a combined $182,500 in 2024, the same year Troy Jackson wielded the gavel as president of the Maine Senate. The Washington Free Beacon reported that the arrangement spanned gun-control advocacy, alcohol-industry lobbying, and union work, all funneled through a firm that openly promised to "leverage" its relationships inside the Legislature.
The gap between Troy Jackson's populist pitch and his family's lobbying income is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of public records filed with the Maine Ethics Commission.
Troy Jackson has spent years cultivating a blue-collar image. A self-described "fifth-generation logger" first elected to the Maine Senate in 2008, he rose to Senate president in 2018 and held the post until term limits forced him out in December 2024. In an April 2026 candidate questionnaire published by Maine Public, Jackson framed his run in unmistakable terms:
"I'm tired of good bills that would help lower prescription drug costs, protect workers, stop the spraying of harmful chemicals and so much more get vetoed. I'm tired of folks being told to hold on, wait a little longer or that now is not the right time. All thanks to the work of special interests, high-priced lobbyists and corporate greed."
Those words landed differently once the lobbying disclosures came into view. In 2021, B.J. McCollister, Jackson's own chief of staff, left the Senate president's office and launched the Resurgam Group, a self-described "full service lobbying" firm. By 2022, McCollister had brought on Chace Jackson as a partner. A Resurgam press release from that year described the younger Jackson as a "long-time advocate and organizer." It did not mention that his father ran the chamber the firm intended to lobby.
Jackson's campaign, in a statement to the Free Beacon, insisted that Troy Jackson "has fought for working Mainers" and "is guided by one goal: fixing our broken system so Maine's working families stop getting squeezed while the rich get richer." On background, the campaign also stressed that the $182,500 went "to the firm, not to Chace directly." That distinction does not change the core problem: a sitting Senate president's son was paid to influence the body his father controlled.
Among Chace Jackson's nine clients in 2024, the most revealing was Diageo, the London-based spirits giant behind Johnnie Walker and Casamigos. Diageo retained the Resurgam Group to lobby on LD 1695, a bill that would have allowed distillers to ship spirits directly to Maine consumers. The Joint Standing Committee on Veterans and Legal Affairs, the panel with jurisdiction, recommended the bill not pass.
Troy Jackson's Senate overrode that recommendation. On April 9, the chamber passed LD 1695 under a suspension of the rules, a procedural move that fast-tracks legislation past normal debate. The bill ultimately died in the Maine House, but the Senate president's willingness to push a measure his son's firm was paid to advance raises obvious questions about whose interests were being served.
The Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America opposed the bill. In a 2023 letter to the Legislature, the trade group warned that LD 1695 "would not benefit Maine's in-state distillers" and that "the large spirit companies that have the infrastructure and can afford to ship across the country will take sales away from Maine's distillers and revenue away from Maine's agency stores." The group cited a study estimating 64 lost jobs and nearly $3 million in lost wages if direct-to-consumer spirits shipping became law.
Gun legislation presented another overlap. Chace Jackson and McCollister lobbied on behalf of the Maine Gun Safety Coalition, the state's leading gun-control organization, in favor of two bills: LD 2238, which imposed a 72-hour waiting period on gun purchases, and LD 2224, which amended Maine's "yellow flag" law to let police take a potentially dangerous person into protective custody before that person committed a crime. Troy Jackson bills himself as a logger and a rural Mainer, and the National Rifle Association had endorsed him as recently as 2022. He voted for both gun-control measures his son was paid to support.
The Bangor Daily News flagged the gun-control connection as early as January 2024, noting Chace Jackson's lobbying work alongside his father's prior NRA backing. Troy Jackson's shift on firearms may have its own political logic, but the financial incentive running through his family makes the reversal harder to take at face value.
The Maine Ethics Commission's lobbyist disclosure database, which only goes back to 2024, shows a sharp drop-off in Chace Jackson's business once his father left office. In 2025, Troy Jackson's first year out of the Legislature, Chace represented five clients. In 2026, the database lists zero.
Resurgam Group itself merged with another firm, Frame Strategies, in January. McCollister became Frame Strategies's new president. The merged firm's website features Resurgam staffers but makes no mention of Chace Jackson. It is unclear whether he is still lobbying or working in politics at all. He appears to have recently deleted his LinkedIn account and did not respond to the Free Beacon's request for comment.
The pattern is hard to miss. When Troy Jackson ran the Senate, his son's firm had nine paying clients and nearly $200,000 in revenue. When Jackson left, the business dried up. The campaign's insistence that the money went to the firm rather than to Chace personally does not explain why the firm's value to clients apparently depended on one man's hold on the chamber.
Troy Jackson did not originally set out to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins. He ran for governor in 2026 and finished third in the Democratic primary, behind Nirav Shah, the state CDC director, and Hannah Pingree, a former Maine House speaker. The Democratic Senate nomination belonged to Graham Platner, who won his primary by a 53-point margin over Gov. Janet Mills.
Platner exited the race after an allegation surfaced against him. On July 25, 2026, Maine Democrats cleared the field and installed Jackson as the replacement nominee at a party convention, where he won the vote 566 to 5. Platner had previously backed Jackson's gubernatorial bid, and the two held joint campaign events, a detail that underscores how tightly connected the state's Democratic circles remain.
Jackson now faces Collins in what amounts to an uphill general election. His campaign has leaned on the populist logger image, but a series of reports have complicated that brand. Questions about his reception in his own hometown and scrutiny of his personal background have added to the headwinds. A July 28 PolitiFact article examined an allegation that Jackson threw a water bottle at a female colleague in the Maine Senate; McCollister, his former chief of staff turned lobbyist, was quoted in that piece as a "Jackson campaign adviser."
That last detail matters. The man who founded the lobbying firm that employed Jackson's son, the same firm that billed clients to influence the chamber Jackson ran, is now advising Jackson's Senate campaign. The revolving door between Jackson's public office, his family's private income, and his political operation is not a one-time coincidence. It is a pattern.
The Resurgam Group's website did not hide the firm's selling point. It pledged to "leverage our strong existing relationships" in the State Legislature to "help deliver results." For a firm whose founding partner came directly from the Senate president's office and whose other partner was the Senate president's son, those "strong existing relationships" were not abstract. They were family.
Maine voters can decide for themselves whether Troy Jackson's anti-lobbyist rhetoric squares with his son's lobbying income. But the Ethics Commission filings, the legislative roll calls, and the timeline tell a straightforward story: the loudest critic of special-interest influence in Augusta had a special interest of his own sitting across the table.
A politician who campaigns against the system while his family profits from it is not fighting the establishment. He is the establishment, just with better talking points.
