In Maine and Georgia, Democrats lean on labor to open the midterm home stretch

Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee trying to unseat Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, spent Labor Day morning in a union hall in South Portland rather than at a barbecue. Addressing several hundred members of the Southern Maine Labor Council over eggs and coffee, the fifth-generation logger and former state Senate president told the crowd the holiday was the opening bell of his campaign's final stretch. Roughly 1,100 miles south, Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms worked a similar union crowd at an AFL-CIO picnic outside Atlanta.

The two scenes, unfolding hours apart on the same holiday, mark the informal start of the sprint to November 3, when control of the House and Senate — and a clutch of governorships — will be decided. With 57 days left, Maine and Georgia sit among the handful of contests both parties consider likely to decide the Senate majority, and Labor Day made plain how differently the two races are shaping up on paper even as their candidates leaned on identical messaging about work and wages.

"Labor Day has never been just another holiday. Today, here with the people I've fought alongside for years, I want to make a pledge about exactly what I'm going to do in the United States Senate."

That was Jackson's pitch in South Portland. Doug Born, a union member in the crowd, put the appeal in blunter terms afterward: "I think he'd be the most working-class guy in the Senate. That appeals to me." In Georgia, Ossoff cast the race in starker terms, telling the AFL-CIO gathering, "We are dealing with the most absurd and obscene corruption in the modern history of our republic," as he tied Republican Rep. Mike Collins to the Trump administration's economic record.

A financial mismatch in two top-tier races

The numbers underscore why strategists in both parties treat the two contests differently. In Georgia, Ossoff's campaign reported more than $42 million on hand as of June 30, versus roughly $2.2 million for Mike Collins, a trucking-company owner making his first statewide bid. That is a nearly 20-to-1 cash advantage in a state Donald Trump carried in 2024, one Republicans hope to offset with outside spending and the president's continued involvement.

Maine looks closer to even, if not tilted the other way. Federal Election Commission filings show Collins held about $11 million in her campaign account at the end of the second quarter, a typical war chest for a senator seeking a sixth term. But Jackson's campaign says it pulled in $5.3 million in July alone through small-dollar donations processed via ActBlue, most of it arriving the day he became the nominee — a haul that came with no head start, since he could not transfer funds from an earlier, unrelated bid for governor. Outside groups have already poured tens of millions more into the race: Republican-aligned dark-money spending has topped $47 million against Jackson, compared with roughly $27 million on the Democratic side, with the Senate Leadership Fund alone committing more than $42 million within days of his nomination.

How a late scandal remade the Maine contest

Jackson was not Democrats' first choice. Graham Platner won the party's June primary before withdrawing on July 10 after a former girlfriend told reporters he had sexually assaulted her in 2021, an allegation he called "categorically false." The accusation prompted the Maine Democratic Party, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other national figures to call on him to step aside, and the party's chief Senate campaign arm signaled it would withhold support if he stayed on the ballot. Jackson, who had placed third in a separate June primary for governor, was picked to replace him at a nominating convention on July 25, winning all but five of the 571 ballots cast by party delegates.

That compressed timeline shows in how the campaign is being run. Jackson's team is leaning on a volunteer-heavy ground operation rather than paid canvassing, drawing roughly 1,000 people to a volunteer kickoff — a fraction of the estimated 15,000 volunteers Platner's campaign had built earlier in the cycle. "They're gonna outspend us," Jackson has acknowledged, adding that "people know that they're honest and sincere — what they're fighting for." Collins, for her part, has continued to lean on the seniority and appropriations clout that have anchored her past five campaigns, including a recent visit to the Bath Iron Works shipyard to press for more Navy shipbuilding contracts, a mainstay of her argument that Maine benefits from her rank on the Appropriations Committee. She is the only Senate Republican representing a state Trump has not carried in any of his three presidential campaigns, a distinction Democrats hope makes this the year the seat finally flips.

Georgia's race, by contrast, was set months ago without the late upheaval. Ossoff, the first-term senator seeking reelection after winning a 2021 runoff that flipped control of the chamber, ran unopposed in his own primary. Mike Collins won a contested Republican runoff in June after securing Trump's endorsement, and he has spent the summer arguing that Ossoff has drifted from the centrist positioning that won him the seat, while Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor now running for governor, is making her own appeal to labor against healthcare executive Rick Jackson.

The next 57 days

Both races are unfolding against a national backdrop already in motion. Mike Collins' campaign and Republicans more broadly are counting on President Trump, who is holding a midterm-focused convention in Dallas this week and has told advisers he intends to campaign in more than 30 races before Election Day, to help close the financial gap Ossoff and other well-funded Democratic incumbents have opened. Meanwhile, the mechanics of the election itself are already underway: North Carolina's elections office confirmed it had begun sending absentee ballots to military and overseas voters this month, the traditional first step of any general election cycle.

The next real test of both campaigns' strength arrives in mid-October, when third-quarter fundraising reports become public and offer the first full accounting of whether Jackson's summer burst of small donations can be sustained into the fall, and whether Republican outside groups can convert their financial edge in Maine into a shift in a race both parties still call close. In Georgia, the question is less whether Ossoff can compete financially than whether Trump-aligned spending and the president's continued travel schedule can nationalize a race Democrats currently expect to win. Both contests, along with a handful of others opened on the same holiday, will help determine which party controls the Senate when the new Congress convenes in January 2027.