Maine Democrats are coalescing behind former state Senate President Troy Jackson as the party's likely replacement for Graham Platner, who formally withdrew his U.S. Senate candidacy Friday after a former girlfriend accused him of rape.

The 58-year-old Allagash logger arrives with union credentials and a Bernie Sanders imprimatur, but also with a legislative record that until the last decade ran counter to his party's mainstream on abortion, same-sex marriage, and cross-border labor.

Platner submitted his withdrawal paperwork to the Maine secretary of state, ending an insurgent campaign that had survived earlier scandals but collapsed after Jenny Racicot told CNN and Politico that Platner forced her to have sex in 2021. Platner denies the account.

The Maine Democratic Party plans a nominating convention before the July 27 replacement deadline, with roughly 600 delegates set to choose among a field that includes Jackson, former state CDC director Nirav Shah, and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

Our Revolution, the group founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., after his 2016 presidential run, threw its full organizing operation behind Jackson this week, casting him as the candidate who best carries Platner's populist economic message into November against Republican Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., one of Platner's earliest national backers, also endorsed Jackson.

Jackson himself was a Sanders superdelegate in 2016 and campaigned alongside Platner and Sanders at a May Fighting Oligarchy event in Orono.

The record Jackson brings to the race is less straightforward than the endorsements suggest.

He first ran for the Maine House as a Republican in 2000, won a seat as an Independent in 2002, and did not become a Democrat until 2004. His political origin story is the 1998 loggers' blockade of the Quebec border, staged to protest the hiring of Canadian workers over Mainers in the North Woods.

On social issues, Jackson voted against LD 1020, the 2009 bill legalizing same-sex marriage in Maine, and identified as anti-abortion into the mid-2010s, saying at the time that abortion should be illegal except in cases of rape or incest.

He has since reversed both positions, attributing his earlier views to his Catholic upbringing.

His hardest line has been on foreign labor.

As Senate president, Jackson sponsored a 2022 law restricting the use of H-2A visa holders to haul logs point-to-point inside Maine. U.S. District Judge John Woodcock enjoined enforcement, writing that the statute "is not a constitutional means of addressing" concerns about foreign workers, and the First Circuit affirmed.

Jackson vowed to keep fighting, telling Maine Public that "nowhere else do Mexicans or Canadians do point-to-point hauling in the United States."

Whether that record complicates his general-election bid may depend on how quickly Maine Democrats settle on a nominee and whether Collins moves to define him first.