Maine Democrat Troy Jackson's campaign says it has raised $1 million in less than two weeks since he entered the state's U.S. Senate race, a fast start that still leaves him tens of millions behind five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins as Democrats scramble to salvage a top pickup opportunity after Graham Platner's campaign collapsed.

Jackson, a former Maine Senate president and fifth-generation logger from Allagash, told Politico his campaign had pulled in $613,000 of the total since Sunday, when county caucuses selected the 601 delegates who will formally choose Platner's replacement at the party convention in Bangor this weekend.

The campaign said more than 90% of those delegates have pledged to back him, and reported 27,283 contributions from 24,669 individual donors. The figures are campaign-supplied and predate the next Federal Election Commission filing.

The haul nearly matches what Jackson collected across his entire failed run for governor earlier this year, when he finished third in the Democrat primary and raised the least of the major candidates in that field.

It also comes against a sobering benchmark: Collins announced $5.7 million in second-quarter receipts and entered July with roughly $11 million in cash, twice her cash on hand at the same point in her 2020 reelection cycle.

Republican-aligned outside groups have already booked or spent more than $112 million on the race, according to AdImpact data cited by the Bangor Daily News, dwarfing Democrat spending.

Jackson emerged as the party's consensus choice after Platner, the oyster farmer who won June's primary with 72% of the vote, withdrew this month following a Politico report that a former girlfriend had accused him of rape in 2021, an allegation Platner denied.

His top rivals in the scramble to replace him, former Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, both dropped out after Jackson swept last weekend's delegate meetings.

A University of New Hampshire Survey Center Pine Tree State poll released Tuesday showed the race a statistical dead heat, with Jackson at 49% and Collins at 46% among likely general election voters.

The UNH Survey Center surveyed 1,236 Maine residents online between July 15 and July 20, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points. The survey also included 538 Democrat primary voters, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.

Maine is the only 2026 seat held by a Republican senator in a state Kamala Harris carried in 2024, making it central to the Democrat path to a Senate majority.

The party needs to net four seats to flip the chamber.

Decision Desk HQ, cited by The Hill, still rates the contest a toss-up and gives Republicans a 53% chance of holding it.

Jackson has just over 100 days to build a statewide operation, court independent voters, and close the money gap before the Nov. 3 election.