For years, Maine Democrat Troy Jackson, running for Senate as a "working class voice" and "logger by trade," has claimed to run a "Logging and Forestry" company, Jackson Associates, in his rural town of Allagash. It's actually a consulting firm, according to Jackson's personal financial disclosure, which shows that Jackson used the company to accept tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from a Maryland-based union.
Jackson founded the company in 2021, according to state records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, which list Jackson as the company's sole officer and describe its purpose as "forestry, land clearing and development." Jackson, who served as president of the Maine Senate at the time, also began listing the company on his income statements to Maine's ethics commission. There, he listed the business's activities as "Logging and Forestry," a description Jackson used as recently as 2024, records show.
Jackson now characterizes the company differently as he runs for Senate against Republican incumbent Susan Collins. In his latest financial disclosure, he describes Jackson Associates as a "holding company" and describes his "duties" as "consulting." The only income the company generated in 2025 and 2026 stems from Jackson's role as a "General Consultant" for the International Association of Machinists, a national labor union affiliated with the AFL-CIO and located just outside of the Beltway in Upper Marlboro, Md., according to the disclosure. Jackson reported receiving $50,000 from the union in 2025 and $40,000 in 2026. He consulted for the union until August 2026, one month after he launched his Senate campaign.
Jackson's campaign did not respond to a request for comment. It is unclear whether the company ever engaged in any activity related to logging, but the campaign told the Bangor Daily News that Jackson Associates "was set up to manage Jackson's own land but has made no money doing that." It's not clear why Jackson would need to create a company to manage his own land. He accepted some of the consulting payments from the union directly without using Jackson Associates as a pass-through, according to his disclosure.
Jackson's latest filing raises questions about the logger image he has placed at the center of his campaign. His campaign website, for example, describes him as a fifth-generation "logger by trade," though he has not disclosed income generated from logging since 2012, according to the Daily News. Some Maine loggers, meanwhile, have argued that Jackson was never one of them. They say that Jackson only operated a delimber, a machine that strips branches and limbs from felled trees, rather than a chainsaw.
"Oh, it pisses me off," Robert McBreairty Jr., a veteran Maine logger, told the outlet. "He was not a logger. No. A logger, back when we called loggers, loggers, they took a chainsaw and went in the woods and cut down trees and lived it."
After serving in the Maine House for six years, Jackson was elected to the Maine Senate in 2008 and became the chamber's president in 2018, a position he held until 2024. He has said that the "broken system" he witnessed in the state legislature motivated him to run for higher office.
"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," Jackson said in a Maine Public candidate questionnaire. "All thanks to the work of special interests, high-priced lobbyists and corporate greed."
One such lobbyist was Jackson's son, Chace Jackson, who most recently represented the Resurgam Group, a "full service lobbying firm" founded by Jackson's former chief of staff and current campaign adviser, B.J. McCollister. The firm received nearly $200,000 in lobbying compensation from nine of Chace Jackson's clients in Troy Jackson's final year as Maine Senate president, the Free Beacon reported.
The Resurgam Group represented a number of corporate giants as it lobbied the Jackson-led Senate, including OppFi, an online lender that offers small-dollar, high-interest loans—usually between $500 and $5,000 with an average rate of 150 percent—to consumers with poor credit. In 2022, Jackson cosponsored a bill that would have allowed the company to skirt Maine's 30 percent interest rate cap, the Free Beacon reported. McCollister lobbied in favor of that bill even as groups like Maine Equal Justice testified against it, arguing it would enable "some of the worst predatory lending practices."
Jackson, who replaced the disgraced Maine Democrat Graham Platner as the party's Senate nominee in July, did not file his personal financial disclosure until Oct. 5—the same day early voting began in Maine—thanks to a 55-day extension he requested. He did not disclose his donors, meanwhile, until Oct. 15. The late filings meant voters know "less about Troy Jackson's finances than any other major U.S. Senate nominee," as the Maine Monitor put it in a September report.
Collins criticized the lack of transparency in a debate held two days before the deadline for Jackson to disclose his donors, saying, "I would point out that we have no idea who is financing Troy's campaign." A visibly irritated Jackson said he would send Collins his report "tomorrow morning" and promised that it would list "no billionaires" as donors to his campaign. Jackson did not send Collins the report as promised, and when he did file it, it showed contributions from a number of billionaires, including Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein, the Free Beacon reported.
"You said that you would take no money from billionaires," Collins told Jackson during the pair's final debate. "That's not accurate." Jackson acknowledged as much, saying, "As far as the billionaires that I might have on my campaign, that is accurate," a remark that prompted audible laughter in the debate room.
