Graham Platner’s shock exit from the Maine Senate race he secured the nomination for just a month earlier has set off a scramble among the state’s Democratic officials for not just who will replace the scandal-plagued former candidate on the ticket, but who can tap into the same well of voter disenchantment and progressive enthusiasm he had channeled. Among the eight names in the running, the Left is coalescing around one in particular: the state senate’s former Democratic leader, Troy Jackson.

Jackson — a former Republican who consistently and easily won office in the red, Donald Trump–voting district he spent his whole life in — will have a compelling case to make for being the best suited to succeed Platner, whose appeal rested on both a fiery anti-oligarchy message and an image as an authentically working-class Mainer. Jackson’s origin story as a politician is rooted in his and other Maine loggers’ struggle for better pay and working conditions, one waged against both the state’s largest corporate landowner and a bought-and-sold political establishment in Augusta, the state capital.

That worker organizing effort ultimately led Jackson to run for the state legislature and use his seat to coordinate with his fellow loggers to win collective bargaining rights for long-exploited forestry workers — all as his prospective Republican opponent, Susan Collins, sat on her hands. If Platner’s campaign offered the unique promise of an average working Mainer taking on the establishment and winning, Jackson will have a strong claim to make that he has already done exactly that.