It’s the billionaire class vs. the rest of us. That’s why Troy Jackson is the only choice. | Opinion
Heidi Bertels is an associate member of the Lewiston Planning Board and a former member of the Auburn 10-Year Comprehensive Plan Committee. She is a nonpartisan public employee and was previously a dues-paying member of NTEU Chapter 297, until the Trump administration abolished union representation for over 800,000 public servants.
In 1972, Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign was sued after exploiting a two-month window between the signing of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) and its official enforcement date. Treating this grace period as a “free-for-all” to collect tens of millions in secret contributions before public reporting rules took effect, the campaign claimed these donors were exempt from disclosure.
The resulting lawsuit forced the release of the secret donor lists, requiring teams of researchers outfitted with only phone books and telephone calls to track down the individuals and businesses hoping to buy favors from the president.
Fortunately, in the age of technology (and thanks to what remains of our campaign financing laws), we can highlight a name on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) website, press “web search” and immediately see the background of political donors.
The FEC filings for the Maine Republican Party include a list of named donors you may not recognize, and just a few you would: by and large, these people are not household names. But a quick Google search is truly revealing.
These donors are out-of-state billionaires, bankers, financiers, private equity CEOs, AI data center investors and heirs to family fortunes. They are the rich and powerful in our society who fly under the radar, influencing elections and the structure of power in every state in the country. While some may have a direct financial stake in Maine, many are simply shotgunning funds nationwide to ensure the balance of power in Washington stays in their control.
These are the same people who own the media outlets that nitpick any candidate who threatens this power, who own the private equity firms that run our hospitals and other well-known franchises into bankruptcy through leveraged buyouts (see: Joann Fabrics), finance the luxury apartments no average person can afford, lobby against green energy and electric vehicle subsidies because it will hurt their fossil fuel investments and want to put AI data centers in the heart of poor and working-class American cities.
And while most of the donors are unknown, recognizable on the Maine Republican Party’s donor list is none other than Peter Thiel himself, whose company Palantir has made approximately $8 billion in taxpayer funds from U.S. government contracts by privatizing state surveillance, conducting systemic dragnet tracking of American citizens’ data without establishing individualized probable cause.
He claims that true value is created only when companies build unassailable monopolies that shield them from market forces, holds secretive retreats with the world’s rich and powerful where he rants about Greta Thunberg being the antichrist and believes deeply in the anti-democratic technofeudalist ideology espoused by Curtis Yarvin.
While I may be assailing the Republican Party for this, we all know many of our more moderate Democratic candidates are being bankrolled by these same people. While their messaging may not publicly show that influence, their actions, or more often their lack of actions, are the telltale sign of their submission to the monied interests in our country.
Folks, it’s the oligarchy all the way down.
That’s why when I read a recent Substack article by Andy O’Brien, communications director of the Maine AFL-CIO, I was so moved by the details of Troy Jackson’s background.
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Like Troy, I grew up on the fringes. The last home I shared with my single mother, the summer following high school graduation, was a rented trailer in a rural stretch of the Oregon coast. The water pipes inside the trailer were full of rust, so the only way to have potable water for cooking or drinking was to use an outside hose.
This was an area that had been economically decimated by the end of once-thriving fishing and logging industries and would, just a year later, find itself plunged into a recession-related housing bust, as rich vacation homeowners from California lost their fortunes.
Before moving into this trailer, I had been living with extended family, and my older brother had been taken in by a 25-year-old architect who had unintentionally moved into our rat-infested apartment building, locally known as “Felony Flats,” and took pity on five of us crammed into a studio apartment.
While my mom spent that summer cleaning hospital rooms, I was tasked with babysitting my younger brother. While I moved out on my 18th birthday, the two of them would spend the following years living in various homeless and women’s shelters while I did my best to scrape by on minimum wage, sharing apartments with various roommates and supplementing my grocery budget with a monthly $120 SNAP allotment.
Like Troy, I have been able to overcome my background and upbringing, and, also like him, I’ve never allowed myself to forget where I came from. While billionaires and tech-bro investors truly believe they’ve earned and deserved every cent of wealth they’ve extracted from society, both Troy and I know that there are many people out there who have worked just as hard, and often harder, and still have not been able to get ahead.
When I look back at my life since that last trailer, I see how much of my success was a result of timing, luck, and all of the people that went out of their way to help me, and without whom I would never be where I am today.
Unfortunately, many people with similar backgrounds have succumbed to the narrative that the poor are to blame for their own circumstances. That they are simply unwilling to fight as hard as they did to get ahead, and believe the oligarchic claims that their own lives would be improved if only they didn’t have to shoulder the burden of supporting those people.
They blame single mothers, immigrants, convicts and addicts. Never mind the systemic cycles that led to their poverty, crime or addiction: the rich have sold them on the idea that all failure is a personal failing, that we are a meritocratic society, and that if those people were just willing to work harder, they, too, could become billionaire technocrats.
Like Troy, I have always felt an intense sense of injustice about the economic gulf in our society, because that impact was personal. While well-meaning liberal politicians can come to the same views about the monopolistic pitfalls of our capitalist economy, their upper-middle-class, suburban, college-educated backgrounds have always shielded them from experiencing the actual fear and hopelessness of poverty.
They are therefore more willing to carve out deals and exceptions, whether in the name of partisan compromise in our ever right-leaning Overton window, or to support their lobbyists’ interests. To them, policy is a chess game to be lost and won, a way to pad their resume of accomplishments for the next election cycle, and to woo future donors.
This is why Troy Jackson is my guy, and probably the most relatable candidate I’ve had the opportunity to support in my life. There is no replacement for lived experience, and Troy has lived it. Not only that, but he came out the other side having broadened his mind beyond just the injustices that affected him personally, and made the connection that injustice anywhere affects us all, because it is all part of the broader system of oppression and profit-seeking plaguing our country.
I fully trust that whatever Troy does will always be with the working class in mind, because he’s proved that by his decades here in Maine fighting against corporate power for our rights and benefits. I encourage everyone, whether right, left, or undecided, to listen to his message with an open mind and choose him as your candidate in this year’s election. As Troy says: it’s not left vs. right, it’s top vs. bottom, and we’re rising.
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Tagged: columns, election 2026, senate 2026
