Standing between a video camera and a crowd of protesters, Troy Jackson, a logger and former Maine state lawmaker, was trying to find his footing in a Senate race he had not planned to run in, and to respond to a tragedy he had not anticipated.
Hours earlier on Monday, a federal immigration agent had fatally shot a young Colombian man in Biddeford, a blue-collar town outside Portland. Mr. Jackson was seeking to channel Democratic outrage over the event and hit Senator Susan Collins, the five-term Republican he hopes to challenge, for voting to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Let’s tighten that up,” Eric LeBrun, a videographer working for his campaign, said to Mr. Jackson before coaching him on a more succinct script. “This is the big time now.”
Mr. Jackson and several other Maine Democrats are indeed entering the political big time — jockeying to become the party’s new Senate nominee after Graham Platner dropped out last week in the face of a rape allegation he has denied.
To do so, they have to reinvent themselves at breakneck speed for an unusual campaign that will be decided not by the primary electorate, but by 601 delegates who will vote at a convention in Bangor on July 25.
The strange sprint has rendered many traditional campaign tactics, like door-knocking and television advertising, irrelevant. Instead, the candidates must decide whether their time is better spent trying to appeal to voters through public events and videos, or by making their case directly to the small number of delegates who get to choose the next Democratic nominee.
To do the necessary outreach, the candidates have hastily revived dormant campaign operations they used this year to run for other offices, calling up former staff members and hiring new hands.
“It’s kind of minute by minute,” Dan Kleban, who is running for the nomination, said in an interview on Monday at the brewery he founded with his brother. “It’s just like: ‘All right, there’s this press opportunity. Do we do that or do we call delegates?’ Because we only have so much time.”
So far, the only people known to have votes at the convention are 101 members of the Democratic Party’s state committee, while 500 at-large delegates will be chosen this weekend by Democrats in Maine’s 16 counties. Before those meetings, candidates are racing to recruit people who will support them as delegates, and to pack county meetings with their backers.
It is a rare election in which the candidates are trying to choose their voters. And they are doing so even as the rules for choosing the voters are being written for the first time. All registered Democrats who attend their counties’ meetings can vote on delegates, but party leaders have not yet outlined how those elections will work.
Most campaigns are hoping to send delegates who have their minds made up, and are asking their past voters to pledge their support before a Wednesday deadline to register to be a delegate.
“Friends, there’s zero time to waste,” Mr. Jackson wrote in a Facebook post instructing backers to sign up as delegates. “We’re in a solid position to secure the U.S. Senate nomination and defeat Susan Collins, but we’ll need all hands on deck.”
Dr. Nirav Shah, an epidemiologist and former public health official, is also running for the nomination after an unsuccessful bid for governor this year. He has highlighted his role leading Maine’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Dr. Nirav Shah showed up for Maine when we needed him most,” his campaign wrote on Facebook. “Now, he needs our help to secure the nomination.”
More than 5,500 people have expressed interest in either serving as delegates or selecting them at county meetings, Devon Murphy-Anderson, the executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, said in a video on social media on Tuesday night.
As campaigns await the selection of delegates, many candidates have devoted time to personally calling the 101 members of the Democratic Party’s state committee to ask for their support, campaigns and committee members told The New York Times.
Taylor Grant, the president of the Maine Young Democrats and a state committee member, said she was uncomfortable with the lobbying efforts.
“Having candidates go down the list and try to get all of our votes, and then use that to become the U.S. Senate candidate when we’re such a small portion of the populace, doesn’t sit right with me,” she said.
Ms. Grant also voiced fears that none of the candidates who entered after Mr. Platner’s exit could beat Ms. Collins, given the abbreviated timeline before the general election.
“The level of support that Graham had — I don’t think it’s possible to get that back with a different candidate,” she said.
Campaign volunteers have also fanned out across the state to collect 500 required signatures, including at least 50 from eight different counties, by next Monday. Candidates cannot collect them digitally, so many have had volunteers print them out and bring them to events ranging from local Democratic Party meetings to farmers’ markets.
“We’ve got people with clipboards everywhere,” said Alex Obolensky, a campaign consultant for another candidate, Jordan Wood.
The intense rush leaves little time for sleep or personal lives. Kayla vanWieringen, Dr. Shah’s campaign manager, warned family members and friends on July 7, the day before Mr. Platner withdrew, that she would probably not respond to texts or calls for at least two weeks.
“It’s been basically 18-hour days,” she told The Times.
Staff members for several campaigns told The Times that they had let their leases end and moved out of Maine after their bosses’ bids for other offices ended, only to find themselves driving back up last week.
Some, like Matthew Jeweler, Mr. Wood’s organizing director, found solace in picking up campaign work after their candidates lost in June.
“It’s not often that you get to rejoin a campaign while you still miss it,” he said.
Dr. Shah has run the most public-facing campaign, drumming up attendance at several town halls on less than 24 hours’ notice. He also appeared at a rally on Monday for the man killed in the ICE shooting in Biddeford, leaving early to outline his federal policy positions at a news conference in Freeport, 30 minutes away.
A Senate campaign “is an endeavor of a different order as compared to a gubernatorial race,” he told The Times in a phone interview on Tuesday while traveling to another news conference in Biddeford.
Another Senate candidate, Shenna Bellows, the Maine secretary of state, has concentrated her efforts on personally calling state committee members and organizing volunteers, according to a campaign spokeswoman. But she also attended a vigil on Tuesday night in Lewiston for the man killed in the ICE shooting, Joan Sebastian Guerrero.
Mr. Jackson has appeared at several rallies and vigils for Mr. Guerrero. He also joined an organizing call on Monday night with Our Revolution, an advocacy group founded by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
In an interview on Monday, Mr. Jackson acknowledged that he had “never considered the Senate before.”
“The governor’s race is obviously what I was interested in, because I saw a clear path to fixing the things I cared about there,” he said at the anti-ICE rally in Biddeford. But he said Mr. Platner’s withdrawal had created “an opportunity to continue fighting that message in the U.S. Senate.”
Mr. Jackson has kept pushing ahead. Just before 8 p.m. that night, his campaign posted a tightly produced montage in which he used an expletive to describe the shooting of Mr. Guerrero.
“He’s got a 3-year-old daughter left behind,” Mr. Jackson said, standing outside Ms. Collins’s office on Main Street. “And that is not the Maine I want to live in.”