2026 Maine Democratic Senate Delegate Results

How Delegates Were Classified

I classified most of the candidates by matching the official delegate candidate list against slate lists from the Jackson, Shah, and Bellows campaign websites using a first name/last name match. Jordan Wood didn't have a list of delegates that I could find. In some cases, names from the slates had no exact first name/last name match in the candidate list so I reviewed them manually and either discarded or matched to a potential delegate. This would happen if there was a typo in the name for example.

There were some cases where a delegate candidate was listed on multiple slates. If their written statement had a candidate's name in it I read it manually and matched it to a candidate if they expressed support for a specific candidate. If their statement was ambiguous or did not mention a candidate I classified them as “Multi-Slate”. It is unclear to me what it means if a potential delegate appears on two slates but I just reported that as is because it was the most information I could provide.

For potential delegates that were not on any slate, I manually reviewed their statement if they mentioned a candidate name at all. I classified potential delegates that were not on any slate and had no mention of any candidate in their statement as “Unaffiliated”.

I did this review after the Cumberland County results were available so I only considered winners in counties that had results. This saved a lot of manual review time.

Delegates being tied to a candidate is a bit less precise in this election than in a more typical delegate processes where delegates formally pledge for a candidate.

Party committee members are automatically delegates. There are 101 of these delegates. To my knowledge they are not associated with a candidate yet. I included them in the totals so you can see how close candidates are to an absolute majority of delegates.

Wide Margins

It appears that Troy Jackson is winning overwhelmingly, by much more than a typical election margin. This is actually what you would expect with this voting method. Voters were able to vote for as many delegates as their county could select. If every voter had voted only based on candidate slates then whichever slate had the most support would win. That means every candidate in the winning slate wins. In this extreme case, even a tiny margin for one candidate could result in winning 100% of the delegates.

At time of writing 97% of winning candidates were from a slate so our scenario is not too far off from full slate voting. We see exactly what we would expect: large margins for the winning candidate. While this looks strange, it is important to note that this process is selecting a single nominee. The delegate count may feel lopsided but the senate nominee who has the support of the most voters should still be the one that wins. Despite the fact that slates make the delegate makeup less representative of the voters, they can potentially increase the influence voters have over the final result because they make it easier for voters to express their preference for their preferred candidate.

It might be interesting to look at the total number of votes every delegate received, including the ones who lost, to get a sense of how much voter support various candidates had. However, I can't find this data yet.

Background

I started making this results page because I have been following the process, and ran as a delegate. I didn't see a typical election results map for this anywhere so I wanted one for myself. I got a bit carried away and I figured I'd share it.

After I started tracking it I found out that the Bangor Daily News is doing similar coverage. There are slight discrepancies between our counts and from my analysis it seems they were missing some of the delegates that I manually sorted into Jackson and Bellows (5 and 2 at time of writing) because they were not exact text matches with the slate lists. They seem to have had some delegates give them information that they were planning to vote for Jordan Wood. I opted not to include them here because I am not 100% why they were considered Jordan Wood delegates. They didn't mention him in their statements.

I figured I would publish my results page anyway because I have been meaning to get more into blogging and it took a long time to make. So hopefully it provides some insights.

I will be re-running my results download and updating the tracker here as fast as I can so it should remain reasonably up to date.