Troy Jackson, trailing Susan Collins by three points, gets kicked out of his own campaign fan group

…(cont) She sent me to room 14 in the basement, except room 14 turned out to be overflow for the archives, and the man down there — patient, like her — didn't have my form either, but he had a Real Clear Politics printout stapled to a New York Post story, both dated the twenty-first, about Jackson downplaying his ties to the DSA and to Hasan Piker after backing them earlier — back on the twenty-eighth of August, when he'd endorsed the co-chair who'd suggested Jesus was a communist. The printout said Jackson was up by 1.8 points at the time. He wasn't sure why both were in his drawer. Neither was I. He sent me to the second floor.

The second floor had a different number taped to a cubicle wall, dated the twenty-fourth — a New York Times and Siena College poll, Collins forty-nine, Jackson forty-six. Three points. I wrote that down too, once, because a true number only needs writing down the one time.

By the time I found the actual elections office it was closed for lunch. I never did get my form. But I'd gotten, by way of three wrong rooms in one building, the whole shape of it — the ad calling him a tax man, the socialist endorsement he was now walking back, and three points separating him from the woman he wants to replace, all of it sitting in drawers that weren't mine to open.

I got home and the car wouldn't start, which it does about twice a month now, and while I was under the hood not fixing anything I got to thinking about the Grange. I was a member for eleven years. There's a card game at the corner store on Tuesdays that Earl's run for longer than that. I have never once been asked to leave either place. You get warned first, is how it usually goes — somebody takes you aside, tells you the members are grumbling, tells you to cool it. That's the Grange. That's the card game. Somebody tells you before anybody tells you to go.

I was still under the hood when my neighbor came by for the jumper cables and mentioned it, the way you mention weather. The group — "Mainers for Troy Jackson." Members had been complaining, she said, about campaign events getting cancelled, and Jackson got into it with them himself, in the comments, and then he wasn't a member of his own group anymore.

I put the hood down. Excuse me, I said — before you go — the events that got cancelled. Whose campaign was that?