By Patrick Svitek, CNN
(CNN) — County party chairs inundated with calls. An endless stream of Google sign-up forms and spreadsheets. And a disgraced former nominee looming over it all, haunting the party’s hopes of starting anew.
The snap Democratic election to replace Graham Platner and face Republican Sen. Susan Collins this fall is off to a hectic and dramatic start.
The implosion of Platner’s campaign after he was accused of rape – an allegation he denies – left Maine Democrats scrambling to create a highly unorthodox process that reflects the high stakes for the battle to win control of the Senate.
On July 25, just 15 days after Platner formally dropped out, 601 delegates will meet in Bangor, the state capital, to vote on a new nominee. Most of the delegates – 500 – will be picked this weekend at county meetings across Maine. The other 101 delegates will automatically come from Maine’s Democratic State Committee, and they are already being heavily courted.
At least eight candidates are rushing to collect enough signatures to qualify for the convention and assemble slates of delegates to vote for them.
“We are in a perilous situation, and there is no perfect way to deal with an unprecedented situation like this,” one of the candidates, Jordan Wood, told reporters this week.
Platner’s tarnished legacy looms large, with some of his supporters looking for a replacement nominee to continue the working-class progressive movement that he tried to build.
Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, who launched his Senate campaign with the support of over 50 current and former elected officials, appears to be making the most explicit appeal along those lines.
“You poured your hearts, your time and your energy into building this movement alongside another candidate in Maine, and I know that there’s real pain, anger and disappointment, and I’m not going to try and minimize that,” Jackson said Monday on a call with members of the national progressive group Our Revolution. “But look, this movement has always been bigger than one person.”
Candidates face a 5 p.m. Wednesday deadline to declare their intent to run, with the first scheduled debate on Thursday. By the end of Monday, candidates will need to submit 500 signatures to qualify for the ballot, including 50 signatures from at least eight separate counties.
On Tuesday night, the Maine Democratic Party said it had already received more than 5,500 submissions from Democrats who either want to be delegates or attend the county meetings to pick delegates.
It is a process with a far smaller electorate than a traditional primary, requiring an intense focus on organizing and interpersonal relationships. At least some campaigns may have reached out to, if not spoken to, all 601 delegates by the time they arrive in Bangor.
Maine Democrats have little room for error. July 27 — two days after the convention — is the last day under state law on which they can submit the name of the replacement nominee for inclusion on the ballot.
“I think that all of us are working hard to make this process transparent, inclusive and as timely as possible,” Paige Zeigler, chair of the Waldo County Democrats, said in an email that partly addressed out-of-state political observers: “We Mainers will show the way because ‘as Maine go, so goes the nation.’ Now follow us and elect some damn good leaders this November.”
How the campaigns are running
Previous statewide candidates, with built-in political networks, could have an advantage.
Nirav Shah’s campaign for governor, which got the most first-round votes in the June 9 Democratic primary before losing to Hannah Pingree, was still winding down when Platner ended his candidacy. Shah’s campaign st