Lorenzo Krakowsky of Owls Head is a former teacher and high school principal.

This is a message for Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson.

There is less than a month left to win this election, and it is time for you to make your case urgently and directly to the people of Maine. Enough with the endless fundraising, TV ads, limited community events and outside consultants. Stop listening to the DSCC and the Democratic Party establishment politicos — they’re not Mainers, and they don’t know what we need.  

Your personal story and your vision for how to truly serve working Mainers is what will win this thing, and it’s what  people will rally around.  Folks want to hear from you in person, in their towns and in their counties. They want to be inspired and fired up directly by you. You know Maine and you’ve been fighting for us for years.

 Here’s what it will take:

• Use your current funds to go on a 40-day town hall barnstormer through all of Maine, north to south and east to west. Open those town halls to everyone who wants to come. Answer every question that is asked. Stay as long as is needed to hear and connect to everyone.
• Use your volunteers to generate enthusiasm and boost attendance at those town halls. Rally them to phonebank, canvass, go to demonstrations, connect socially and get out the vote now. Get as many folks as possible out to your town halls in October.
• At those town halls, let loose: call Sen. Collins a corrupt politician, call what’s going on in Gaza a genocide, tell your personal story, tell us exactly what you’ve done and what you’re going to do to make life for working Mainers fair and equitable. Run as the fighting progressive that you are. Don’t hold anything back!
• Hold a press conference ASAP to call on Sen. Collins to resign immediately and drop out of the race because of the allegations of corruption against her. Bring this up every single day from now until Election Day.
• Relentlessly pressure Sen. Collins to justify her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh and end the right to have abortions, and her votes to fund ICE and support its authoritarian, illegal actions.
• Use the October debates to hammer Sen. Collins about her corruption, her elite insiderism and her incompetence as the Appropriations Committee chair. Label her a corrupt politician, an elitist, a hypocrite, a Trump puppet and an AIPAC tool. Let everyone know she’s in the pocket of special interests and the rich oligarchs outside of Maine who want to crush us.  Don’t be deferential.  

So many of us are rooting for you, and we are 100% behind you, but we need this campaign to be ferociously urgent, completely open, genuinely grassroots and unrelentingly aggressive. 

You need to run like you have nothing to lose —  it’s the only way we will win.