LEWISTON — Jordan Wood saw the writing on the wall while in his home state of Maine the month before the 2016 election.

He was back from Washington, D.C., knocking on the doors of mostly modest homes in the town of Norway while volunteering for a Democratic congressional campaign. His conversations with voters naturally turned to the looming presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

He was struck by what he was hearing in a part of the state that had supported former President Barack Obama in the prior two elections. About a third of the people answering his knocks in the Oxford County town were registered Democrats who said they were going to back Trump.

They felt their economic situations had not improved under Democrats going back to former President Bill Clinton, whose wife, Hillary — secretary of state under Obama — was “corrupt,” as they told him. Trump, a New York billionaire, just sounded like the better bet at “reform,” those rural Maine voters explained.

Jordan Wood called friends to share a blunt assessment.

“Uh, I think we’re going to lose the election,” he said.

Wood’s prediction proved true. About a decade later, with Trump in the middle of his second term, the 36-year-old is now running for the 2nd District seat himself, hoping to win over many of the voters he listened to when knocking on doors. After growing up in Lewiston and Gardiner as the son of a pastor and teacher, his career has taken him to the Midwest and Capitol Hill to work for Democrats and political groups seeking to banish corporate money and election deniers.

His initial status last year as an early challenger to U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, turned into Wood switching races after U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a moderate Democrat, said he would not seek a fifth term.

Wood said his move — which also literally included a move when he, his husband and their baby daughter bought a 2nd District home in Auburn (while keeping their 1st District home in Bristol) — was not one of opportunism. Rather, he said he wanted to avoid spending money against the Democrats who became the better-known, better-funded Senate contenders: Sullivan oysterman Graham Platner and Gov. Janet Mills.

Hoping to win the four-member Democratic primary to face former Republican Gov. Paul LePage in the fall, Wood believes he has learned something through his conversations with 2nd District residents.

Winning their votes is about connecting the dots between why they are struggling with healthcare or paying for things, and how the political system is set up to reward corruption and the wealthy, Wood said.

Whether enough 2nd District voters trust a guy who spent years working in Washington to represent them is a tough question to confidently answer ahead of Tuesday’s primary. But explaining how the status quo has hurt them is something Wood feels he can confidently do to bring them back to the party.

“It’s not abstract at all for Maine people,” Wood said.

FROM MAINE TO MICHIGAN AND DC

Wood was born Sept. 14, 1989, at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston along with his twin brother, James, to Jennifer and David Wood. James now lives in Seattle, while their older sister, Julia, lives in Virginia.

David was a preacher, and Jennifer was a teacher who initially planned on stepping away from work to spend time with her newborn boys, but James was born with severe asthma and allergies. His healthcare costs at a time when insurance companies did not have to cover asthma care meant Jennifer had to return to work as an ed tech at Auburn’s Edward Little High School.

The family moved to Gardiner when David, who was born in Australia, became pastor at Gardiner Baptist Church.

Wood has dyslexia and struggled in school as he attended Gardiner High School and then Auburn’s St. Dominic Academy. But he did well enough to get accepted to college after working odd jobs in high school in construction and at the Bates College cafeteria.

As he prepared to graduate high school in 2008, Wood recalled the message from adults in Maine amid the declining economy: “Leave the state.”

He found a small, private Christian school in western Michigan to attend on need-based aid. Calvin College, now known as Calvin University, is in Grand Rapids and was seemingly a strange pick for a young man who would grow into progressive politics.

Former President George W. Bush had served as a recent commencement speaker, and Betsy DeVos, who would later become Trump’s first education secretary, is an alumna with her name on a campus building.

But Wood found his place while majoring in political science and philosophy. He helped start Calvin College Democrats and interned on Michigan campaigns and on Capitol Hill for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

He got introduced to U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, an Illinois Democrat representing the northern Chicago suburbs, and he parlayed that into a job on Schneider’s reelection campaign. Schneider would lose his 2014 reelection bid to Republican Bob Dold after unseating Dold two years earlier.

Dold, a moderate with pro-gun control and pro-gay marriage views, saw former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spend around $2 million to run ads in support of him over Schneider in 2014 as part of the Democratic billionaire’s push to elect candidates focused on bipartisanship.

Wood saw Bloomberg’s spending as antithetical to “what a democracy is supposed to look like.”

“I think the injustice of one billionaire in New York City deciding who the representative in a district is, is just so wrong,” Wood said on a recent weekday over lunch at Baxter Brewing Co. in Lewiston.

His experience in the race influenced his decision to start working in 2015 for End Citizens United, a PAC that works to counteract the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision that paved the way for corporations to spend unlimited amounts on races.

He worked his way up at the group, going from finance director to vice president by 2019.

Wood expressed pride at the group’s work to grow the number of members in Congress who reject PAC money, but progressive organizers have criticized it over the years as its electoral spending has slowed and its fundraising expenses remained high.

That’s a similar criticism facing a Democratic strategy firm co-founded by the man who would become Wood’s husband in 2016 — Jake Lipsett. His firm, Mothership Strategies, has faced controversy over its fundraising practices, and Wood has dealt with scrutiny during his campaign for his ties to Lipsett and Mothership, which is not working with Wood. (Lipsett is volunteering with Wood’s campaign, Wood said.)

The couple, who have a 1-year-old daughter named Ella and a second child on the way, have been together for a decade.

FIGHTING ELECTION DENIERS

Wood left End Citizens United and became chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., in 2020, two years after she flipped a Republican seat in Orange County. Porter is now running for California governor. While he learned plenty in the job, the experience he cites most often came on Jan. 6, 2021.

The day turned chaotic as rioters stormed the Capitol, and Wood wound up barricaded with Porter and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in Porter’s office until the violence came to an end. He has touched on that day in his campaign ads.

As the pandemic and remote work waned and traveling between Maine and Capitol Hill to work for a California congresswoman became increasingly untenable, Wood stepped down to start studying political reconciliation movements at Harvard Divinity School. He took some time away from politics to make the famed Camino de Santiago pilgrimage that ends in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

After Jan. 6, he felt America developed “a crisis of democracy” and observed Trump backing candidates around the country who believed his lie that he won the 2020 election.

He and Lipsett moved back to Maine in 2021, and Wood co-founded democracyFIRST to support candidates around the country from any party who support “free and fair elections” and work to defeat election deniers. He led it until stepping aside last year.

JUMPING IN

Wood said he jumped in the Senate race last April because he felt Democrats, especially those in higher places, were only waiting for Mills to challenge Collins.

Wood and many others did not foresee the sudden rise of Platner, the oyster farmer and military veteran from Sullivan who garnered national buzz and huge crowds as soon as he launched his Senate bid last August. Platner is now the party’s presumed nominee while facing a string of controversies.

Wood had called on Platner to drop out of the Senate race last October after a flurry of disclosures related to Platner’s past Reddit posts and his tattoo that resembles a Nazi symbol rocked his campaign. But Wood decided to switch to the 2nd District race last November after Golden, 43, said he would not seek reelection due to increasing incivility and threats against the congressman and his family.

Wood said he and Platner “agree on a lot,” and he said it did not feel helpful to the party if he spent his sizable war chest running a primary campaign against Platner and Mills. (Wood has raised about $5.7 million between his Senate and House campaigns — and burned through most of it by spending about $5.3 million, according to campaign finance data.)

He has since endorsed Platner in the Senate race.

‘WHY WOULD THEY DO THIS?’

Wood has kept his platform relevant to the work he did earlier in his career. He feels it is possible to ban lobbyists and corporate PACs from donating to candidates, to ban members of Congress from trading stocks, to require members who commit misconduct to pay their own legal settlements and to ban those older than 75 from serving as House speaker.

However, he realizes many of these goals might take years and require Democratic control of Congress.

He would vote in favor of creating a universal, single-payer healthcare system and capping out-of-pocket childcare costs at $10 a day for families earning less than $250,000 a year. He says the government could raise $4 trillion over the next decade by adding a 2% tax on household wealth that exceeds $50 million and a 4% “billionaire surcharge” on households with a net worth above $1 billion, with his tax plan currently applying to about 75,000 households nationally.

Wood said rural voters he knows from growing up in Maine and those he has spoken with on the campaign trail have expressed how the healthcare system is not working well for them. When he talks about his priorities and connects the dots between campaign finance reforms and the current system, they see how their plight relates to the structural changes he’s pushing, he said, and they wonder of the current powerbrokers: “Why would they do this?”

Those who’ve known him longest say Wood has the ability to bridge political divides. John Smedley, a retired Bates College professor who has known Wood “since birth” as a neighbor, said Wood has never made the mistake of “not going to people to hear them.”

Becky Fles, whose husband went to school with Wood’s father and whose family lived across the street from the Wood family in Gardiner, said Wood is “not really interested in empty, emotional platitudes about things” and has instead focused his career on “doing the work.”

His character also differentiates him from LePage, said Fles, the school board chair for Maine School Administrative District 11 in Gardiner who is also on the state and national school board associations.

“Jordan will meet with anybody,” Fles said. “He’s very approachable.”

Wood said he’s not sure what the future may hold, but the stakes felt too high for him to not run this year.

“You never plan a campaign,” he said. “You don’t know what the moment in politics is going to be.”