The Maine Democratic Party has quietly removed transgender candidate Ashley Webb and several other hopefuls from its U.S. Senate nominating convention lineup, leaving just two contenders in a race already defined by chaos and scandal.

After the filing deadline closed at 11:59 p.m. ET on July 20, 2026, the party verified each candidate's submitted signatures and eligibility. When the dust settled, only two names remained on the Maine Democratic Party's official voter guide: Saundra Pelletier and Troy Jackson. Ashley Webb, who had appeared on the party's website alongside a host of other potential candidates before the deadline, was gone. A search for Webb's name on the party site now returns nothing.

The party has not publicly explained which specific qualification Webb failed to meet. Candidates were required to be registered Maine voters, file a written Declaration of Intent with the state party chair, and submit at least 500 valid nominating signatures from individuals who were registered Democrats as of the June 9, 2026 primary. Webb could have fallen short on any one of those requirements, or more than one. The party's website offered no individualized explanation for any of the removed candidates.

A field of twelve collapses to two

The sudden narrowing of the field caps weeks of turmoil for Maine Democrats. The party found itself scrambling to replace its original Senate nominee, Graham Platner, after he quit the race amid a rape accusation, an allegation his accuser has stood behind publicly, though Platner has denied it. His departure triggered a never-before-used succession process that compressed what normally takes months of campaigning into fewer than three weeks.

Twelve Democrats initially jumped into the replacement contest. AP News reported that candidates had to collect 500 voter signatures and recruit delegates on a punishing timeline, with a state party convention of 601 delegates scheduled for July 25 and a hard deadline of July 27 to place a new nominee on the ballot against Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

That compressed schedule exposed fault lines inside the party. Dan Jenkins, a Maine Democratic delegate applicant, told AP he wished the Platner situation had surfaced earlier. "I don't think anyone's happy that we're in this situation," Jenkins said. "We would have preferred that this had broken many, many months ago."

The chaos extended well beyond logistics. Internal party fractures widened as candidates struggled to distinguish themselves in a race defined more by crisis management than policy substance.

Webb's viral campaign and contested claims

Webb, who identifies as a transgender woman, first attracted national attention after participating in a candidate debate and going viral. Webb had announced the Senate run on Reddit under the username sparky603, where the candidate also made a series of striking physiological claims.

In Reddit posts attributed to that account, Webb, who stated a karyotype of XY, claimed to ovulate and experience a monthly period. Webb wrote of being "pretty positive I am the XX type, accept [sic] I got internal organs, unless what I am feeling are tumors that just happen to grow where those sorts of organs are usually."

In another post, Webb described the claimed monthly symptoms in graphic terms:

"When the monthly pain is real bad, I am feeling something in both my right and left side and above my bladder. When you don't have the proper hole, it finds one of two exits... My exit connection was made with my colon. Cause when I get this monthly pain, that is where the blood comes out of."

Webb also claimed that intersex individuals "don't get diagnosed till our 20's as we tend not to be born with extra holes," adding that a delayed diagnosis was the fault of "incompetent doctors who preferred to prescribe opiate pain killers rather than find the problem." None of these physiological claims were independently corroborated in any available reporting.

Whether those claims played any role in the party's decision to remove Webb from the ballot is unknown. The Maine Democratic Party's stated criteria were procedural, signatures, registration, and a declaration of intent, not ideological or medical. But the party has not said which requirement Webb failed to satisfy, and Webb has not publicly responded to the removal.

Jackson and Pelletier survive, but baggage follows

The two remaining candidates carry their own complications. Troy Jackson, a former president of the Maine Senate, emerged from the first debate as a frontrunner alongside another candidate, according to the Washington Examiner. But Jackson's record includes well-documented accounts of a volatile temper.

The Washington Post described Jackson as "a powerful Maine legislator now running for Senate" who "once angrily threw a water bottle in a meeting after he couldn't persuade a lawmaker to vote his way." The Post also reported that Jackson "yelled at another lawmaker, cursed and shouted in a meeting with the speaker of Maine's state House, until she kicked him out of her office." His temper, the Post noted, was "a feature of his leadership, and one that Democratic lawmakers discussed among themselves as a problem and even raised with the governor."

That is the man Maine Democrats now have as one of only two options to take on Collins in a race that could help determine control of the U.S. Senate. The other, Saundra Pelletier, has received far less public scrutiny, and far less public attention.

The broader Democratic field offered little comfort before it collapsed. Fox News covered the primary debate, with Laura Ingraham describing the candidates as a "buffet of bad options." One candidate, Maine Beer Company founder Dan Kleban, conceded during the debate that the Democratic Party's reputation "is in the toilet" because it has lost focus on kitchen-table issues. Another, Shenna Bellows, admitted she was on vacation and unprepared on key policy facts when pressed during the debate.

Bellows told a questioner bluntly: "When I need to know the facts, I will. I'll do my homework." That answer did not inspire confidence among delegates already rattled by the Platner implosion, a crisis that former insiders had warned about well before it became public.

Open questions the party has not answered

Several basic questions remain unanswered. The Maine Democratic Party has not disclosed which specific qualification or qualifications Webb and the other removed candidates failed to meet. It has not named the other candidates who were dropped alongside Webb. And it has not explained whether any candidate was given an opportunity to cure a deficiency, for instance, by submitting additional signatures, before being removed from the listing.

Webb's silence adds another layer of uncertainty. There is no public statement from Webb addressing the removal, no indication of a legal challenge, and no explanation of whether the candidacy fell short on signatures, registration, the declaration of intent, or some combination.

The convention of 601 delegates is set for July 25, with a final deadline of July 27 to place a nominee on the November ballot. Maine Democrats will choose between Pelletier and Jackson, and no one else. The party that began this cycle with a dozen candidates and a nominee accused of rape will go into a general election against Susan Collins having narrowed its options to a former state Senate president with a documented temper and a candidate most voters have never heard of.

When a party's biggest names rush to defend an accused rapist and the replacement process yields two survivors out of twelve, the problem is not bad luck. It is a party that has stopped asking itself hard questions, and started hoping voters won't either.