Is the Quality of Political Candidates Dropping?

The girlfriend of the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Maine is his second cousin. Can't we do better?

From Maine Wire:

RELATIVE ATTRACTION: Troy Jackson’s Longtime Lover Is His Second Cousin

Logger-Turned-Senate Hopeful Troy Jackson and Longtime Squeeze Lana Pelletier Are Second Cousins by Blood — and the Pair Has Never Bothered with a Marriage License

By Steve Robinson July 30, 2026

The tiny St. John River Valley town of Allagash (population 240) has long been the butt of Maine jokes about its handful of last names and family trees that don’t so much branch as tangle.

Now Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Troy Dale Jackson, 58, and on his fifth pacemaker, finds his own ancestry under the same microscope that eventually ran his predecessor, oyster hobbyist Graham Platner, out of American politics and into hiding.

Jackson, a 26-year politician and lobbyist, has made a career of bragging that he’s a is a fifth-generation logger, but you don’t have to go far back the generational line to find where it crosses paths with the ancestors of his significant other Lana M. Pelletier.

Allagash tipsters and genealogical records confirm that Jackson’s longtime significant other, Lana Pelletier — his high school sweetheart and the mother of his two adult sons … — is, in fact, his second cousin by blood.

Jackson and Pelletier share the same great-grandparents: Thomas Pelletier and Edith Thibodeau. Thomas and Edith’s daughter Albertine was Troy’s grandmother; their son Louis Sr. was Lana’s grandfather. That makes Troy and Lana second cousins on the Pelletier line.

The pair has been together for Jackson’s entire political career, stretching from his early days as a pro-gun, pro-life, conservative working-class rabble-rouser in the late 1990s and early 2000s through his rise to become a pro-gun-control, pro-late-term-abortion socialist state Senate president.

Pelletier has eschewed the spotlight, slugging along at various state jobs while Jackson has pursued his political ambitions and lucrative side hustles as the political enforcer for Maine’s dwindling labor movement.

Now, his sudden elevation as the Democratic nominee to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins has brought renewed focus to both candidates, with left-wing muckrakers circulating conspiracy theories about Sen. Collins’ love life and the retirement investments of her husband. But the more curious significant-other story in the Senate race might just be the Aroostook romance that could have taken root at an Allagash family reunion.

Jackson has, at various points, referred to Pelletier as his wife in official bios and statements. Locals in the historically Catholic village of Allagash, however, are quick to set the record straight with the dry precision of people who have known both families — or just the one family, depending on your perspective — for generations: The couple is not, and has never been, legally married.

They simply live together, raise kids together and appear together on the occasional mortgage and lawsuit paperwork. In a place where everyone knows everyone’s business, the lack of a marriage certificate is less a scandal than local trivia.

The Family Wreath: Jackson and Pelletier’s common great-grandparents were Thomas Pelletier and Edith Thibodeau Pelletier. Thomas and Edith had two children who matter here: Albertine Pelletier O’Leary and Louis A. Pelletier Sr. Albertine was the mother of Colleen McBreairty, and Colleen was the mother of Troy Jackson. Louis Sr. was the father of Louis A. “Louie” Pelletier Jr. Louie Jr. and his wife, Patricia “Patty” Gardner Pelletier, were Lana Pelletier’s parents. That means Colleen McBreairty and Louie Pelletier Jr. were first cousins. Their children, Troy Jackson and Lana Pelletier, are second cousins because they share the same great-grandparents: Thomas and Edith Pelletier.

Before the pearl-clutching begins, let’s be precise — because the difference between first-cousin and second-cousin relationships is both legal and biological, and Maine law draws a bright line.

People in second cousin marriages share about 1/4th as many bad recessive genes as people in first cousin marriages and 1/16th as many as brothers and sisters would. So, second cousins marriages are outlawed in only Kentucky and Nevada, while first cousin marriages are outlawed in 26 states and restricted in 7 more.

Regulations on cousin marriages in American states go back to 1858, so it wasn’t just the full-blown eugenics movement (which got rolling around 1900) that accounts for how much more anti-cousin marriage Americans are than the English.

Still, second cousin marriages are not, to the say the least, fashionable in America. To the American mind, even second cousin marriages seem icky.

The eugenics movement in America wasn’t compromised by its leading family, the Darwins, being the product of the marriage between first cousins Charles Darwin and Emma Wedgwood. (While most of their surviving children were highly accomplished, three of the ten died young with what sound like birth defects.) American women scientists who became active proponents of eugenics, such as Helen Dean King, played a sizable role in measuring the birth defects caused by inbreeding.

As I wrote in 2002:

In contrast, Americans probably disapprove of what scientists call “consanguineous” mating more than any other nationality. Americans have long dismissed inbreeding as something practiced only among hillbillies.

That old stereotype probably had some truth to it. One study of 107 marriages in Beech Creek, Kentucky in 1942 found 19% were consanguineous, although the Kentuckians were more weighted toward second cousin marriages, while first cousin couples are more common than second cousins pairings in the Islamic lands.

Today, over half the states in American states ban first cousin marriages, at least among those able to have children. This reflects popular distaste. Three huge studies in the U.S. between 1941 and 1981 found that no more than 0.2% of all American marriages were between first cousins or second cousins.

So, it’s somewhat embarrassing for the Democrats to run for the U.S. Senate a guy who hasn’t yet married his high school sweetheart of the last 40 years who is also his second cousin. Can’t American political parties do better? (Or maybe the Democrats figure that all working class white men are sleeping with their second cousins?)

Does it seem like the quality of political candidates is in decline?

I can’t prove that it is right now, but I will suggest a reason why we would be getting less and less impressive candidates after the paybreak:

Paywall here.