In the NFL, savvy teams oftentimes seek out a backup quarterback whose play style mirrors that of their starter — the idea being that in the event of an injury, their offense can continue to operate as it’s meant to.

Maine Democrats have followed a similar course by tapping one sleazy, antisemitic goon to replace another.

After the long-foreshadowed implosion of Graham Platner’s campaign for US Senate this summer, progressives demanded that he be replaced by a candidate just as regressive and demagogic.

They found their man in Troy Jackson, the former president of Maine’s state senate who had been easily dispatched in the party’s gubernatorial primary earlier that summer.

A former moderate who had taken a sharp left turn in recent years, Jackson quickly picked up where his Nazi-tattoo-clad predecessor left off.

“Anybody with eyes and a heart knows the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza,” asserted Jackson one day after Platner dropped out.

Translation: “How do you do, fellow kids?”

Jackson is a charmless mediocrity lacking in both political talent and a moral center.

In embracing the left’s unhealthy obsession with the world’s only Jewish-majority state — not to mention the Middle East’s only liberal democracy — he saw an opportunity to excite the Democratic base by signaling that he would carry Platner’s fallen tiki torch across the finish line.

But then again, this fixation would appear to come naturally to an ogre who allegedly pushed around his ex-girlfriend and chucked a water bottle in the direction of a female colleague.

“It’s unfortunate that there are people here in Maine that don’t like to use that term only because they’re Jewish and what that means to them, with the Holocaust,” Jackson told Portland’s NBC News affiliate on Tuesday, as he complained about the refusal to call Israel’s war against Hamas a “genocide.”

But he insisted that the Gaza war “fits that description and it is. It’s [an] unbelievable thing that’s happened there that people that are innocent are being murdered, and it is a genocide.”

His condemnation of Hamas for starting the war came far more reluctantly.

“You could argue the same thing for Hamas too,” he conceded under duress.

Could, but Jackson wouldn’t.

He’s more interested in smearing Jews — American Jews; American Jews living in Maine whom he would work for should he prevail this November — than he is in telling the truth about the fundamentalist savages wholly responsible for the death and destruction on and since Oct. 7.

That’s antisemitism, pure and simple.

And not the warmed-over, faux-intellectual nonsense favored by academics and their downwardly mobile ex-pupils in Brooklyn — the hard stuff that groypers and Islamists alike shoot directly into their veins.

What’s all the more discouraging is that Jackson was likely elevated not in spite of his bigotry, but because of it.

After all, from Michigan to Maine and Pennsylvania to Park Slope, it’s what the Democratic base craves now.

And for evidence, look no further than the left’s apoplectic response to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s introduction of his “Strategy to Combat Antisemitism,” which ought to have been greeted as a welcome departure from his regular propagation of blood libels.

“Launching a ‘Strategy to Combat Antisemitism’ in a time of the Gaza genocide is akin to a ‘Strategy to Combat Anti-Whiteness’ at the height of South African apartheid,” complained anti-American activist Aaron Maté.

A panoply of high-profile influencers echoed this critique.

“Bro it’s so over. They got him,” declared one too cowardly to provide an antecedent for “they.”

“He going for the top goy award,” chimed in another, slightly braver cretin.

“Protesting events where Zionist organizations sell stolen land in the West Bank is not antisemitism. And Mamdani definitely knows better,” insisted still another.

“Throwing a bone to the people calling you a terrorist every day is never going to make them stop.”

All this over a straightforward condemnation of antisemitism with nary a mention of Israel.

A year ago, Mamdani represented the fringe of his party, yet he’s already been outflanked.

The future of the Democratic Party belongs to the Jew haters — even ones as unimpressive as Troy Jackson.