Democrats reeling since the election of President Donald Trump have been looking for a hero. They found one in Gov. Janet Mills.
Following her Friday confrontation with the president over Maine’s policies allowing transgender students to participate in girls sports, T-shirts are being sold with her “see you in court” line. The Maine Democratic Party fundraised on it with a Monday text from Mills. Conservatives and liberals on social media disagree on who “DESTROYED” whom during the exchange.
It may seem unlikely that a 77-year-old governor from a small state has this role in the Trump zeitgeist. But it is in keeping with a theme that helped to put her in office: serving as a leading opposition figure to a precedent-smashing Republican.
I have covered Mills since before I arrived at the Bangor Daily News in 2015. Here are four things you need to know about how her history led to this moment.
Mills came up the hard way in Maine politics.
Maine routinely has one of the highest shares of women among state legislatures. Democrats have a long-running training program for younger women who want to run. This was not the case when Mills was rising in politics. The two other women to be elected statewide since then — former U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe and U.S. Sen. Susan Collins — also came up in this era.
She was the state’s first female criminal prosecutor when she got her first legal job with the attorney general’s office in 1976, when there were only 24 women in the Legislature, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.
Four years later at 32, she was New England’s first female district attorney after the governor appointed her to be the top prosecutor in Androscoggin and Franklin counties. She hit the same milestone for Maine when she became attorney general in 2009 and governor in 2019. Some around Augusta joke that she still sees things from the perspective of Maine’s top lawyer.
Her time as a prosecutor included a high-profile investigation into her.
Mills’ time as a district attorney was both formative and eventful. She has always tried to put forward a gritty image, using the slogan “Tough Works!” when she ran unsuccessfully in a crowded 1994 primary in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District.
There were many unconventional cases along the way. In both 1987 and 1990, she was part of two cases in which she intervened against families who wanted to pull their sons from life support following serious accidents. She lost both in court, and one of them was later seen as a precursor to a high-profile case out of Florida.
Perhaps the most attention-grabbing case of Mills’ tenure was about her. In late 1990, a TV station reported that Mills was the subject of a federal investigation into alleged drug use and abuse of power. It began with a tip from Maine’s drug enforcement agency, and Mills was eventually cleared of wrongdoing after a state probe that made a year of headlines.
Mills contended that it only happened because she criticized the state agency for focusing on small-time drug dealers. State officials denied that at the time. When she spoke to reporters, she gave a similar statement that echoes the one she gave on Friday after the U.S. Department of Education said it would investigate Maine’s athletic policies.
“If this kind of thing can happen to me, it can happen to anyone in the state of Maine and that’s what worries me,” she said in late 1991.
Another Republican foe may have put her in the governor’s office.
Mills’ time as attorney general — which came in two stints from 2009 to 2011 and then from 2013 to when she was sworn in as governor — is best remembered for her spats with then-Gov. Paul LePage. The fighting really kicked off in 2014, when her office refused to defend two of LePage’s legal stances on health care issues. He sued her directly in 2017.
She ran for governor largely on reversing LePage’s policies, including his stance against Medicaid expansion that had been approved by voters in 2015. After Mills won the 2018 race to replace the Republican governor, she implemented expansion on her first day in office. The program is now facing cost overruns that have caused budget trouble in Augusta.
Mills won that race after a crowded seven-way Democratic primary in which she was arguably the centrist candidate. Progressives hit her from the left on issues from tribal rights to gun control. But LePage was there as her foe, and her first campaign manager credited her fights with the Republican as positioning her well for the primary. She then beat LePage in 2022.
Mills wields much power in Augusta, but change is coming.
The governor has benefited from full Democratic control of Augusta since she took office. Mills has typically gotten her way there while sitting between a more progressive crop of legislative Democrats and still irking Republicans who remain in the minority.
The latter have criticized her spending levels and her most restrictive policies during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, including a vaccine mandate for health care workers. But there is a more low-key divide between Mills and Democrats that will take center stage when voters choose the term-limited governor’s replacement in 2026.
After the 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, Mills signed off on a 72-hour waiting period for gun sales but is opposed to a referendum bid to enshrine a “red flag” law. She improved Maine’s fraught relationship with tribes early in her tenure but has irked them since by resisting their efforts to overhaul the 1980 settlement governing tribal rights.
In a recent University of New Hampshire poll, concern over spending pushed Mills’ disapproval rating to its highest mark at roughly an even split among Maine voters. A wide field of potential candidates among Democrats and Republicans is lining up to run to replace her in 2026. The next Democratic governor is likely to embrace many policies that Mills has not.