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Charlie Dingman is the chair of the Maine Democratic Party and an attorney based in Augusta. He lives in Leeds.
It will surprise no one that, as chair of the Maine Democratic Party, I enthusiastically support our Democratic nominee for governor, Hannah Pingree.
But my support for Hannah goes well beyond my role as party chair. It comes from watching her work for years and seeing firsthand the kind of leader she is.
I have spent much of my career as a lawyer advocating before all three branches of Maine government. That has given me a front-row seat to state government, both when it works well and when it doesn’t. It has given me the opportunity to see Hannah’s effective leadership during her time in the Legislature and her work leading the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future.
Hannah listens, asks insightful questions, and thinks strategically. She works with focus, determination, and courage to build workable solutions. And I believe she will stand up to anyone who, like our current president, would stand in the way just to accumulate wealth and power.
Good leadership is not just about having the loudest voice in the room. It is about understanding the problems we face, listening to people affected by them, and figuring out how to make things better. That has been a consistent focus of Hannah’s career.
My career has long focused on health care law and policy, so I find Hannah’s approach to that key public concern especially encouraging. Our health care system is enormously complex, often chaotic, and insufficiently focused on health outcomes and affordability. Maine people feel the chaos, cost, and inadequacy as they struggle to afford insurance, find a primary or specialty care provider, or maintain prescription drug therapy when it’s prohibitively expensive.
Ideal solutions will require concerted, nationwide action and investment. Hannah knows we can’t wait for Washington to get there, which may take years even after we reawaken Congress by sending Democratic majorities to the House and Senate. That’s why she’s pledging to create a public health insurance option in Maine. It will not eliminate private or employer-sponsored coverage but will provide another choice — a state-backed plan designed to provide affordable, reliable coverage and use the state’s leverage to help bring down costs.
Her health care plan recognizes something that is especially important in Maine: having coverage does not mean much if you cannot find someone to care for you. She has proposed investing in primary care, strengthening maternity and reproductive health care, and recruiting and retaining more health care workers, particularly in rural communities.
I believe Hannah is the leader we need to seek real improvements in this challenging arena: a governor willing to dig into the details and stay focused on getting results.
We can’t ignore the extraordinary headwinds that any state leader will face from what I view as our currently corrupt and self-absorbed federal government. President Donald Trump’s Republicans have concentrated wealth and power by funding their tax cuts for the ultra-rich with massive cuts to health care and other basic services, while brutally attacking rights and institutions we have long taken for granted.
I think Maine needs a governor who will resist these abuses of power, acting creatively to counteract them to the full extent that a state can do so, while we await a reckoning and a change in direction in Washington. I believe Hannah has the tenacity, the energy, the intelligence, and the compassion we need to lead Maine in this incredibly challenging chapter of our history.
The next four years will bring challenges we can predict and, undoubtedly, some we cannot. Maine needs a governor who cares deeply about the people they serve and knows how to turn good ideas into action. I’ve seen Hannah Pingree deliver exactly that for years in her other leadership roles. I’m excited to be working to elect her as Maine’s next governor.