Janet Mills
Janet Trafton Mills is an American politician and lawyer serving since 2019 as the 75th governor of Maine. She served four nonconsecutive two-year terms as Maine Attorney General, from 2009 to 2011 and from 2013 to 2019.
A member of the Democratic Party, Mills was first elected attorney general by the Maine Legislature on January 6, 2009, succeeding G. Steven Rowe. Her second term began on January 3, 2013, after the term of William Schneider. She was the first woman to hold the position. Before her election, she served in the Maine House of Representatives, representing the towns of Farmington and Industry. Her party nominated her for governor in the 2018 election, and she won, defeating Republican Shawn Moody and independent Terry Hayes. On January 2, 2019, she became Maine's first female governor. Mills was reelected in 2022.
On October 14, 2025, Mills launched her campaign in the 2026 United States Senate election in Maine, seeking the Democratic nomination to face five-term incumbent Republican Susan Collins.
Early life and education
Mills was born in Farmington, Maine, on December 30, 1947, the daughter of Katherine Louise and Sumner Peter Mills Jr. Her mother was a schoolteacher and Congregationalist, while her father was a lawyer who served as U.S. Attorney for Maine in the 1950s. Mills graduated from Farmington High School in 1965. As a teenager, she spent nearly a year bedridden in a full-body cast due to severe scoliosis, which was corrected surgically.Mills briefly attended Colby College before moving to San Francisco, where she worked as a nursing assistant in a psychiatric hospital. She later enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Boston, from which she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1970. During her time at UMass Boston, Mills traveled through Western Europe and became fluent in French. In 1973, she began attending the University of Maine School of Law, and in 1974 was a summer intern in Washington, D.C., for civil rights attorney Charles Morgan Jr. of the American Civil Liberties Union. Mills graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1976 and was admitted to the bar.
Early political career
Mills was appointed as Maine's first female criminal prosecutor by Governor Joe Brennan, and was an assistant attorney general from 1976 to 1980, prosecuting homicides and other major crimes. In 1980, she was elected district attorney for Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties, a position to which she was reelected three times. She was the first woman district attorney in New England. In 1994, Mills was an unsuccessful candidate for the United States Congress in Maine's 2nd congressional district, losing the Democratic primary to John Baldacci.Mills co-founded the Maine Women's Lobby and was elected to its board of directors in 1998.
In 2000, Mills served as a field coordinator for Bill Bradley's 2000 presidential campaign in Maine. In 2002, she was elected to the Maine House of Representatives. There, she served on the judiciary, criminal justice, and appropriations committees. She was reelected in 2004, 2006, and 2008.
Attorney general of Maine
Mills was elected to her fourth term when the Joint Convention convened in December 2008 to elect the new attorney general. She became Maine's 55th attorney general on January 6, 2009. When Republicans gained control of the Maine legislature in 2010, Mills was not reelected. In January 2011, she was elected vice chair of the Maine Democratic Party. She joined the law firm Preti Flaherty in February 2011 as a lawyer with the firm's Litigation Group in its Augusta office. After Democrats regained control of the legislature in the 2012 elections, Mills was again chosen as attorney general, resigned as vice chair of the Maine Democratic Party, and took the oath of office as attorney general on January 7, 2013. She was reelected on December 3, 2014, despite the Maine Senate coming under Republican control.Republican governor Paul LePage opposed Mills for attorney general due to many disputes between them over the legality of some of LePage's policies. On January 28, 2015, he requested the Maine Supreme Judicial Court's opinion as to whether the governor's office needed the attorney general's office's permission to retain outside counsel when the attorney general declines to represent the State in a legal matter. LePage did so after Mills twice declined to represent him in matters she determined had little legal merit, though she approved his requests for outside lawyers. On May 1, 2017, LePage sued Mills, asserting that she had abused her authority by refusing to represent the state in legal matters, or taking a legal view contrary to the LePage administration's.
Governor of Maine
Elections
2018
On July 10, 2017, Mills announced that she would seek the Democratic nomination for governor of Maine in 2018. One of several candidates in the primary, she won the nomination in June, finishing first after four rounds of ranked-choice voting gave her 54% to her closest competitor's 46%.In the general election, Mills faced Republican nominee Shawn Moody, independent Maine State Treasurer Terry Hayes, and independent businessman Alan Caron. Endorsed by every major newspaper in Maine and the Boston Globe, buoyed by major ad buys from Democratic political action committees and receiving Caron's endorsement a week before the polls closed, Mills was elected with 50.9% of the vote to Moody's 43.2%. She became Maine's first female governor, the first Maine gubernatorial candidate to be elected with at least 50% of the vote since Angus King in 1998, and the first to win at least 50% of the vote for a first term since Kenneth M. Curtis in 1966. She received over 320,000 votes, more than any governor in the state's history.
Mills's campaign was aided in part by a Democratic super PAC that financed Maine-themed ads meant to attract young voters on social media. Both Mills and outside groups outspent Moody by an average of $15 per vote cast, for a total of $10.7 million.
2022
Mills ran for reelection in 2022. She faced no opposition in the primaries, making her the Democratic nominee. In the general election, Mills defeated the Republican nominee, former governor Paul LePage, securing a second term. She received over 376,934 votes, breaking the record for the most votes ever cast for a gubernatorial candidate, set four years earlier.Tenure
One of Mills's first acts as governor was to sign an executive order to carry out the expansion of Maine's Medicaid program as called for by a 2017 referendum, something LePage had refused to do. Medicaid expansion was an issue she had campaigned on. Mills also dropped work requirements for Medicaid that LePage requested toward the end of his tenure and that had the Trump administration's approval. She said the work requirements "leave more Maine people uninsured without improving their participation in the workforce".Mills revived the tradition of Maine governors attending Martin Luther King Jr. Day commemoration events in Portland, doing so in 2019.
In September 2019, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres asked Mills to speak at the General Assembly on climate change. Mills told world leaders at the UN that she intends to make Maine carbon neutral by 2045. She was the first sitting Maine governor to address the General Assembly.
On June 11, 2021, Mills announced the end of the state of emergency started on March 15, 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The state of emergency ended on June 30, 2021.
On June 24, 2021, Mills vetoed seven bills, including one that would have closed the Long Creek Youth Development Center, a juvenile prison. The vetoes received harsh rebuke from progressive Democrats in the legislature.
On April 20, 2022, Mills signed into law the Maine state supplemental budget, which included free community college for students of the class of 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
2026 U.S. Senate candidacy
In December 2022, a month after her reelection as governor, Mills told the Portland Press Herald she did not "plan to run for anything else". In November 2024, the same paper reported that she would not rule out a 2026 campaign for Maine's United States Senate seat held by five-term incumbent Republican Susan Collins. Collins is the only Republican representing a state Donald Trump failed to win in any of his three presidential campaigns. She was reelected by eight points over Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon in 2020. Mills endorsed Gideon in that race.In July 2025, NOTUS reported that Mills was still considering entering the race. In August, Axios reported that Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer was actively recruiting Mills to challenge Collins. Later that month, Mills told reporters she might decide whether to enter the race in November.
August also saw the campaign launch of Sullivan Harbor Master Graham Platner, running in the Democratic primary on a progressive-populist platform. Platner was endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders and organized labor. In October, Sanders publicly discouraged Mills from challenging Platner, who had raised over $3.2 million from small donors in the seven weeks since his campaign launch. Axios reported on October 7 that Mills was planning to enter the race by the end of the month and on October 10 that Mills would formally enter the race on October 14, citing a leaked campaign document. The same day, an ActBlue page was launched and a fundraising video was posted to Twitter, but both were deleted.
Mills formally announced her candidacy on October 14. She has said she plans to serve only one term if elected. If elected, she would be the oldest freshman senator in U.S. history at 79 when she is sworn in. In a campaign launch video, she highlighted her opposition to Donald Trump with clips of their confrontation in February 2025. Mills has been endorsed by Senators Chuck Schumer and Catherine Cortez Masto. After she announced her candidacy, Democratic candidates Dan Kleban and Daira Smith-Rodriguez left the race and endorsed Mills.