Governor Mills is Maine’s first female governor. In her record-breaking wins, she received more votes than any governor in Maine history and is the first governor since 1970 to have been elected with a majority of the vote for both terms.
Governor Mills in front of the Maine State flagJanet Trafton Mills took office as the 75th Governor of Maine on January 2, 2019.
As Governor, she guided Maine through a worldwide pandemic with nation-leading outcomes, such as one of the highest rates of vaccination and one of the lowest rates of death in the nation, safeguarding the lives and livelihoods of Maine residents.
Governor Janet Mills’ Leadership: Transforming Maine’s Economy and Enhancing Quality of Life
During her tenure, Maine’s GDP has seen the best GDP growth in New England and surpassed the economic growth of bigger states such as California, New York, and Virginia. Indeed, Maine has seen more economic growth in the past four years than it did in the previous fifteen.
She has extended health care to over 100,000 Mainers, reduced the uninsured rate by more than any other state in the country, funded schools for the first time in Maine’s history, increased the minimum teacher salary, provided free community college, reduced taxes on Maine retirees, boosted the Rainy Day Fund to over $900 million, and given substantial tax relief to Maine residents, among many other bipartisan achievements.
With her Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan, she is committed to filling Maine’s chronic workforce gap, investing tens of millions of dollars in workforce assistance such as education and training, childcare, housing and healthcare, and broadband development.
Governor Mills was born in Farmington, Maine, which remains her hometown today. She is the granddaughter of Aroostook County potato farmers and the daughter of a longtime high school English teacher and U.S. Lawyer for Maine, she learned early in life the importance of hard work, getting up early to sell newspapers and working in the evening serving food at the local diner.
Janet Mills: A Trailblazer in Public Service and Personal Life
In 1985, she married and met the love of her life, her husband, Stan Kuklinski, a widower with five young daughters ranging in age from four to sixteen. They returned to Farmington, and she was a full-time parent and assisted in raising their daughters while working full-time herself. She is currently the proud grandmother of three grandsons and two granddaughters. After a devastating stroke, Stan died in 2014.
Janet initially came into public service as an Assistant Attorney General, prosecuting homicides and other serious crimes. She then was elected District Attorney of Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford Counties, the first woman elected DA in New England. In her position, she witnessed firsthand how the criminal justice system often failed victims of domestic violence. Fed up with the Legislature’s inaction, she helped create the Maine Women’s Lobby to fight for battered and abused women and won election to the Maine House of Representatives herself in 2002.
In 2008, she was chosen by her peers to be the Attorney General of Maine, the first and still the only woman to have ever held the position. She was Attorney General from 2009-2011 and 2013-2019. In her role as Attorney General, she took it upon herself to stand up to those who have attempted to take advantage of Maine people–from taking on fraudulent mortgage lending corporations to assist in keeping Maine people in their homes to taking on big Pharma for their involvement in creating the opioid epidemic and then using those funds to buy overdose-reversal kits that have saved over 1,000 lives, to taking on the fight to preserve health care coverage for young adults.
Governor Janet Mills: Uniting Maine for a Brighter Future
As governor, she’s working to ensure that all Maine people have affordable, high-quality health care, that Maine boasts a robust economy with good-paying jobs in all regions of the state, that all Maine children have access to a world-class education, and that Maine is a place where families can establish roots and bring up their children.
She is a pragmatic problem-solver who is intent on uniting Democrats, Republicans, and Independents to come together in a common cause and propel Maine forward – believing that nobody has a corner on good ideas.
