Product Code Database
Janet Trafton Mills (born December 30, 1947) 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 2019, the Central Maine Power Company was granted all necessary permissions to begin work on a corridor running from Beattie Township to a power grid in Lewiston, Maine. Despite Mills's initial skepticism of the proposal and pushback from critics, changes to the budget caused Mills to sign the agreement.
Mills has also enacted regulatory standards for the quality of water on Indigenous reservations used for sustenance fishing.
In 2023, Mills was elected co-chair of the bipartisan Climate Alliance.
The Firearms Policy Coalition criticized Mills for a series of posts in which she and the organization interacted. Mills reported the FPC for a tweet in which the FPC posted, "Hey @GovJanetMills, Three words: Fuck you. No." in response to news that "Mills is leaving the door open for a possible assault weapons ban following the Lewiston shooting."
Mills opposes red flag laws, instead supporting "yellow flag laws" for gun safety. In 2025, after activists gathered enough signatures to trigger a referendum on implementing a red flag law, Mills endorsed a No vote.
Mills supports transgender athletes' participation in sports that align with their identity. On February 21, 2025, she publicly clashed with President Donald Trump on the issue. Trump threatened to cut federal funding if Mills did not comply with his executive order to prevent transgender women from participating in women's sports. Mills told Trump "see you in court", and later released a statement saying "The State of Maine will not be intimidated by the President's threats."
After Mills's exchange with Trump, Maine's Department of Education was unable to access federal funds for a child nutrition program. The state sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture over the frozen funds, and a judge ordered the administration to unfreeze them. On May 2, 2025, the Trump administration agreed to unfreeze the funds, and Maine agreed to drop the lawsuit.
As governor-elect, Mills said that the use of Native American imagery and nomenclature associated with Maine School District 54 and its Skowhegan high school was "a source of pain and anguish" for the state's Indigenous population. After taking office, she signed into law a measure to ban the use of such references in public schools.
Mills's primary residence is in Farmington, Maine, where she was born and raised. As governor, she resides at the Blaine House, the governor's mansion in Augusta.
|-
|-
|-
|-
|-
|-
|
|
