Janet Mills: Education, Early Career, and Rise to Maine Governorship

Janet Trafton Mills, born on December 30, 1947, in Farmington, Maine, is an American politician and lawyer currently serving as the 75th Governor of Maine, since assuming office on January 2, 2019. Her journey to the Blaine House is marked by a diverse educational background and a career dedicated to public service. Mills's career has been marked by a number of firsts for women in Maine’s historically male politics, from district attorney to attorney general to governor.

Early Life, Education, and Personal Life

Janet Mills was born and raised in Farmington, Maine, a place she still proudly calls home. She is the third of five children of politician Sumner Peter Mills Jr. and schoolteacher Katherine Louise Coffin Mills. She lived in Farmington until about age five, when her family relocated to Gorham for about nine years while her father was a US attorney. The family then returned to Farmington, where she was tutored at home for a year while recovering from surgeries for scoliosis. She graduated from Farmington High School (now Mt. Blue High School) in 1965.

Janet learned the value of hard work at a young age, delivering newspapers in the early morning and serving meals in the evening at a local diner. She briefly attended Colby College from 1965 to 1967 before dropping out and moving to San Francisco. After a few months, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and worked as a psychiatric nursing assistant before enrolling in the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Mills spent an academic year studying at the Sorbonne in France and backpacked around Europe. She graduated from UMass Boston with a bachelor's degree in French in 1970. In 1973, she began studying law at the University of Maine School of Law. While a law student, she interned for the Cumberland County District Attorney’s office, American Civil Liberties Union, and the Center for Law and Social Policy. Mills received her Juris Doctor and passed the bar in 1976.

In 1985, she met and married the love of her life, Stan Kuklinski, a widower with five young daughters, ages four to sixteen. Janet and Stan moved back to Farmington, and she became a full-time mom to five daughters, who she helped raise while working full-time herself. After the children were grown, they raised standardbred horses and moved to Farmington. Following a stroke, Stan passed away in 2014.

Early Legal Career

Janet first entered public service as an Assistant Attorney General, where she prosecuted homicides and other major crimes. In September 1976, Attorney General Joe Brennan hired Mills to work as an assistant attorney general in the Office of the Maine Attorney General. Assigned to the criminal division, she prosecuted murder, tax evasion, and fraud cases.

Four years later, Brennan, then the governor, appointed her the district attorney for Androscoggin, Franklin, and Oxford Counties to fill a vacancy. She successfully ran for election to fill out the term six months later and was reelected three times. In that role, she saw firsthand how the criminal justice system frequently failed victims of domestic violence.

Political Involvement and Maine House of Representatives

Prior to her own campaign, Mills became active in politics in the mid-1970s. She served as a delegate to the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas, and then co-founded the Maine Women’s Lobby in 1978. She worked on Brennan’s 1978 gubernatorial campaign and Edward Kennedy’s 1980 presidential bid and served as a delegate to the 1980 Democratic National Convention.

In 1994, Mills resigned as the district attorney to pursue the Democratic nomination for a seat in the US Congress. After being defeated in the primary, she co-chaired Brennan’s unsuccessful 1994 gubernatorial campaign and ran for attorney general, where she was narrowly defeated. In early 1995, she joined her brother Peter Mill’s law firm in Skowhegan, Maine.

She ran for office again in 2002-this time for a seat in Maine’s House of Representatives, representing the Eighty-Ninth District-and won. She was reelected three times. There, she served on the judiciary, criminal justice, and appropriations committees.

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Attorney General of Maine

In 2008, the Maine Legislature elected Mills the attorney general, the first and only woman to hold the job. She served as Attorney General from 2009 to 2011 and again from 2013 to 2019.

As the state attorney general, Mills worked to protect consumer rights, health care, and civil rights. During her first term, she supported the marriage equality bill, refused to challenge the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, and suggested legislation to protect against deceptive free trial offers, a bill that became law. During subsequent terms, she tackled many of the same issues but increasingly came in conflict with then Governor Paul LePage, a conservative Republican whose use of executive authority resulted in multiple lawsuits with Mills. Mills claimed many of his actions, such as his attempt to deny eligible young adults from receiving Medicaid benefits and to carry out a voter-approved expansion of Medicaid, were unlawful.

Election as Governor

In November 2018, Mills defeated Republican Shawn Moody by 7 percentage points to win the governorship. She was sworn in on January 2, 2019, as Maine’s first woman governor. In her inaugural speech, she announced her priorities as expanding Medicaid, reducing health insurance premiums, leading a coordinated state response to the opioid addiction crisis, and setting a 50 percent renewable energy target. She firmly retained the position in the 2022 election as the sole Democratic nominee, supporting abortion rights and prioritizing environmental issues.

Her gubernatorial victory signified voters’ rejection of LePage’s leadership and an embrace of more progressive policies. In her historic 2018 victory, Janet earned more votes than any governor in state history and is the first governor since 1966 to win a majority of the vote for her first term.

Key Policy Initiatives and Accomplishments

During her first full day in office, Mills signed an executive order to expand Medicaid. Within her first two months, she ended a moratorium on wind farm construction; joined the United States Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of states committed to meeting the Paris Agreement emissions goals; and initiated treatment- and prevention-oriented opioid policy. She also supported an Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution.

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Mills's efforts concerning health care expanded health care to 90,000 people, and her Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan invested millions in job training programs. In 2022, Mills signed the Maine state supplemental budget. Notably, this budget included free community college for pandemic-affected students.

Under her leadership, Maine’s GDP has experienced the strongest GDP growth in New England and outperformed the economic growth of larger states like California, New York, and Virginia. During the COVID-19 crisis, Janet has worked tirelessly to support Maine’s small businesses and workers. Janet’s administration provided significant funding to Maine’s public school systems to help them provide safe in-person learning opportunities and to adjust to remote-learning options.

Commitment to Addressing Maine's Challenges

Mills is determined to ensure that every Maine person and every Maine family has access to affordable, high-quality health care, saving lives, and building Maine’s economy back stronger than ever before.

Recognizing the urgency of the opioid crisis, Mills has worked to:

Rein in prescribing practices that encourage addiction and put opioids in the hands of people who misuse and divert them.
Make naloxone, also known as Narcan, available to every family and agency that needs it.
Expand drug courts and provide medication-assisted treatment and supportive services to participants.
Provide treatment slots and supportive therapy across the state, along the lines of Vermont’s “hub and spokes” model, providing a “hub” of medication treatment to reduce chemical dependency and “spokes” of primary care, intensive outpatient services, and assistance with housing, employment, and so on.
Provide prevention programs in our schools and communities, focusing on self-esteem and decision-making skills, starting in early childhood, and identifying and addressing “adverse childhood experiences” that contribute to substance-use disorders later.

Mills is also focused on strengthening Maine's economy by:

Bringing our infrastructure up to modern standards, including high-speed internet.
Building a first-rate education system that will attract young families and train the next generation of Maine entrepreneurs and workers - including fully funding the state’s education obligations.
Taking stock of our competitive advantages, including beautiful and spacious abandoned mill buildings, a solid bedrock of granite, and cold temperatures.
Investing in research and development.

A Pragmatic Leader

Along the way, Mills has developed a reputation as a pragmatic problem-solver, a leader who listens to all sides and tries to build consensus. She is a fierce champion for the people of Maine, and her tireless work on their behalf has served as a powerful example of the positive impact Democratic pro-choice women can make in executive leadership positions.

Future Aspirations

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." However, 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.

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