Janet Mills Net Worth, Family, Husband, Education, Children, Age, Biography, Political Career

Janet Mills Biography

Janet Trafton Mills is an American politician and lawyer serving as the 75th governor of Maine since January 2019. She previously served as the Maine Attorney General on two occasions.

A member of the Democratic Party, Mills was first elected Maine 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 Republican 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 of Maine in the 2018 election, and she won, defeating Republican Shawn Moody and Independent Terry Hayes. On January 2, 2019, she became Maines first female governor.

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, 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 she 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 JD in 1976 and was admitted to the bar.

Janet Mills Net Worth

Janet Mills Net Worth is $ 100 Million in 2022.

Janet Mills Family, Parents

Mills was born in Farmington, Maine, the daughter of Katherine Louise and Sumner Peter Mills Jr. Her mother was a schoolteacher, and her father was a lawyer who served as U.S. Attorney for Maine in the 1950s. She is the sister of Peter Mills, a former Republican state senator and gubernatorial candidate in 2006 and 2010, Dora Anne Mills and Paul Mills.

Janet Mills Husband, Children

In 1985 Mills married real estate developer Stanley Kuklinski, with whom she had five stepdaughters and three stepgrandsons and two stepgranddaughters. Kuklinski died due to the effects of a stroke on September 24, 2014.

Janet Mills Career and Achievement

Mills was Maines first female criminal prosecutor 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 the Democratic primary to replace then-Republican congresswoman Olympia Snowe. She placed 3rd, losing to John Baldacci.

Mills co-founded the Maine Womens Lobby and was elected to its board of directors in 1998.

In 2002, Mills was elected to the Maine House of Representatives as a Democrat. There, she served on the judiciary, criminal justice, and appropriations committees.

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 was elected and became the 55th Attorney General of Maine on January 6, 2009. When Republicans gained control of the Maine Legislature in 2010, Mills, a Democrat, was not reelected to another term. 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 firms Litigation Group in its Augusta, Maine office. After Democrats regained control of the legislature in the 2012 elections, she was again chosen to be 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 being attorney general, due to many disputes between them over the legality of some of LePages policies. On January 28, 2015, LePage requested the Maine Supreme Judicial Courts opinion as to whether it was legal for the governors office to need the Attorney Generals offices 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 LePage 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 administrations.

Governor of Maine

Elections

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 competitors 46%.

In the general election, Mills faced Republican businessman 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 Carons endorsement a week before the polls closed, Mills won the election with 50.9% to Moodys 43.2%. She became Maines 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 states history.

Millss 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. These numbers, however, are less than those of the 2nd District Congressional race of the same year, in which Democrat Jared Golden spent $131 per vote and incumbent Republican Bruce Poliquin spent $95.

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