All across the country, members of our State Climate Policy Network (SCPN) are fighting to make an impact on climate change in their communities. We have individuals in our Network from all 50 states, each experiencing climate change differently in their local areas and finding unique solutions to build resiliency efforts.

Senator Chloe Maxmin is a 29-year-old community organizer from Nobleboro, Maine who began her climate activism when she was twelve. After flipping a State House seat that had never been won by a Democrat in 2018, she introduced a Green New Deal for Maine which was passed and signed into law in 2019. She now serves as the youngest female State Senator in Maine’s history after defeating the Republican incumbent and Minority Leader. We spoke with Sen. Maxmin about the power of community and what it looks like to create effective, justice-oriented climate policy in rural Maine.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Good afternoon, Senator Maxmin, thank you so much for making the time to speak today! Let’s start with a little bit about your background. You are one of Maine’s youngest state senators ever and also the first Democrat to ever represent your House district. I’d love to hear how you got interested in politics. What was your entry point, what made you decide to run for office?

I get that question a lot, and my answer is always the same. It’s simple but it’s the truth, which is that I just really love my home. I grew up in rural Maine in a district that consistently goes red. But the community that I grew up in is not only incredibly beautiful but also very kind and caring; we share values that extend beyond party, and we are built on our shared humanity here. Being raised in this place with that kind of community, I’ve always loved it so much. As I’ve done different work over the years, I’ve come back to the inevitable truth that all of the good change that we want to see in this world relates back to politics and policies, and even more fundamentally, who we elect, because they’re the ones making policies. So I spent a lot of time on the outside of the system trying to influence it, trying to figure out how citizens could build the most effective political power. While I think that that is where my heart lies, and it’s so important in this world, we also need to be thinking about who we’re electing, how they’re running their campaigns, and how they’re acting when they’re in office. I decided to run for office to try and bridge that movement and electoral work. Also, after Trump was elected in 2016, I think we all saw how the rural red vote has gained so much political dominance. I live in these districts that voted for Trump, that went from blue to red. And I think there’s an opportunity here to figure out how you campaign in a way that’s rooted in values that can try and swing some of these trends in the other direction.

I’m curious to hear you talk a little bit more about the inside game versus outside game approach to politics. I think that question of, do you want to be an advocate/organizer who works from the outside or do you want to take a strategic approach to changing institutions/policy from the inside, is really interesting. It sounds like you kind of have one foot in each of those and I’d love to hear a little more about that.

Before I ran for office I did so much grassroots organizing and worked on a bunch of different campaigns to kind of see how that was, and I always felt like there was a huge gap between movement power, and the kind of political power that influenced elected representatives. I think the climate movement is an interesting example. The climate movement has been organizing for decades for change, and the on-the-ground metrics are really impressive. We see hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets, millions all over the world — who could ignore that? This is starting to change now, but historically that hasn’t really translated into political power, so always movement power but no climate policy that even remotely matches that kind of organizing. I also think about campaigns as well, which are ground zero for meshing movement politics and electoral politics. Our campaigns are just really rote, they’re very data-driven, they’re very extractive, they’re extremely stressful and toxic. They don’t have the community-building of movement campaigns and they also don’t build the type of political power that you need for good policy, but they have the potential to do both. 

And then once you’re in office […] I always thought it would be so clear, as an elected official, what my community wanted because that was my experience as a constituent. Once I was elected, I realized that in more conservative communities it can be hard to tell what your community wants. There are so many instances where you have equally represented polar opposite opinions yelling at you to do two different things. All of this is to say that it’s really important, both for citizens and elected officials, for there to be super sharp movements on the outside. I think that those movements need to be issue-based but they also need to be inherently political: they need to be focusing on policy, targeting legislators, putting pressure on the political system, while staying rooted in the community and in community organizing. I think one way to kind of start that transition is through campaigns because they have this opportunity to build something that is rooted in your community, but also has the express intent of holding you accountable as an elected official. 

I’m also curious to hear a little bit more about what made you so passionate about climate justice?

It goes back to what I was talking about earlier, which is that I really care about where I come from. I see the greatest threat to our community and our land as climate change. Here in Maine, our entire economy is based on our natural resources, whether it’s fishing, logging, snowmobiling, or tourism, all the reasons why people come to Maine. Without the health of our environment, our economy is really at stake, and so is our heritage and culture. That’s why I focus on it, but I think that climate change is also profoundly intersectional, and that the climate crisis is illuminating, for many people, these deep inequities in our society. In rural spaces, talking about climate change is one of the ways that we talk about equity and economic justice, so I think that’s really important for rural communities as well.

One of the things that you ran on was this idea of a Green New Deal for Maine. What was the original vision for that bill, and how has it changed over time?

When I was campaigning in 2018 for my State House District, I was really surprised because I rarely heard people talk about climate change. But, I often would hear folks talk about how we want people to go ice fishing every winter, and all the worries about there being enough rain for the farm for the summer, these more rooted ways that we talk about how our climate is changing without actually using those words. When I was elected, I knew I really wanted to work on climate legislation, but I wanted to do it in a way that was really representative of my community. That was my big thing campaigning. I want to represent everybody in our community and not just kind of parrot what other people are doing. Another thing that I think about a lot is that we often talk about politics on a linear spectrum from left to right, but I actually think it’s much more curvy and loopy and intersects in a lot of places. I really wanted to show that working on progressive climate stuff is actually exactly what rural conservative communities are asking for. That’s why I called it the Green New Deal because I really wanted to draw attention to how we translate those progressive values into a rural conservative context. I wanted everyone to pay attention to that theme in Maine, which I know is echoed in other parts of the country, that our environmental policy is really privileged and not rooted in working class experiences, and is not resonating with enough folks to actually get the kind of traction that we need. I wanted to do it differently. 

The original bill had five different parts and all those parts but two got stripped for various reasons. That made me sad because when you’re elected, you’re like, ‘Okay, I want to work on climate stuff!’ But then you have to submit an actual specific bill and figure out things like, what does an actual just transition policy look like for Maine? Nobody knows that pathway, because that policy pathway has not been laid out. One part of this bill would have created the Green New Deal Task Force which was going to bring frontline communities to the table to chart out that just transition pathway for Maine. Then, it was going to establish the Just Transition Commission, which was going to also be led by frontline communities and folks who were displaced or [were going to] be displaced by the energy transition [as a way to] monitor how Maine was transitioning and make sure that it was actually just and equitable. I was super excited about those pieces and the justice and equity components embedded in them. They got stripped because our Governor was working on the Maine Climate Council which is a slightly more moderate entity, less focused on a just transition. They’ve been doing good work and we did integrate some of our language into the Climate Council Bill, but it is a different entity. One of the components that stayed in the bill has to do with apprentices on clean energy projects. I worked a lot with the unions on the Green New Deal and this was a piece that they were really excited about. It basically makes sure that a certain percentage of workers on large-scale renewable energy projects are from Federal or Maine Department of Labor apprenticeship programs. That’s important because we’re always talking about how people don’t want to get trained for an industry that won’t have jobs for them, but then you also hear the industry complaining about how there aren’t trained people for the business that they want to create. This fills in that pipeline and guarantees folks in apprenticeship programs that they’re going to have a job, and then the developers know that they’ll have trained people as well. The other piece of the bill that we just improved this last session has to do with school decarbonization and basically making sure that schools, and therefore property taxpayers — property taxes are a huge issue in Maine, as they are everywhere — have all the support that they need as they’re transitioning to renewable energy and navigating all the different renewable energy standards and those complex landscapes.

One of the dynamics that I hear you talking about is this tension between having some sense of where we need to go but, because it’s never been done before and also because there’s so much opposition and disinformation around climate action and what’s actually possible, it’s really hard to envision how we get there logistically, concretely, and in a way that you can put in a bill. It sounds like you’re making really good steps in the right direction.

We’re trying! It’s small steps and politics has a way of whittling things down, but we’ll get there. 

I appreciate that you’re still optimistic.

We’ll see how long that lasts. But you have to have hope if you’re going to fight, and you have to have something to fight for.

Getting back to talking about campaigns, you’re obviously someone who’s thought really deeply about campaigns as something that can be transformative for a community and a constituency beyond just being the tool that you as the candidate use to get yourself elected. I think conventional wisdom says that climate change is a lefty issue — it’s not something that appeals to working class folks, it’s not something that appeals to people in more conservative areas. Your campaigns have been in some ways proof that not only is climate change an issue that everyone has a stake in, but it’s also an issue that you can champion in those districts if you do it right. I’m curious if you have any more thoughts on that?

I think that’s exactly true. I’ve knocked on about 20,000 doors in past cycles, which I say not to brag but just because I feel like my sense of my community is not yet outdated. The time that I’ve spent knocking doors has really changed my identity as a progressive organizer. I realized that when you take the time to listen to folks who the left has traditionally ignored or overlooked because they’re rural or they have an “R” next to their name, there’s actually not as much space as we think between the two sides. There are clearly exceptions, and I’m certainly not saying that the extreme violence and racism and xenophobia on the right is okay at all, but I think most folks are more moderate, and they’re just as frustrated with our government, as I am and you are. We come at it from different places and have different experiences and different reasons, but I think the core foundations are very similar. That gives us a lot to build off of because we’re talking about values and identity, which is more foundational than policy or wonky jargon, which is usually what we hear in the campaign sphere. I think there’s a lot of potential to connect human-to-human and have real conversations that build super solid foundations for policy that might be surprising, or that might push the needle in ways that were not expected from rural places.

As with everything in organizing and politics, it comes down to self-interest and finding where that overlaps and what you can do with that. So, 20,000 doors is a lot of doors to knock! Do you have any funny or heartwarming stories from your campaigns?

Oh, I have so many stories. One of the ones that I tell a lot because it was really impactful was in 2018, and I was knocking on these folks’ doors who were down in their garage working on their snowmobiles. The owner came up and, at the time, we were debating Medicaid expansion in Maine. He asked if I support Medicaid expansion and I said, ‘yes, I do.’ He kind of pointed up his driveway like, ‘ok, you can leave now.’ And because I’m me, I thought, ‘oh we agree! That’s nice, he’s giving me some time back!’ But I could quickly tell by his body language that he did not agree with me, and that really surprised me because we had talked for maybe 20 seconds.

I felt like, hold on a second, what just happened there, I’d love to hear your thinking. I don’t care if you vote for me or not, I’d just love to hear where you’re coming from. He told me a story about how he grew up in the house with no running water or electricity and he’s built his life himself, and part of that involves paying for health care and not relying on Medicaid. He had a really different perspective on it that I could very much understand and that made a lot of sense to me, and I think the fact that he could tell the story and that I could hear him meant a lot to him. He ended up voting for me and so did his whole family which was really sweet, but it was also such a lesson in the ways that we’re trained to react. He reacted to me as a Democrat and then I reacted to him but when we just kind of took the time to calm down and listen to each other, there was a lot there to uncover.

It’s such a different orientation. On the campaigns that I’ve volunteered with, there’s been such an emphasis on getting to as many doors as you can, and if you get a bad response you just mark it in your notes, keep moving, and talk to the friendly people. What you’re saying is that you actually take the time to engage with every single person and meet them where you can and where they’re at, and that there’s something really powerful about that.

It’s so true, and it wouldn’t have been possible without my campaign manager Canyon Woodward, to give credit where credit is due. We barely used any resources from the state party and one of the things that we did was create our own canvassing universe. By doing that and not really doing what the state party usually does, we ended up talking every day to people who had never been contacted by Democratic campaigns or canvassers in their entire voting history. There were a lot of people who hadn’t been contacted since 2008 when Obama was getting elected. So it’s no wonder we’re not hearing these stories, it’s no wonder we’re not winning these districts, because we’re not talking to people in any kind of meaningful way. Instead, we’re really focused on extractive politics: how many people can you talk to, how much can we squeeze out of our existing base. We’re not doing the careful meaningful work of relationships.

It strikes me that that’s also not really fair to the voters. There’s this sense of frustration in more progressive political spaces that these voters understand that our policies are actually in their interest, like rural voters don’t get it or that they don’t see that we’re actually trying to help them. I’m hearing from you that sometimes that’s because we’re not talking to them, we’re not trying to figure out how to communicate that message, so why are we surprised when they feel like they’ve been forgotten or left behind or ignored?

Exactly. I’ve come to feel like the idea that all these people are voting against their self-interest is really condescending. If we’re not listening to them, if we’re completely ignoring the reality that rural people have, then they’re looking at the left and seeing that no one has ever taken the time to come talk to them. They feel like all the left policies are urban, and even though you’re frustrated, you don’t want to vote for a Democrat.

As you were saying before, Maine is extremely connected to its natural resources, but it’s not really one of the first places that comes to mind when I think about hotbeds of progressive political action. I’m curious if you’ve seen the climate movement in Maine grow or change over the past few years?

I think it is growing. I don’t think it’s necessarily because of politics, I think it has more to do with evolving organizing on the ground. There are some amazing organizations that are really rethinking power and justice and what that looks like when you’re organizing in a very White rural state. I think that’s really shifting the dynamics here and some of that is spilling into policy and influencing policy, but I don’t think that policy or policymakers are the origin of this new phase of climate organizing. This year we had a bill to create a consumer-owned utility for the state. There were a lot of young folks organizing to create a Youth Impact Commission, so there were different bills that these folks were organizing around that are rooted in community and just approaching the process differently.

I believe your bill was the first Green New Deal proposal to be endorsed by an AFL-CIO chapter, and I know you mentioned working with labor on it. Can you talk a little bit more about that — especially in the context of some of these dynamics we’re talking about around what it looks like to actually get people who are typically seen as opponents of climate action to actually buy in and be part of the process? Do you see opportunities to keep building on that and going forward?

From the first or the second conversation that I had about the Green New Deal bill, the labor folks were in the conversation. I think oftentimes what we see in climate organizing and progressive organizing, in general, is a person or an organization with more power and privilege or access coming in with an agenda and vision and trying to get people to join them. I think the process of creating that vision together is just so much more empowering for everybody. It makes sense to me that no one would want to join someone else’s vision with no input, so having the bill start with that kind of inclusive conversation was really important.

As an elected official, I would say most of us don’t know everything that there is to know — that’s a very fair thing to say. But there are advocates who know everything that there is to know about their issue, and so I feel a kind of a responsibility to be a conduit or to support the work that organizers are doing. The piece of the Green New Deal about the apprenticeship programs came from labor folks toward the end of the bill process. It was helpful for me as a policymaker to kind of take myself out of it and make space for the experts and the organizers to shape the bill.

That feels reflective of the approach that you took in your campaigns, of seeing your job as figuring out what the constituency wants, what their needs are, what their interests are, and then how to build toward that through the electoral process.

Exactly. And you obviously have to work with folks who you trust, and not just blindly do whatever any interest group tells you to do, but I really trust the AFL folks here in Maine, so that worked well.

Switching gears a little bit, I’m curious to hear about your experiences being such a relatively young person in elected office. Personally, I feel very inspired by candidates and legislators like you, especially given that so much of the grassroots climate leadership is coming from young people and students. On the other hand, I imagine it could be really challenging and in some ways really lonely. I’m curious what that’s been like for you in terms of how you’ve navigated those dynamics, but also if there’s anything you feel like you’ve brought into politics that is unique to you being a young person? 

First and foremost, I really believe that we need all different people with all different identities and backgrounds in office. If we’re just electing wealthier, older, White people, our policy is just going to reflect that perspective. You can’t really help that one, so we need to really support different folks getting into office. It’s also important to say that, in states like Maine that have citizen legislators where you don’t get paid full time and it’s such a weird lifestyle, [being a policymaker is] just not accessible to everybody. I’m lucky that my other work allows me to work at night or while I’m in session.

I always want to say that there are so many other ways to deeply influence policy without getting elected, and that we need folks in all the roles to move everything forward. But that being said, when I started running, I was 25 and there was definitely that ageist thing where people don’t really take us seriously, or you have to prove yourself a little bit more — I ran against old White guys every time I had an election. Preparing for those debates I knew that I had to be more prepared to prove myself a little bit more and that it’s just going to be a different dynamic, and that’s just how it goes. But slowly, over the years, people have seen that I am capable, I can handle it, it’s not beyond the powers of a young person to be really effective in office. The dynamic inside is almost more challenging for me. I think the average age of the Maine Legislature is somewhere in the high 50s. Young people have a really different way of looking at policymaking and how it’s gone historically, where it is now, and how we need to push back. The establishment is really strong and the power of leadership is really strong. I’ve seen that it’s the younger folks who are more likely to push back and say, ‘I don’t think this is the way that it should go,’ or it’s the younger folks who have a much stronger equity and social justice analysis. That often leaves the younger legislators a little bit more exposed going against this massive power. I think that’s important, those perspectives need to be articulated. It does make one’s life a little bit harder for good reasons, but those dynamics do start to emerge.

That makes so much sense — it’s a long road! I want to end on a more positive note, because this has already been a tough summer in terms of climate disasters. I wonder if there’s anything that’s making you feel hopeful at this moment, whether in the realm of policy that you’re working on or planning to work on, or anything else?

I find a lot of hope in so many of the young folks that I see organizing in Maine and in other parts of the country via social media. I just think there’s so many brave, bold voices out there who I want to follow. I really want to follow their lead and I take a lot of inspiration from that. On the more explicitly political end, I’ve been really inspired by so many of the advocates up in the statehouse, the grassroots organizers, the smaller organizations, the citizens who come up. Just the people who are really influencing policy in really powerful, rooted ways. Statehouses can be really insular and they can be very dominated by lobbyists who get paid a lot of money, but to see that power shift just a little bit is really exciting.

Featured Image: Courtesy of Senator Maxmin