PORTLAND (NEWS CENTER Maine) — Attorney General Janet Mills has won Maine's 2018 gubernatorial election. She's the state's 75th and first female governor-elect in its 198-year history.
"I do hope this election sends a powerful signal, a message to the women and girls of Maine of any age. There is no obstacle you can not overcome. None! There is nothing you can not do," Mills said in her victory speech Tuesday night.
Mills, a Democrat, will replace term-limited Gov. Paul LePage, who first took office in 2010.
In a concession speech Tuesday night, Republican candidate Shawn Moody said, "we lost."
Breaking glass ceilings isn't anything new for Mills: She was the first woman in Maine to be elected district attorney in 1980 and state attorney general in 2009.
Mills' victory continues Maine's 60-year trend in not electing same-party candidates in consecutive gubernatorial races — it hasn't happened since the 1958 election.
Mills grew up in Farmington and still lives there. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts Boston in 1970 and earned her law degree in 1976 from the University of Maine Law School.
► Watch Governor-elect Janet Mills speak to Mainers Wednesday morning after a historic win here.
Shortly after school, she began her legal work as an assistant AG under Democratic AG Joseph Brennan, a future Maine governor, from 1976-1979, and Republican AG Richard S. Cohen in 1980.
After serving as DA for Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties from 1980-1995, Mills served three terms as a state representative for House District 89, her hometown of Farmington, before being elected by fellow legislators in late 2008 as Maine's 55th attorney general.
When Republicans took control of the Maine House and Senate in 2011, a member of that party replaced Mills as AG, but two years later she was re-elected attorney general.
Mills' older brother Peter, a Republican, was a Maine state legislator for 15 years. He, too, ran for Maine governor — twice, in 2006 and 2010 — but failed to make it past the primary stages.
In a mid-October interview with NEWS CENTER Maine, Mills said she was "running because [she] fe[lt] qualified, ready and energized to turn the state around, turn [it] in a new direction."