Rep. Chellie Pingree (D)

The new congresswoman from the 1st District is Chellie Pingree, a Democrat elected in 2008. She succeeds Democratic Rep. Tom Allen, who unsuccessfully challenged Republican Sen. Susan Collins in 2008. Although Maine has a long history of electing women to office, Pingree is the first Democratic woman from Maine elected to Congress.

A veteran of the state Senate, Pingree is already an experienced legislator, but her path to elected office was hardly conventional. She grew up in Minnesota, the granddaughter of Scandinavian immigrants who came to work as dairy farmers. Her parents moved to Minneapolis, where her father was an accountant and her mother a nurse. The city’s anti-war activism during the Vietnam era had a profound influence on Pingree, and she left high school early for alternative education programs on the East Coast. At one program in Worcester, Mass., she met her future husband and followed him to Maine, where they settled on remote North Haven Island in Penobscot Bay. As disciples of the “back to the land” movement, they lived for years in a cabin without running water or electricity and made their living as organic farmers. Although the couple later divorced, Pingree thrived on the island, both politically and professionally. In 1981 she started her own business selling knitting kits. At its peak, the company, the North Island Design Company, distributed 100,000 mail-order catalogs. She started her political career in local offices on the island, including serving as tax assessor and sitting on the planning and school boards.

In 1991, she took her daughter to a local speech by then-Rep. Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, who briefly sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988. The speech inspired Pingree to take her friends seriously when they suggested that she run for an open seat in the state Senate. She went door to door in the traditionally Republican district in Knox County and won. Pingree rose to majority leader in 1996. As leader, she fought back a challenge from pharmaceutical companies and persuaded reluctant parties to agree to a law allowing the state to negotiate prescription drug prices, the first such law in the country.

Pingree left the state Senate in 2001, barred by term limits from seeking re-election. She ran unsuccessfully against Collins in 2002. Shortly after her loss, she received an offer to become president of Common Cause, the Washington, D.C., government and campaign watchdog group. She took the reins of the nonprofit organization just as it had been thrust into the national spotlight by the push to overhaul the nation’s campaign finance laws. That fight was not an easy one; she recalls an often strained relationship with Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a Republican who accused her of injecting partisanship into her work and is said to have pressured her to resign. As president, Pingree also directed Common Cause to lobby against media consolidation in the hands of a few powerful companies.

She left the job in early 2007 to run for the House seat that Allen gave up to campaign for the Senate. Although she had worked for years to limit the influence of money in politics, Pingree had no trouble raising far more of it that any of her five rivals for the Democratic nomination. She mostly eschewed money from political action committees but enjoyed the backing of EMILY’s List, which funds women candidates who support abortion rights. Pingree won the primary with 44% of the vote.

In the general election, she had a decisive fundraising advantage, bringing in $2.2 million compared with her Republican opponent, state Sen. Charles Summers, who raised about $645,000. Summers had run twice before for the 1st District seat, losing the 1994 primary to James Longley and the 2004 general election to Allen. Pingree consistently led in the polls in the Democratic-leaning district. On Election Day, she won 55%-45%.

In Congress, Pingree was named to the Rules Committee, a prime assignment for a freshman, and to the Armed Services Committee. Drawing on her background at Common Cause, Pingree supported a bill creating a voluntary system for candidates to refuse political contributions from lobbyists and political action committees. Pingree’s daughter, Hannah, is following in her mother’s footsteps. She has served in the Maine House of Representatives since 2003, and in 2008 she was elected speaker of the state House.