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

The congresswoman from the 1st District is Chellie Pingree, a Democrat elected in 2008. She succeeded Democratic Rep. Tom Allen, who unsuccessfully challenged Republican Sen. Susan Collins that year. 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 was already an experienced legislator before coming to Washington, 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 Designs Company, distributed 100,000 mail-order catalogs. She started her political career in local offices on the island, including serving as tax assessor and 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. 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 than 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. Pingree won 55%-45%.

Pingree has been a consistently loyal Democrat. She was named to the Rules Committee, a prime assignment for a freshman. 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. During the health care debate, she ardently backed a government-run public option and criticized provisions that were added to appease anti-abortion Democrats. She took a strong interest in environmental issues, helping to form the House Sustainable Energy and Environmental Coalition and introducing a bill forcing BP to pay royalties on the oil from its massive Gulf spill in 2010.

In her 2010 re-election campaign, Pingree’s opponent was alternative energy company owner Dean Scontras, who got support from tea party activists. The Maine Republican Party ran ads accusing Pingree of taking trips on the corporate jet of her fiancée, hedge-fund billionaire Donald Sussman, an arrangement they said made the former Common Cause leader appear hypocritical. Scontras also sought to tie her to liberal House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The nation’s anti-incumbent sentiment helped him close the gap, even with far less money than Pingree. But her longtime familiarity with the district’s voters helped her pull off a win with 57% of the vote.