“Where is the grass going? It’s being paved over, deliberately, even in the people’s own Rose Garden. Most Mainers feel it in their backyards: life is no longer affordable, and too many feel shut out of our community.

I’ve spent ten years in the last mile, where the grass won’t grow: going places others won’t go to treat neigh bors the system wrote off. I’ve watched Mainers ration prescriptions while pharmaceutical lobbyists write the rules. That is not a policy failure. It is a choice policymakers made.

So this movement’s test is simple: do resources reach the people who need them, or the people who rig the system? Health care for all. A home you can afford. Protection for the natural resources our livelihoods depend on. And power returned to those it was taken from: Native Mainers by history, women by bans on their choice, neighbors in recovery by stigma, immigrants by a broken system.

Our Maine historian, Heather Cox Richardson, reminds us these times are not normal. In extraordinary times, Mainers do the impossible. Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose book helped end slavery; Joshua Chamberlain, who held the line at Gettysburg; Frances Perkins, who gave us Social Security; Margaret Chase Smith, whose Declaration of Conscience faced down McCarthyism. Each turned the tide.

Now we turn it again. A real grassroots movement doesn’t just get people to the polls; it gets results to the people. Beat Susan Collins, then heal what her decades enabled. Judge us by this.”