This story will be updated.
AUGUSTA, Maine — Gov. Janet Mills will focus on costs in a Tuesday speech that was colored by her campaign against U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, rolling out an affordability plan centered on $300 relief checks for most Mainers.
The Democratic governor was set to deliver the final State of the State address of her tenure in the Blaine House. Under normal circumstances, it is a time for a governor to use the bully pulpit for the final time and cement their legacy by convincing the Legislature to embrace their goals.
But Mills is trying at age 78 to knock off a five-term incumbent in Collins, an electoral survivor whose seat is at the center of the national map in 2026. The governor is trying to win a heavily nationalized battle with Republicans while contending with a stiff primary against political newcomer Graham Platner, who has captured attention while campaigning to Mills’ left.
The governor’s speech showed her reckoning with these obstacles and targeted President Donald Trump’s policies without naming him. Relief checks are at the center of her “Affordability Agenda,” which recognizes costs as the dominant issue in U.S. politics. Nearly half of Americans said it was hard to meet everyday costs in a Politico poll released last month.
“From health care, housing and utilities to the price of a pickup truck, groceries and life-saving medications, costs are too high,” she will say, according to a prepared version of the speech.
The relief checks will be met with resistance from Republicans as an election-year play by Mills to put her name on a mailer going to approximately 725,000 Mainers. They would cost more than $218 million. That and another $70 million in spending aimed at housing would come from the state’s rainy day fund, which sits at a legal maximum of $1 billion.
Mills has campaigned against Trump as much as Collins. Her sharp February exchange with the president at the White House over Maine’s laws allowing transgender girls to play in scholastic sports according to their gender identity prompted a 2026 referendum effort from conservatives.
Her speech also came a week into a federal immigration enforcement surge into Maine. She only referred to Trump as “the president” in the speech, but she doubled down on past criticism of his immigration, tariff and health care policies. She was set to open it by saying agents are trying to “intimidate and silence us.”
“Tonight, I say to the people of Maine: We will not be intimidated. We will not be silenced,” she said.
There was unprecedented security in the State House for the formal event after which VIPs are ushered across Capitol Str to a private reception at the governor’s mansion. The lobby was packed with members of the Capitol Police and the governor’s security detail. Ropes divided the third-floor hallway through which Mills will walk into the House chamber for the speech.
Top Republican lawmakers will give a pre-recorded response to Mills’ speech, which is being carried live on Maine Public at 7 p.m. Sen. Rick Bennett, a former Maine Republican Party from Oxford who is running as an independent in the crowded race to replace Mills, is set to respond on behalf of the few unenrolled members in the Legislature.
