- chloe maxmin is the fabled political unicorn of these times. coming from a background as a progressive activist from an early age, she won her 2020 race for maine state senate against a formidable opponent, the incumbent republican leader of the state's senate. she did so in district 88, that also voted for senator susan collins. chloe first spoke at bioneers in 2014 when she had recently launched, divest harvard.

starting with just a handful of students, the campaign rapidly ballooned into one of the biggest in the country. it helped spur the local divestment movement from fossil fuels that now has moved or committed $14 trillion in assets worldwide. born and raised in rural maine, after college, chloe was determined to return to her beloved home to serve that place and her fellow mainers. in 2018, she ran for the ate house of representatives and won. in 2019, she introduced the state's green new deal legislation, carefully customized to what her constituents had told her they most needed and wanted for their place. she did so with the notable backing of the state afl-cio union.

how did chloe accomplish all this? that's what she's gonna describe for us. and now, the remarkable chloe maxmin, who's now reached the expectation defying age of 28. - hello everybody. my name is chloe maxn, i am cominto you from nobleboromaine toy. i've been in and out of the bioneers community nce i was in college quite a w years ago and i always loved the gaerings and i'm grateful at least to be participating virtually this year. i just glected as state senator here in maine. we took on the highestanking republan in the state and we flipped a disict from red to blue. today, i'm gonnaalk about why it's so important toe investing progressive energy into rur conservative places, d how that really contributes to our fight oclimate. but i'm gonna do it through the lens of my story and how got to that place because it certainly took me a while to uerstand the importance of politics

in the climate fight. i'm showing you this picture of the maine house of representatives because itepresents a political ace that i have spent so much of my li being angry at. i have been angry at the lobbyists, at the people that we elect, theorruption, the lack of urage, the weak votes and the lack of progress on climate change. but it's a broken system, politics is, and it's also system that wdesperatelneed to work r us. so, i spend most of my te in spaces like this today to try and turn it around. i grew up on my family's farm in nobleboro, it a sll town of 1600 people in the middle of mae. and for as lg as i c remember, i have just loved my home and my counity more than anything, it's always been,iven knowledge of mysf and my life that i would devote myself to fighting for maine. as itarted to grow u i began understand

that climate change is reay the biggest threat tmaine, it threatens to totally undermine our economy, our culture, our way of life, everything that we know and love. so, i started to take action when i was 12 and when i got to high school, i started this group cald the clime action club. we really focused on individualehavior change to talk to our community about our impact on the planet. i then went to harvard for college and after first yr there, i learned about this project called the trailbreaker pipeline. it's a pipeline that goes from portland, maine, to montreal, used to carry crude oil nortard. buthere was a proposal to reverse the flow ofhis pipeline and bring tasands from alberta, to montreal d down through new enand and maine into portland's cao bay. for so many reasons this s a very bad idea. but the biggest kicker for me is that exxon mobil owns 76% of this pipeline.

i hano idea that the fossil fuel instry and these big corporations had ch a presence in my home ste. so, i went back to harvard th fall and i started a campaign called divest harvard. i'm not gonndig too much into the ecific story of divt harvard, it's a powerful story. we started with three people and withitwo years we had0,000 people who had signedn to our campaign. but during divest harvard da, saw the wer of you people to build really deep movements that were focused on systemic change. in high school i was focusing on using reusable bags, and then at harvard, we were focused on building movements to change how the fossil fuel industry interas with our society. we were usg climate change as a way to talk about e importance ofivestment. but we were also trying to say that we need to really look at the fossil fuel industry

and their stranglehold er our pitical system. were building movement for a better politics througour universities. it was a lile bit convoluted but that was our theory of change sot harvard, we rallied, we marched, we had forums, weid everything humanly possible. ile the adnistration didn really lien to us, althgh one dayhey will, we built aassive mement. it was also during my days adivest harvard that i met a young man named canyon, who you can see highlighted in these photos. and he grew up in rural red, north carolina. and it was almost immediately a friendship because wetart to talk about how we we building these really exciting movements in an urbaspace around an issue, but we couldn't even fathom brging those to our hometowns. the language, the tactics, it just wouldn't fit where we grew up and that aays puzzled us, but we really loved organizing on campus. bu as our rk at dist rvard came to a clos

as i ce nearer to graduaon, i had been working on divestment for almo three years and i'd seen the divestment moveme take of trillions of dollars get divested, thousands of students getting involved, hureds ofaculty members taking a sta, thousands of alumni. and it was rlly incredible, but it was also becoming so clear that we were unable to take all of this energy that we had built through divestment and pivot it towards our stated goals which wagetting better people in office, getting good climate policy, holding public officials accountable. we werawesome at issue movement organizing, but we couldn't do anythingith polics, the infrastructures just weren't there. and that was super puzzling to me. so, wh i graduated harvard, literallthe day ter i came back to nobleboro and i started to think and ite about what it would take for the climate movement to become more politically powerful.

weere plenty powerful people wise, but not powerful enough political. and it wasn't too long before i cided to r for office. i had been working on different campaigns and i felt like they just really weren'teaching beyond the choir, kind of electing the same kinds of people and mostly losing. so, my hometown state rep district is district 88. and it's very rural. it's three and a hf towns in rur maine, d most of these towns are in the most rural county in the state, and maine is the most rural sta in america. district 88 has a 16% republican advantage. so it les very hard r. it's a really interesting community. but i think most importantly when i was thiing about how to really rebuild a different type of politics, i recognized that rural communities were beingo left out

of the progressive equation, and also that ste level races were not being talked about in the climate movement as well. if you take divestment, for example, we had built all of this power basically 2010 to 2015. and then in 2016, the rural communities ected donald trump, and republicans won almost twice as many state legislative seats as democrats. despite people's climate march and the hundreds of thousands of people who were talking about climate change. so, i cided kind of go right the heart of everything, which is a very conservative rural state rep campaign i coinced canyon to move up to nobleboro with me and to t and figure out how we could win district 88. i was running a democrat, budistrict 88 had never been won by a democrat before. but we were in this to do it differently, to not replicate politics as usual. so, ofwe went. usually when you run for office, the state rty helps u

likeet your peop out fo"get out t vote" and gooor knockingnd stuff but weid it all ouelves because we recognized that politics as usual and the democratic party as usual was not really serving rural conservative places. i had a primary that we won th 80% othe vote. and then after the primary, i started to talk to most all republicans and independen for months and months and months. and it was so eye opening that there are all these people who are not on our side, who are votingepublican, who are voting agait the climate, but not necessarily becae they want to but just because we haven't been there, we haven't listened to people who have a different rspectiv who are coming from a different place. and it was through our campaign that we were ablto connect with these fol. the other thing that we did that was really important is t and take kind of the ethic of a movement organizing model and bring it

into electoral politics. and e of the biggest piec of that is buildg actual relationships, which is one of the beauties of local politics. we wonn 2018 wh 52.4% of the vote by 218 vot. i was the first democrat to represent district 88, and for the past t years, i've been serving as a state rep. i've really been trying to do it differently. every month i've hosted constituent office hours, all of my bills have come directly from conversations with my nstituents. i sponsored the maine green new deal which was the first state level bill to be endorsed by a state, afl-cio and the country, and really just trying to think differently about how can interact with my constituents. but, amidst all of thati still felt like, we made the biggest strides working for a new kind of politics when it came to the campgn season. soabout halfway through my time as a state rep,

the opportunity came up to run for ste senate. and i took it because to me the work that you do on a campaigtrail last far bend a candite or an eltion day. and that kind of movement building is so exciting to me, is the heart ofhere things are at these days. the state sete distric really teresting. i call it, it's district 13 but i call it lucky district 13. most of it is in lincn county, maine, which is this very rural county in a very rural state. we were going up against a man named dana dow who had been in and out of office for almost 20 years. he had never losa general election before in his life. he is also the senate nority leader. so, the highest ranking republican in thstate. he was susan collins's guest at the state of the union this year. and, yeah, it was a lot to go up agast. he owna local buness and everybody knows who dana dow is.

he also won by less than 400 votes in 2018. so, we knew that we could do it. distri 13 is also really interesting. insteaof a 16% republican advaage, which is district 88, the sete distrt has a 1.6% republican advantage. so it leans republican, but it's almost a third democrat, publican and independent. so it's, feels like a much more reprentative cross-section of the different political dynamics that we're experiencing today. the hill named linco county, one of the top 10 counes in the us that would define the 2020 election. d it's about 38,000 people in district 13. so, i say all of this just to give you a little bit context for this race anhow challenginit was, and also to show that we wanted to ing everything that we learned in 2018 to a state sene race and show that itould work when it was scaled up. so, we launched in january with an awesome potluck

at the north nobleboro community center with like 100 folks, it was beautiful. i stted knocking on doors, but instantaneously covid hit. and we put our campaign on pause and devoted our entire volunteer infrastructure to supporting seniors through covid. so, we live in aural comnity with no transportation access, and we found that, well, we literally found dozens andozens ofeniors who weretuck at home with no food, no way to get their prescriptions, noay to get to t doctor, people who are just stranded. and we ended up using our mpaign as a public service to bring together 200 volunteers to make 13,500 phone calls and make sure that every single senior in our community was contacted and had access to the resources that they ed. but eventuallywe had to transition back to normal campaigning. and th was reall trky with covid. but weried to do it in kind way

thatas really centered arou a politics that was by and for our counity. we had letters to the editor, had more autiful hand paied signs. we had these really beautiful social distanced outdoor gatherings all summer long to bring our volunteers together. we were very public and proud about running a 100% positi campaign which s so important with the susan collins, sara gideon race happening, that usenate race was incrediblyoud and negave. so we were really trng to show that there is a better way. we were really lucky to receive two huge endorsements from unlikely lies. one was the lincoln county sheriff, todd brackett, who was a big supporter of our campaign. d the other one was a guy named, les fossel, who was a former republican state senator for lincoln county. and both of them were really proud support our campaign 'cause we were focusing on values and not party.

i also did my own canvassing this year. sowe knocked on 10,000 doors total in 2018. this year alone, i personally ocked on 13,314 doors. we also did a lot of phone banking, we made 65,649 phone cas this yr to peoe. so, in total, our dict voter contact was 86,486 people. that was the highest voter contact of any senate campaign in mae. the send highe was 34,600 people. so youan really see the scale of our campaign and what wdid by bringing a differenperspective to it. d what's interting is that this direct voter contact was to a very targeted group of peopl who wereind of in the middle, they might vote dem, theyight vote republican. and that universe was about 5000 people. so it's just crazy to think about almost 90,000 contacts to try and sway 5000 people. it's really, reay intereing stuff.

we also didn't use any of t support from the democratic party. so we did all our own graphic design, we produd and worked with the local paper to send out all of our mailers, we created our own canvassing universe. so, our volunteers and myself went to houses th had trump flags out there, and those trump folks were voting for us. and it was really incredible toee what we cou do when we just reach beyond the choir just a little bit. and we won. we won by 600 tes, which is 51.1% of the te, about 24,000 people vote so, it was a cse one, bu we always knewt would be and it was incredible. we are trying so intentionally to run a campaign that looks like a social movement, but has the fect of electoral politics. we are trying so intentionally to bring a different kind of thinking to what the democrats

and progressives need to do in rural communities. and i think we were trying to prove that our tacticsnd our way of thinking can work. canyon managed my state senate campaign as well, and i just wanna mention his me again becae everything that we do is together. i'm going to augusta tomorrow to ele our sectary of state and then on wednesday i'm getting sworn in, december 2nd. so, it's allappening very quickly. but, once you get elected that is just the beginning of the work. it's reallwhen the bills come and the arguments happen and e convertion start to begin about what real climate policy looks like. and so, going back to those days in the clime action club when i was just focused on using reusable bags, now the work feels a little bit bigger and a little bit more structural, but kind of the same thing of just doing what you can as one person to get the world where it needs to go. and that's my email on the scen right there.

so, please feel free treach out if i can ever be of any suort for your work anthank you r all that you do.

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