Sweet sets sights on Collins, lays out bold vision to address wealth, gender inequality

Former candidate for governor and equal rights advocate Betsy Sweet is running to replace Sen. Susan Collins in 2020. Compelled to run by Collins’ votes for conservative judges and Trump administration policies that Sweet says have endangered affordable health care, the environment and abortion rights, she believes she can win by taking bold risks made both possible and necessary by the current national political environment.

“The old playbook that got us into this mess is not going to be the playbook that gets us out,” the Hallowell resident told Beacon shortly after announcing her candidacy last week. “The riskiest thing we can do as a state and as voters is try to play it safe. This is not the time for that.”

Health care for all? Tackling climate change? Keeping abortion clinics open as state after state passes draconian bans? According to Sweet, every challenge Maine and the nation faces can be traced to a wealth divide that has led to three multibillionaires accumulating more wealth than the poorest 50 percent of Americans.

The disparity between working families trying to make a sustainable living and wealthy elites further benefiting from the Trump tax cuts that Collins supported is fueling the division that Sweet believes has been mischaracterized as a partisan issue for too long.

“We’re being told every day, by the news media and everyone else, that people are divided. Right versus Left. North versus South. Mainers versus new people who’ve arrived,” she said. “That’s not what I find.”

Instead, she said she has noticed that when the idea of billionaires and their companies paying their fair share in taxes, contributing to “the good of our society as a whole,” is discussed, the narrative of division evaporates.

Sweet’s platform is based on transferring money and power from the haves to the have-nots through reversing those federal tax cuts for the wealthy while raising the minimum wage and, above all, getting big money out of politics.

‘Who paid for it?’

Though Sweet ran for governor last year as a Clean Elections candidate, running for a federal office means she can’t tap into the Maine Clean Elections Fund she fought to establish in the 1990s.

In the spirit of her campaign for governor, however, Sweet has eschewed PAC money and her opponent’s ritzy fundraising model for small donations. Sweet, who raised three daughters as single mother juggling multiple jobs, often with little left at the end of the month, says she wants to run a campaign by and for those who understand similar struggles. In this respect, Sweet is part of a new national wave of Democratic campaigns focusing on small dollar fundraising.

“We’re going to count on real people being able to give five dollars a month,” she said. “That’s who we will be and that’s how we will raise our money.”

The choice to take money from small donors, Sweet said, is one based in accountability. In a country where corporate lobbyists funnel billions into shaping the outcomes of different votes and elections, Sweet said the money that politicians pocket from these lobbyists causes them to forget their constituents back home.

If sent to Washington, she said she doesn’t intend to forget the everyday people who elected her, made her campaign possible, and whom she’s represented in the State House for decades as an advocate for LGTBQ rights and anti-domestic violence measures.

“Every time I see a commercial for Susan Collins, I think, ‘Who paid for it?’” she said. “Susan Collins has forgotten who she is. She’s forgotten who she represents.”

If successful in the Democratic Primary, Sweet will be able to draw on more than $4 million already raised through crowd fundraising for Collins’ eventual opponent.

Other priorities for Sweet are funding health care for all and transitioning away from fossil fuels to the solar, wind, and geothermal energy that she says could make Maine, with its diverse resources, the “renewable energy basket of the country” while hopefully staving off the worst impacts of climate change.

The problem, she said, is that industry lobbyists are using money to stymie progress. In the U.S., fossil fuel subsidies run into the hundreds of millions and represent ten times the amount spent on education. Pharmaceutical companies spent over $200 million on lobbying efforts in 2017.

Every time I see a commercial for Susan Collins, I think, ‘Who paid for it?’

“When we say we can’t afford [universal health care], that’s BS,” Sweet said. “The only reason we don’t have universal health care in our country is because the money of the drug and insurance lobbies. We don’t invest in research and development [on renewable energy] because politicians are getting paid off by the fossil fuel industry.”

“That’s why we don’t have it,” she continued. “It’s not because people don’t want it. It’s not because we can’t figure it out.”

Sweet believes her campaign funding model will allow her to advocate strongly for these causes, which are broadly popular but have gained little traction in Congress.

“We have to demand healthcare for everybody, now. We have to start saying it,” she said. “It’s hard to say it when [lobbyists] are contributing to your campaign.”

A caring, moral perspective

Collins’ vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last fall sent shockwaves through Maine. Although reproductive rights advocates in the state scored major victories this year and expanded abortion access to more low-income women, Justice Brett Kavanaugh has shown a willingness to restrict a woman’s right to choose at a national level.

As a life-long advocate of women’s rights, Sweet has come out squarely in support of keeping abortion accessible and has condemned Collins’ vote as evidence the senator is out of step with the needs of Maine women. In an economy that Sweet sees as rigged against the welfare of women, she says losing the right to choose can lead women, especially women of color, down the path to poverty.

“Because we are the traditional caregivers, because of the bias and sexism in our economic system, it means we are the first to feel the effects of an economy that doesn’t work for us,” she said. “We are the first to feel the effects of them taking away our right to choose. We can’t have economic equality if we don’t have the right to autonomy over our own bodies.”

This inequality manifests itself in more ways than just abortion access. When Sweet founded the Maine Women’s Lobby in the early 1980s, she was told there were a finite number of women’s issues: abortion, nursing, and daycare. Yet she pushed pack against the notion that a woman’s organization should have so narrow a focus.

“I said we need to talk about those things, but we need to talk about women’s perspectives on every issue,” she said. “On tax policy. On economic development. On investment. On the environment. We’re going to talk about what we bring to the table and what we need on those issues.”

Maine women still contend with losing $3 billion annually due to the state’s wage gap.

These views help inform what Sweet calls the “caring, moral perspective” that she believes the person who replaces Collins must bring to Washington, a perspective that recognizes all Mainers as community members who deserve to thrive. She points to the support for asylum seekers in Portland as a moment where this perspective has been on full display.

“We have to ask ourselves the moral question: Who are we? What kind of country are we when we have children in cages and are separating children from their families?” Sweet said. “We see our values with all the new asylum seekers coming to Portland. We’re not putting them into cages. We are opening our homes and working to get them set up in the community so they can be contributing members.”

Sweet joins Bre Kidman, an attorney from Saco, as the only other announced Democratic candidate in the 2020 race. Speaker of the Maine House Sarah Gideon is expected to announce her candidacy soon.

(Top photo courtesy of Jeff Kirlin)