 Hello, everyone. I am here with Lisa Savage, a US Senate candidate running for the Green Party. And this is a really interesting race because for those of you who don't know, Maine passed ranked choice voting just a couple of years prior. So this is a race where Lisa Savage could possibly be the first member of Congress that is a Green Party member. So this is really exciting. Lisa, thank you so much for coming on the program. Thanks for inviting me. So tell us how ranked choice voting has affected your race in particular, and how this actually is really giving you a chance to change the country. Yes. Well, ranked choice voting is very much in play in this election for various reasons. One of them being that the incumbent Susan Collins is the least popular senator in the United States now. And the way ranked choice voting works in Maine is that if someone gets a majority of the votes in the first round, then the elections over they won, and ranked choice voting doesn't really kick in. But it's unlikely that Susan Collins will pull that majority. We don't know who the Democrats will nominate yet. That primary was postponed a little bit to July 14. But I have ballot access, and it looks like another candidate has ballot access. So it looks like there will be two independents on the ticket. I'm calling myself an independent green now, because we tried to get ballot access as a member of the Green Party, which I was. But the rules for third party ballot access in Maine are quite onerous. And we had a very good team and a lot of volunteers in the field and paid gathers. We just the external circumstances were such that it was impossible. And recognizing that I unenrolled as a green, which many green candidates have had to do before me. And people said, it's okay, we know you're still green in your heart. Didn't change my policies or my platform at all. And then the rules changed quite a bit for ballot access, where we needed twice as many signatures, but we had much longer times to collect them. And we were able to use Super Tuesday. Maine doesn't usually have a Super Tuesday primary, but it did this year and stand outside the polls. And we gathered over 9,000 signatures in one day, we only needed 4,000. And so we have turned those in and we're able to be on the ticket. Now, who the Democrats will nominate will probably be a really key factor, because there's a very Bernie Sanders like candidate in this race, whose platform and values as expressed are very similar to my campaign, Medicare for all, demilitarized green new deal, solve the student debt crisis and guaranteed minimum wage, all that progressive changes that we really need to see in this country. However, that candidate Betsy Sweet probably will not get nominated. The Democratic Party in Maine has already indicated that their favorite is a candidate named Sarah Gideon. I don't think she necessarily is going to appeal to the Betsy Sweet followers. She's a very corporate Democrat, and she's already raised tens of millions of dollars outside of the state for her run. So we are very likely to appeal to Maine's very independent electorate. The biggest party affiliation in Maine is no affiliation, unenroll. And they are, we have a history of electing independent candidates. The other senator for Maine is Angus King. He is an independent and he was a two term governor of Maine as an independent. So I think that we have a good shot at it. And with ranked choice voting in play, we could definitely win the election. Yeah, this is incredibly exciting. I think that this is one of the key races to watch in 2020, not just because Susan Collins is someone who absolutely has to lose her seat. And we'll talk through that. But because this really is showing the importance of ranked choice voting to where you have a phenomenal Democrat running. And if she isn't able to win that primary, it's not like voters who are progressive and left leaning are shut out of this race. You still have an option. And so I'm wondering, have you and Betsy Sweet work together at all in terms of if she does win the primary? Are you guys going to do a type of campaign like we see in other countries with ranked choice voting where you have vote me one, vote them two? How have you guys coordinated at all? Because I know you guys have a very similar message. It's possible that we will coordinate. We haven't done any formal coordination yet. We've certainly appeared in several candidate forums together. We ran into each other back when we used to be able to campaign in person. And she was very friendly and welcoming. So I think it's entirely possible that if she gets the nomination, we will at least consider such a strategy. You know, ranked choice voting is already overturned an unpopular GOP incumbent in the state of Maine. I live in the second district, which is the northern low income, low population part of Maine and southern Maine is much more populous, much more progressive. And we had Bruce Pollack when as our representative in Congress. And in 2018, he was challenged by Jared Golden, who was had been served in the state legislature for a while, but wasn't not it did not have a lot of name recognition, fairly young candidate. And there were two independence running. And those independence pulled enough that what happens in Maine is so let's say there were four candidates on the ticket that time. When the first round of votes is counted, whoever got the least number of votes is crossed off the ballot. And they look at, okay, people that picked that candidate first, who did they pick second? And those votes are then transferred to those candidates that will go to another round if someone still doesn't have a majority of votes. So in that race, it did go two rounds, both the independence were eliminated and their votes redistributed and Jared Golden took the seat. The logic behind this is that I am the opposite of a spoiler in this type of race because someone who votes first for me is very unlikely to put Susan Collins second. And somebody who ranks the Democrat first, whoever that candidate may be, is very unlikely to rank Susan Collins second. So those second choice and third choice votes can be very significant. Yeah. And I wanted to talk to you about this because Susan Collins, I really feel like there's a real opportunity here to oust her. And she is someone who needs to go. Now, why do you think, I mean, there's a number of reasons. So this is kind of a loaded question, but why do you think she needs to go? I think that the most recent betrayal of voters that people can remember is that she voted for Brett Kavanaugh after kind of leading voters on for weeks pretending as if she wasn't sure and was undecided when we all know that this was a foregone conclusion. But I mean, can you talk through some of the policy reasons why this seat has got to be taken away from her? Sure thing. Kavanaugh was definitely the turning point for most voters who became disenchanted with Susan Collins. I know many centrist Democrats, people I've taught school with over the years who have voted for Susan Collins in the past, because she was a guaranteed vote they felt for women's reproductive health rights, children's issues like education and healthcare for children, and that she could be counted on, Collins could be counted on to cross the aisle and vote with Democrats on those issues. So people would vote for her. When she upheld Brett Kavanaugh's nomination and he ascended to the Supreme Court, all those people that I've spoken to were like done. Now I never voted for Susan Collins, she's way too conservative for me, but interestingly I had a virtual house party a couple weeks ago with some retired postal workers and they have been very disaffected with Susan Collins since 2006 because she was the sponsor of that legislation that undercut the US Postal Service by insisting that its pension fund be funded out 75 years, which is an absurd requirement that no company or other public entity has to meet. And they know that that was the beginning of taking an axe to the US Postal Service. So it was interesting to me that that way predated Kavanaugh. Since the Kavanaugh hearing, it has been evident that Susan Collins always votes with the Trump agenda and that's not very popular in Maine. She's always presented herself as centrist, independent minded, and so forth, but she lost me with Jeff Sessions. When she glowingly introduced a blatant racist candidate for attorney general of the US, to her Senate committee, I was like I'm completely done at that point. That was before Kavanaugh, but since Kavanaugh, the very bad tax bill that robbed from the poor and gave to the rich that Republicans pushed through Congress, Mainers didn't like that, so that lost her even more popularity and the whole impeachment debacle also was not good for her. She's adopted now this kind of oh I'm not sure or oh I think the president learned his lesson. She doesn't walk the walk anymore and Maine voters that does not sit well with the Maine electorate. Yeah, to me it seems like and I'm not in Maine, so it seems like the Kavanaugh debacle really was the mask off moment to where she revealed she's no centrist. She tows the Republican party line. She is a loyal vote for Republicans. But people in Maine, they've been putting up with her for a long time and it's nice to see that there's options now and not just like one good option. There's a multitude of options and in the event that seat were to be taken away from her and let's say best case scenario, she's out and you win. How would you, assuming Biden is able to win, affect change because you would be the only green in Congress. So what would that look like? How would that be different? I'm assuming that you would caucus with Democrats to a degree, but in terms of challenging them, there's not very many progressive United States senators. You would be standing alone with Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley. I mean, maybe Elizabeth Warren, if you characterize her there. So how would you affect change? Because I feel like there would be an attempt to marginalize you as a US senator from the Democrats. Do you think that Chuck Schumer, for example, would try to bring you in the fold and work with you or do you think you'd kind of be iced out? How would you navigate that? And this is a really tough question because you're not there, but this is something that I've always wondered about because we have this two-party duopoly that's incredibly dominant. And one thing that has been 100% clear is that Democrats and Republicans have no interest in even trying to be fair to third and fourth parties. So how would you try to affect change as a US senator from the green party if you were elected? It's a valid question. And I'll just preface my answer though by saying I think that we might see a lot of change at the ballots this November. I think that it might be more than just a handful of New England senators with that, you know, very progressive title. I certainly hope so. But at any rate, it's an interesting strategic question that you ask because actually when I win the election, I will still be unenrolled. I will not be in the green party the day I win the election because I am unenrolled right now. I'm running as an independent green. Do I want to reenroll as a green as soon as I'm able to do that? Sure, I do. And there's nothing illegal about doing it. I can do that at any point after the election is over. But it affects who you caucus with because independence have to caucus with a party, I guess, is a rule for the Senate. I'm not sure if it's true of Congress as a whole. Whereas if I were green party, I have the power to form my own caucus. Now, would I be able to do that or not? You know, good question kind of depends on who's in there. People sometimes ask me the question, you know, on your first day in the Senate, what are you going to do? Well, I've had several jobs in my life. And on the first day in the job, you find out who your support people are. And you, you know, thank them and express your gratitude for their support. And you, you know, learn where things are and so forth. So I jokingly answer this question by saying first day in the Senate, I call Bernie, and I meet with constituents from Maine that are in town visiting in Washington, DC, because, you know, I'm not going to take any corporate money or any corporate lobbyist money or any corporate CEO money or any super PAC money where they launder the corporate money. So you can claim like Sarah Gideon does, I don't take corporate money. But of course she is. I if I get elected, the people of Maine are sending me there. And they are the people that I should be meeting with. They are the people that I need to hear from about, okay, you trusted me enough to be the, you know, voice for our general consensus in Maine about what needs to be done. And, you know, I take that very seriously. That would be a sacred trust to me that I would really, really need to always be listening to my constituents. Maine's not a very big state. They're, you know, that's like 1.3 million or 1.5 million at this point. And some of those are little children and so forth. So to be in touch with your constituents in Maine is doable. And so I care a lot more about those retired postal workers worried about their pension than I do about Chuck Schumer. Let's just put it that way. That's a good answer. So you mentioned Sarah Gideon. And what's really interesting about this race, I think probably the most fascinating dynamic is that the usual narrative has been flipped. So usually there's this argument from the Democratic establishment that, you know, the Green Party is taboo. You have to stay away if you want to beat that Republican. But in this instance, Sarah Gideon is the one who is jeopardizing the ousting of Susan Collins. And there was an article I covered on my program a couple of weeks ago that talked about how the GOP is planning to spend big, especially on her, on this race, to weaponize the Democratic Party's hypocrisy with regard to Tahririd. Because a couple of years ago, Sarah Gideon was rightfully, I think, calling out, you know, Kavanaugh and the Republicans line then, but now is silent won't actually address this. So the GOP is going to try to weaponize that issue against her if she's the nominee. And it seems as if the establishment really is betting on her, the Democratic establishment is betting on her. So explain why in the event if, if, you know, voters are going to go with traditionally who is viewed as the safe choice, why that's a really bad bet and why in this instance, the safe choice is not the safe choice. Well, right choice voting lets you vote your values rather than your fears. So you don't have to make the safe choice for your first pick. You can pick who you really want to vote for first, and you can make your safe choice as your second pick. And that's one of the beauties of that system, I think. But it's a very good point about the me too. Some strategists here that have run for elected office before that are kind of senior advisors on the campaign have said, Lisa, you're the only one who's going to be able to talk about me too, because the Democrats can't talk about it. The Republicans can't talk about it. It's another feature of Maine that we have a lot of women represent us in Congress. It's not that unusual. So in this race, all the leading candidates are women. It's not super unusual. It does make for an interesting me too type environment. So I don't know exactly, you know, what the final consequences of that particular aspect of this election will be, but it should be interesting. Okay, so I want to talk to you about how you would legislate. Your party is very progressive. I think that you check all the boxes for anyone who supported Bernie Sanders supporters. How would your platform go further? Because that's one thing that I've always admired about the Green Party is that some of my key criticisms and disagreements with Bernie Sanders, the Green Party actually kind of addresses them, for example, support for BDS, explicit support, reparations. So how does your platform differ a little bit? And how would you push, you know, the more, I don't want to say extreme, but I think the more left wing ideals that aren't being addressed by the progressives who are currently in Congress and in the Senate, how would you get that on the national agenda? Well, you know, I used to lead with demilitarized Green New Deal because that is I was an anti-war organizer here in Maine for many years before becoming a candidate. And one of my issues and campaigns here for the last five years has been the conversion of Maine's weapons building industry to building solutions to climate change. And that is a win-win for climate because building weapons systems is horrible for the climate and driving climate change. Using those weapons is driving climate change. But if you also were building something that addressed our energy needs in a way that wasn't a driving climate crisis, that would be a second win. Demilitarized because of those aspects and also because the very good question, how are you going to pay for it? The Pentagon budget is this ginormous elephant in the room at all times. And most people in the U.S. have no idea how much of their discretionary tax dollar each year goes to the Pentagon and its very wealthy contractors. I don't lead with that anymore because in this public health crisis, if we have not understood why the need for a comprehensive single-payer universal health care system for every resident of the U.S. is of crucial importance for our security, even at this point, it's a more urgent security need than the climate crisis. I don't know how much, how people could not understand how important that is. When we look at the example of other countries, people tend to focus on personalities and, okay, the current chief executive in the White House is not capable of leading in this type of crisis. We all know that. But really the failure is that we should have a national health care system in place with the authority, the resources, the forward planning to address a pandemic that health experts have been predicting for years that eventually some sort of global, you know, probably viral infection would become very challenging. The whole health insurance industry as a, you know, I'm one of those people that thinks profit and health care should not even be in the same sense together. Not every human action is appropriate for profit and health care would be one of them and we see that we have about a 30% inflation rate on what we pay for health care. But it's usually framed by conservatives as this sort of virtue thing where, well, if you have a job and therefore have good health care, then you're, you know, a good American who's doing the right things and have a work ethic and all. And if you don't have those things, it's some sort of personal individual failure of yours. Completely overlooking the fact that like, maybe it's a stay-at-home parent raising their children. Maybe it's somebody who's working in a field where health care doesn't come along with the job, but it's an important field and they want to work. You know, it's a public health issue. If all of us don't have adequate health care, then none of us have adequate health policy in a pandemic. Right. And I'm glad that you brought up a pandemic because what we've seen has been wholly inadequate. And there's now this growing sense as the virus is actually increasing in certain states, a number of states, I think more than a dozen at this point. There's this sense that we have to hurry up and reopen when we know that that is possibly a really, really bad idea because it could spread. And so, you know, much of the left I think is an agreement that reopening isn't the correct solution, but there is this urgent need to reopen among just citizens because they're hurting, like they can't pay their rent. So what do you think the proper response would be and how do you feel Congress has addressed this? Like just using the Heroes Act, for example, if it came to the Senate, would you support that bill knowing that there's some good, but a lot of bad? Like what would you do in this instance? What do Americans need in your view? The Heroes Act would be a really hard one because it does finally bail out the state and the municipalities and the school districts. And there are going to be layoffs that will make the current unemployment situation mild by comparison. If those entities do not get relief from the feds for all the tax revenues that they have not been able to collect, Maine in particular will be in deep water. But I really don't like the Heroes Act because I really don't like that it bails out lobbyists. It bails out the lobbying organizations that spend their, you know, time and money whining and dining Congress to buy influence with them. They don't need to bail out. That's a terrible idea. So I'm really glad I don't have to vote on that one because that would be a hard one. I do think that the bills that have been passed so far have been a largesse to the corporations that put legislators there and very little for the people. I just got my husband and I got our stimulus check last week. It's okay. We're doing all right. But there are people that were desperate for that stimulus check that didn't get it. One one-time stimulus check. Other wealthy countries are giving every adult $2,000 a month in recognition that if you tell people to stay home, very many of them won't be able to work and earn income anymore. And they will need a way to feed themselves and be able to stay home. In America, we've got all this pressure to reopen, reopen because there's no way for people to live if they, you know, they lost their jobs or they lost their health insurance. And also if they're a small business owner, which Maine has a predominance of small business owners. They employ many people in Maine. How are they supposed to, you know, pay their bills, pay their mortgage, pay their rent? It's a real conundrum. Our governor has put together a council for planning for the recovery of the economy after the pandemic is over whenever that will be. And it's stacked with, you know, business people. You know, it looks like it reads like the Chamber of Commerce. There's like one labor representative on it. There are a couple of people of color community, the native community has some representation. But it's basically, you know, the word recovery in that context means the people that used to be making good profits before the pandemic, they want to get back to where they're making good profits again. And we're, we're seated here to plan for that. But, you know, I've been a school teacher in this part of Maine where I live for 25 years, and I'm just retiring right now in order to devote myself to the campaign full time. And the people around here were not doing well economically before the pandemic came along. The families of the children that I work with as a reading interventionist in this very small rural elementary school, they were already, even if they had jobs, even if they had a car and a way to get to jobs, they were just one mistake or accident illness away from their whole financial house of cards collapsing. Very many of the children in my school experience food insecurity, regularly housing insecurity. They may have health care through the state, but many of their adult family members don't have adequate health care. Almost no one has dental care, and that really people's ability to, you know, work and participate in regular life. So we were not in good shape before the pandemic came along, and it has just shined a spotlight on this growing chasm between the haves and the have nots. I was a history major. Politically, that is a dangerous place to be. When you start to have Nancy Pelosi showing off her $12,000 refrigerators, two of them packed with expensive ice cream, and that's her stay at home plan, and people are literally starving, you know, childhood food insecurity has gone through the roof since the pandemic started. That's a very politically unstable situation. It always makes me wonder, did these people not read history that they never study revolutions and the kind of conditions that bring about, you know, regime change, or they just think they're immune to it. They're in the bubble of Washington, DC. You know, that's what everyone warned you about. Once you get there, you'll be in the bubble and you'll stop being able to see things clearly. Yeah, it's striking. I remember the refrigerator video as well, and I watched it like twice in a row because I was so shocked. Like, is this happening? It seems like this is a parody, you know? I wanted to ask you, on the note of COVID-19, I've talked to dozens of candidates running for Congress across the country, and if you're a candidate who is grassroots driven, you know, you are rejecting corporate PAC money and all money from large multinational corporations. COVID-19, basically, it changed everything about your race. You kind of had to throw out the entire playbook that you use as a grassroots candidate. So being, you know, a candidate yourself who's running for a statewide office, you know, you're running to be the Senate and represent the entire state. So it's not just a district. How has COVID affected the way that you campaigned? Yes, it's an interesting question. Luckily, most of the people on my campaign team are much younger than I am and very tech savvy, many of them. So it's been a learning experience for me. I have to learn a new app a week at least, maybe sometimes a new app a day, but we have been able to pivot pretty successfully to using online tools to do our house parties. We have a weekly volunteer orientation that has new people coming in every week and sort of getting, you know, up to speed and learning. I always attend that because I feel like, you know, they need to see the candidate knows I'm here, the candidate cares that I am, you know, working on this campaign. It, in some ways, it enables us to draw a volunteer support and fundraising support from other like-minded greens or independents and progressives around the planet. Really, many of our supporters are in other states in the country. We have a very key volunteer who's living in Mexico. She's a US citizen, but she's living on a retirement income and, you know, goes farther there. We have a really great volunteer who's also a US citizen who's living in England right now getting a master's degree. It's been kind of interesting because aside from the time zone thing, does it really matter that you're in Chicago and I'm in Maine right now? So, you know, it's offered some opportunities as well as some challenges. It's hard to not be able to go out and shake hands with people, look them in the eye, give them a hug if appropriate. You know, that is limiting. But for instance, we had an event last week as a fundraiser. We did an art auction. Many of my supporters are artists, Maine is a very artist-rich state. And so several big name artists and some other up-and-comers donated works to our campaign. And then we held a Zoom auction, a live auction, where people bid on the work. And it was a really funny event. Many people, we encouraged people to come even if they didn't want to bid. And people said that was so interesting. The art was really exciting. Some of it was political, some of it wasn't. And so those are the type of, you know, we would never have done that on Zoom or not for the pandemic. So, yeah, it's been interesting. That's really exciting. The art bidding is actually a really great idea that hopefully other candidates will hear this and kind of, you know, take you up if they, you know, are artistic and whatnot. And I'm not artistic at all. So I wouldn't be able to participate. But I mean, like if they have staffers that can do that or contribute in some way to where they can bid goods, that's really interesting. Okay. So anyone who's watching this by now, I think they're incredibly excited because I've covered Green Party politics for quite some time on my channel. And it's really exciting to see whenever we, on the cusp of making a really huge advance, you know, this is huge. It could be a game changer. So tell us what we can do to support your campaign right now and where we can go, what websites and all the donations. What can we do? Sure. Thanks. Well, this has been a really exciting week because we've been collecting endorsements and Chris Hedges had already endorsed me. And then we heard today that he's running for Congress in New Jersey as a green. So that's super exciting. But our website is lisa4main spelled out F-O-R main M-A-I-N-E dot org. And any place, you know, if you go to the website, you can find out more about what we've been up to. You can volunteer. You can make a donation there. You could find the address to make a donation by postal mail if you want to support the post office in that way. And we welcome everyone who wants to join the team. One of the things I have in my experience is I was a union negotiator for my teacher's union for several years in a row. And I am a spokesperson for this team. I am not like the campaign. I have a huge group of people, very smart, very dedicated people that are behind me and that I'm representing as the front person. So we welcome your involvement. And we have people that are ready to find out what are you good at? What do you like to do and match you up with some effective actions you can take to support the campaign? Well, thank you so much. We've been talking with Lisa Savage running for the U.S. Senate in the state of Maine in an attempt to oust Susan Collins. We will be watching this race closely. Stay tuned for more details.