“Do something, Mom.” Is one of the most compelling calls to action anyone can hear. And we did. Elizabeth’s campaign for this election is now suspended, but the work continues.

C T E

Vision Issues About

We know these times are not normal.

What do Mainers do in difficult times? We step up for each other.
I'm Elizabeth Coté — a sixth-generation Mainer raising the seventh.
I'm running for United States Senate.
For affordability. For health care. For politics we can be proud of again.
For my children and yours.

Grassroots thrive in rich soil. Our state looks green, but our communities are being drained. Maine's wealth is extracted from under our feet to enrich billionaires who will never know our names.

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 neighbors 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. Heal what's been broken. Hold the candidates, our leaders and ourselves accountable for this.

Groceries, care, contempt, and a knock on your door with no warrant. These look like four problems. They are one. A few people hold most of the money and most of the power in this country, and they have written the rules to keep it. Prices climb because they can. Insurers deny because no one stops them. Washington fights because the fighting pays. And a government that answers to the few will eventually come for the rest of us.

Break that concentration and all four hold. Leave it and none of them do.

Relentless service. Every mile. Real results for Maine.

Elizabeth is a sixth-generation Mainer — now raising the seventh. Her first home was a Fairfield trailer park, and she grew up in Waterville and Bangor. She was fourteen when her little sister broke her arm and cried harder over the bill than the break, because the family couldn't afford the care. Elizabeth decided right then: that isn't unfortunate — it's wrong.

She became the first woman in her family to go to college, then earned her way to Harvard Medical School. In 2004 she volunteered in Baghdad to help rebuild Iraq's health ministry, working the combat hospital and treating everyone who came through the doors — soldiers, civilians, and prisoners alike. In Haiti, she cared for families after disaster and fought to keep parents and children together — because no family should be torn apart by a broken system.

But she saw that medicine alone couldn't fix a broken system, so she went to study government at Harvard's Kennedy School. As a White House Fellow at Health and Human Services, she helped write the order that ended a wave of dangerous drug shortages — and made sure a working pharmacist, not a lobbyist, stood in the room when it was signed. Government can work for people.

Then she came home for good. As the only doctor for the Aroostook Band of Micmacs, she ran the entire clinic — and made it the only one in its service area to meet every federal quality benchmark. The Indian Health Service honored her with its Area Director's Award for innovation in expanding access to care. She's worked in Maine's health and recovery clinics ever since — ten years helping Mainers on the hardest days of their lives.

Maine needs a leader who will go the last mile to reach people in need — and serve everyone, no matter their place, power, position, or party.

Paid for by Elizabeth Coté © 2026 Coté for Maine · Privacy · Contact