(upbeat music) - Hello, I'm Jennifer Rooks.

Thank you for joining us.

This "Your Vote 2022" Special was slated to be a debate between the three candidates for Maine's second Congressional district.

However, Democratic Congressman Jared Golden and Republican Challenger Bruce Poliquin declined our invitation.

So instead, we are bringing you a conversation with independent candidate Tiffany Bond.

Bond is a family law attorney and a mediator who lives in Portland.

This is her second time running for this seat.

The questions for tonight's interview come from the news team at Maine Public and our media partners, the Portland Press Herald and Lewiston's Sun Journal.

Tiffany Bond, welcome back.

- [Tiffany] Thank you so much for having me.

- The first question, this is your second time running for Congress in the second congressional district.

You don't live in the district yet, the second congressional district.

You're explaining to us why you're still in Portland.

- Absolutely.

So we actually were house hunting pretty actively in 2018 and we hadn't found a place, so I didn't run in 2020 in the second congressional district 'cause I didn't feel like that was authentic.

I didn't enter this race until we'd purchased some property in Sandy River that we planned to build our forever place.

Unfortunately, there have been some construction delays.

Anybody who's needed repairs done to a home in the last year knows that it's very difficult to get the supplies and contractors that are necessary to do a lot of the work.

And so we were actually hoping to be out there this summer and have our boys start school this fall.

But there have been delays and we'd rather have the right place than the right away place.

- Well, let me ask you that then.

So if I'm a voter in the second district, and I know that you don't live in the second district or not yet, even though you intend to, also you aren't raising money for this race, you're doing it sort of your own way.

How do I know that you're a serious candidate?

- Well, so I do work in the district, in fact about 75 to 80% of my cases, I'm a family law attorney, as you said earlier, are in the district.

So the thing that drives me to be in the district is not the race, it's that I'm already working there and I'm moving my practice out there.

So in the event that I don't win the election, I'll be having a family law practice in Franklin County.

There just simply aren't enough attorneys in rural Maine.

It's really problematic.

You mentioned not raising money and I don't know that I would call that particularly accurate.

I simply don't want the money wasted.

I don't want it to go to awful commercials and those mailers we all hate.

I want people to take the same amount of money they would give my campaign and instead go invest it in the community.

Support a teacher, support a small business business, support a not-for-profit and say that I asked for people to invest in the community.

I call it Maine raising instead of fundraising.

So that doesn't mean there's no money, it means that when I say I want resources in the community, I mean it.

And that's how people are finding out about the campaign and it's just such a lovely way to interact with people instead of mailers that nobody likes.

- So in 2018 you came in distant third, I believe 6% of the vote.

What makes you believe that you can win this time?

- Well, both gentlemen have had a shot at it.

I don't find that either one does a particularly good job at it.

My job is still hard.

So a lot of my day job as a family law attorney is working with federal law.

I work with people's retirement, student loans, healthcare, all the social support services we see, so TANF, SNAP, which is more commonly known as food stamps, housing assistant, all of those are federal programs, some of them are state administered.

I also work with a lot of issues with veterans, I work with a lot of issues with disability and social security and the laws around them are just crummy.

They're not written well, they're not tied to what people's needs are.

So I think where I'm very different than them is I've experienced in the working part of the laws that are drafted.

And I think I came in a distant third because I'd never run for office before.

No one knew who I was.

I sort of came out of nowhere.

I think I had 17 or 18 followers on social media.

This time around I have upwards of a hundred volunteers, I have a lot of more name recognition, I'm doing two digital town halls a week.

I'm at events every weekend.

I'm pretty accessible in various forms of media for people to ask questions and get answers.

And I think one of the things that we've seen tonight is neither Poliquin or Golden is that accessible.

- So let's talk about some issues.

- [Tiffany] Sure.

- When you announced your latest entry into the race in June you said, and I'm gonna quote you, this is from Twitter, "We needed to talk about gun violence in 2018 when I ran before, we didn't.

Spoiler, the problem has gotten worse.

We need to work on solutions."

Gun violence.

Big issue for you.

What would you do first if elected to Congress to address this?

- I think with a lot of problems, we first look at the law that's there.

Right now we have a lot of federal and state law.

They don't work well together.

There's a lot of issues in training in different departments that aren't getting what they need so that everybody can implement the law that's already there.

So there's, there's a whole bunch of disconnects there.

A lot of my work is in domestic violence as well.

So I often will have paperwork served, for example, as part of a protection from abuse order.

And a lot of times we hear, oh they said and they didn't have any guns and there's just no way to check up on a lot of that stuff.

And it leaves people feeling very unsafe.

My own children feel unsafe in school sometimes.

And just generally I think that we should have better supports for particularly gun ownership and mental health.

My children would have a grandfather if we had better supports for that.

So I think that we should be having red flag laws come into place.

I think we should be working with existing laws.

And then one of the things I often say is, I don't care if you hunt, but if you hunt people, I will find a way to take your guns away.

You shouldn't have them.

- So red flag laws, that's a tangible and concrete proposal.

But beyond that, when you say making sure people are not breaking the current laws.

- Well first we need to put more dollars into training so that people who are enforcing the laws, law enforcement, have some awareness of what those laws are, there's a lot of disconnects there.

And I think that we also need to do a better job of maintaining the databases that have information on people who should not have weapons.

People who have violent charges, either domestic violence charges or protection from abuse orders, that should not have weapons.

Those networks still don't work together well and you end up having a lot of folks that are in possession of weapons that shouldn't be.

I think that we need to look a lot more at the data that we have available.

And if I were to just thumb in the air, pick a place that I think might be unexpected to stop gun violence for example, I think that if we provided pre-K education a year or two younger, we would not only catch domestic violence that's happening to children, which is great indicator of violence, generally, that's going to occur in households, but also we catch children who have emotional regulation issues earlier so they get a better coping mechanisms.

So I think it's gonna be some conventional things that you would see and expect.

So for example, getting those databases to work together, putting more funding and things, there's gonna be some additional things.

So Maine's yellow flag law is not great and not particularly enforceable.

Some red flag laws that are very enforceable but also are done with a scalpel, so we're mindful of balancing rights and then looking at some unexpected things like looking at data and seeing, hey, maybe if we're adding pre-K, maybe that not only helps parents, but it helps us deal with children in a healthy way that have emotional regulation issues.

- So talking about adding pre-K, are you in favor of federal funding for a universal pre-K?

- Yes.

- Well it's interesting to me, Tiffany, because you're presenting yourself as an independent, but so far the policies that you've proposed are in line with Democrats.

- Are they though?

I don't know that they are universally.

So I think our social support network is appalling.

We have paid in our lives to have these social supports and it's not just the welfare type component, but making sure that our healthcare is accessible, making sure that education is accessible and doing things like moving enforcement around will free up some of those dollars.

So one thing that I don't talk about that neither party talks about is we put a lot of dollars in, for example, food stamps, housing aid, childcare aid, into enforcement and catching people who are maybe getting dollars they shouldn't have, instead of putting all of those dollars into services.

That is both wasteful and it puts our social services agencies at odds with what they're supposed to be doing, which is delivering services.

We should be moving the enforcement to places that are better skilled for it.

So for example, the IRS, their day job is catching fraud.

If we made those benefits reportable, then what we could do is we could be more supportive of folks who needed those benefits and if somebody does sneak through that's not supposed to be there, we can catch them later and not make the 95% of people that are doing the right thing and asking for help when they need it pay for the 5% of people who are trying to get a little bit extra.

So that's something you don't hear from either parties.

So although the issues that we bring up are very often similar and they should be across all parties, the solutions are often very different.

- Let's talk about climate change.

Four years ago you said it was an important issue and that you would support a carbon tax as part of a solution.

Here we are in a different time and place, gas prices more than $3 a gallon.

So many people worried about heating their home that in Maine three times as many people have signed up for heating assistance than last year.

So I'm wondering, given the reality of today, do you still think that a carbon tax is needed?

And if so, how would people in the second district afford it?

- So I'd call that a sliver of an answer.

I think a carbon tax might be a part of the solution.

That said, I mean next month I'm asking people to please call towns up and contribute to heating oil funds so we don't have folks in Maine having to pick between food and heat this winter.

Short term, we are reliant on fossil fuels.

We could resolve the problem if all of the money that the gentleman raised went towards that problem, but I don't think they'll use the money that way.

I think that climate change is such a large issue and it's moved a lot in the last four years as to what solutions may be available that we're gonna see a range of solutions that we have to hit it with.

We're gonna have to look at ways of getting off fossil fuels.

I think that Maine is going to need help in that.

We don't have the resources to help get us off fossil fuels in the timeframe necessary.

I think that we're gonna have to look at a variety of types of solutions, so it might be some wind, it might be some solar, it might be some things that have yet to be invented or aren't sustainable yet.

We also have to look at things like Maine has an abundance of seaweed and when that is combined with anal feed, it brings down methane emissions.

So it's going to be more than just one solution.

It's gonna be a lot of solutions working together to get us where we need to be.

And we also need to, beyond coming up with the solutions, we need to plan better, we need to mitigate and we need to adapt to where the climate's already gone.

- You say you have a passionate dislike for the Affordable Care Act and you list its faults on your website, but you don't seem to have a clear answer for what would replace it.

What would you advocate for in Congress in terms of health insurance coverage for Americans?

- So once upon a time in a land far away, I was a city official, I was a parks commissioner and when there were issues that happened where there was a park we needed to develop, we would check with the other towns, we would see what worked well, what didn't work well, what were unexpected wins, what were things they weren't anticipating that went horribly.

And I think that what we need to be doing is building a few models.

I suspect what will be the best bang for buck for us will be some sort of universal hybrid.

But we have a lot of countries we can look to.

We can aggregate that data, we can build several models and we can run them through the budget offices for scoring to see which one's going to work.

Regardless, we spend more than enough money to be able to have healthcare that we can all use and we're sort of being suckered into believing that we can't have that, and we can.

If we take the same amount of resources that are spent, we could probably get a better system and spend less money.

And again, I suspect it's gonna be a universal hybrid, but as a regular person, I do not have access to the staff and scoring to be able to tell you exactly what the model will be.

- Tiffany, I think everybody all over the political spectrum would agree with you that our health policy could be better.

But practically, looking at Congress today, is the scenario that you lay out, running three potential scenarios through a budget office and then voting on the best one, something that will happen and has any chance of happening in Congress.

- Sure.

My day job is working with people who don't get along very well.

If I got along, they'd stay together and live happily ever after.

So my day job is getting people who just can't stand each other to see where they can get a win out of a proposal that isn't perfect but works the best for everybody.

And I think there's a lot of movement to be had down there.

I also think dealing with healthcare, like dealing with climate change, like dealing with many of our problems, there are short and long term solutions.

I think building a better model is probably a two to five year project, it's not a tomorrow project.

I think there are things that we can be doing with our current healthcare to make it a little bit better.

And I think you work on improving in the short term while you're building the long term solution.

- What can we do in the short term?

- In the short term, I think that if we opened up Medicaid, which is MaineCare here, to public option, I think that that would really help with a little bit of competition.

Part of the problem we have at the marketplace right now is we have people who are not wealthy and do deserve help with their healthcare in the same marketplace with people who are self-employed or are employed but don't have great insurance options available.

And so the risk pool that we have there and the financial cost sharing leads to a lot of divisiveness that doesn't need to be and it also leads to huge coverage gaps.

In 2018 I had ACA insurance and we paid just enough a month and had high enough deductibles to ensure that we couldn't ever go to the doctor.

It was really problematic cause we have young children that do occasionally need the doctor.

My husband had the unfortunate choice of going to a well visit and talking about something that made him sound not well and asking questions and we got a bill well over a thousand dollars.

So that pooling that we have right now doesn't really provide good coverage.

It did indeed help some people, but it also created a bigger hole and in the wrong place.

- I wanna talk about the issues that voters really care about.

Polls have showed that there are three, and different voters care most about one of these three; inflation, abortion and threats to democracy.

Which of these is most important to you?

What are you prepared to do to address it if elected?

- They're all important for very different reasons.

So as a woman, my privacy to make medical decisions is incredibly important.

But by pulling back roe, we didn't just change abortion coverage, we changed our privacy rights generally and we really blurred that line of where the government and people are.

And it used to be that our private lives were private and it just wasn't any of their business and they could keep their nose out.

And I think that a lot of folks don't realize how sweeping that is.

Privacy is one of the most important and fundamental rights we have, in my opinion.

I think that inflation is something that is on the top of everybody's minds.

It certainly is something that my clients are are coming up with as a frustration.

I hope that some of the short term issues with inflation are resolved before I get to Congress because that's still many, many months away.

But what we can do in the long term is build resiliency.

So for example, we just heard about the Jay mill closing and there was a whole lot of lamenting by politicians but not a lot of problem solving.

They weren't looking at it and saying, hey, maybe we can look at Congress and say, why don't we see if there's grants or loans that can be created so that the local community can create a more sustainable business there that matches up with that facility.

So maybe, if you're doing pulp manufacturing, that might tie in very well to a facility becoming something that produces insulin at affordable rates with living wage jobs or, again, lots of access to water, it may make sense that we do indoor vertical farming there so that we can have fresh Maine local agriculture year round and those would both be great ways to repurpose areas that... Jay's not Bedford.

You can't go in and say "We're gonna put in a bunch of restaurants and condos and make that mill fancy."

Jay needs jobs.

They don't need restaurants and condos.

So we need to be looking more creatively at how we have manufacturing working in sustainable industries that we're gonna need for the long haul and getting those living wage jobs here.

That's how you really take care of inflation that's caused by supply chain issues long term.

And that's what our inflation is mostly caused by now, is massive gaps in supply chains.

- I wanna return to abortion.

If elected, would you support legislation to make abortion legally on the federal level?

- Absolutely.

There should be no medical decisions, none, that are made in DC.

I don't care if it's abortion or how you treat colon cancer or what you do with your bunions, those just aren't government realm.

And I think that folks who think it's a great idea to make a abortion illegal, especially on a federal level, which there are people trying to do, don't recognize a couple of things.

Thing one, telling you that you can't have an abortion is the same power as letting the government say you must have an abortion.

That's used very inappropriately.

It has in our own country's history, it has in other histories, that is not a power the government should have.

But the second thing that it pulls in is that when you're talking about medical procedures, you don't see the humanity that is required there.

I have read several of these pain capable abortion bills that are proposed.

Nowhere in there is there anything about the health, the life, the safety of the fetus.

These bills don't care about that.

They don't care about stripping from parents their ability to grieve children that are very much wanted.

They don't care about women dying.

That's not what these bills about.

And shame on us for letting politicians convince us that if we judge and hate our neighbors, that they can get more of our cash.

- You've said, as an independent, you will not be beholden to any party but could work with all sides in Washington.

Congressman Jared Golden has voted opposite his party's leadership more often than pretty much all other Democrats in the house.

And in fact he's angered some progressive Democrats here in Maine by voting against gun control, police reform and COVID 19 spending packages.

So how would Congresswoman Bond be different from Congressman Jared Golden who currently represents the second district?

- Well, I don't aim for left or right.

I try to point my compass north and I think I'm a lot more predictable than Jared Golden because my votes would be philosophically...

I've just lost a pen from the hair, if you heard a click.

My votes would be philosophically consistent.

I'm very upfront about my views and how I think things should be legislated, I do line by line bill reads on social media.

You will never have to wonder how I'm gonna vote and I will be telling you when I vote a certain way, what compromises I thought were acceptable, what compromises I thought were not acceptable and why I did or didn't vote for something.

And I just don't think that's information we get out of Congress right now.

- You've said that you would caucus with whichever party is in power in Congress and I'm wondering if you have some sense of which party you believe you would get better committee assignments under, which party you would more naturally caucus comfortably with?

- I think the parties change a lot over time and I don't think of caucus the same way other folks do.

So I think it's really easy to confuse caucus and party because right now most people who are in a caucus are in that political party, with the exception of depending on the year, Bernie Sanders and Angus King, we only have really a couple of independents in Congress and they have caucused with Democrats.

I don't think of a caucus as having anything to do with ideology.

I think of it as this is where the bills are being made, so I'm going to walk up to the table where the bills are being made and ask for seat at the table.

Since I'm an independent, my loyalty isn't to a party, my loyalty is to the law and to voters and that will always be my priority.

- Your candidacy in 2018 was the first ranked choice election in the US, Your candidacy helped put Jared golden over the top in the second round of ranked choice voting.

This year there are three candidates again.

If no one gets 50% of the vote in the first round, your role could be, again, to propel one of the other two to victory.

Who would you prefer to help?

- I think both of the other candidates need to put a whole lot of work into telling voters why they should be a number two and they should certainly ask their voters to rank a number two 'cause otherwise you're gonna get the other guy.

I was very clear in 2018 that I thought the Bruce Poliquin should not be in office, but I don't know that Jared Golden should be either or I wouldn't be running again.

- So you don't have a preference for one or the other?

- I personally would not vote for Bruce Poliquin, but I haven't decided if I ever would vote for Jared Golden.

- All right.

Are you in this race because it's a rank choice race?

Would you be entering if it were not?

- I think that independence deserve a seat at the table and independence deserve to participate.

And I don't like the idea of either political party being able to say, you can't participate 'cause you're gonna ruin the race.

And so ranked choice voting made running for office generally more palatable to me because to me, ranked choice voting gives us the opportunity over a period of time to say, "You need to listen to independence and consider us, and if you want independence to consider voting for you, you need to give our candidates the same grace and consideration."

- Tiffany Bond, thank you very much.

You can find more information about Tiffany Bond and the other candidates on November's ballot on our "Your Vote 2022" website at mainepublic.org.

From all of us at Maine Public, the Portland Press Herald and the Lewiston Sun Journal, thank you for joining us.

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