Welcome to Amped Up. This is your host Ryan Knight, and our guest today is Lisa Savage.

Lisa is a teacher, an organizer, a progressive, and she is running for the United States Senate

to replace Susan Collins.

Lisa, welcome to Amped Up.

Thanks, Ryan.

Thanks for inviting me.

Absolutely.

Since this is your first time on the podcast,

why don't you give us a little bit about your background and why you're running for Senate?

Sure. Well, I've just retired from 25 years teaching school and Maine in the public schools

in a pretty low-income area. Prior to that I had owned a small family business in Central

Maine for about seven years, a successful business. And I was born in Maine, but I grew up in California. I went to high school in the Bay Area and then came back to Maine to go to Bowdoin College, left again for economic reasons and then I've lived in Maine since 1988, built a house here,

I raised my kids here. And I'm running against Susan Collins, the least popular

senator in the country right now under

rank choice voting and I have been organizing around the military budget

and also climate and militarism for decades here in Maine.

I was also a union negotiator for the teachers union

for many years, but I have not run for other elected office

and honestly, if it were not for ranked choice voting, I doubt that I would be involved in this project.

Yeah we're gonna get to I can't wait to talk about rank choice voting because we need to bring that to all 50 states

because I think it just gives the American people such better choices.

But I want to start off the, I want to start off and talk about what happened yesterday.

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