Krishanti Vignarajah wants to be the first female Governor of Maryland
People like to tell Krishanti Vignarajah she has a lot of nerve. She’s never held public office, she has a baby less than a year old, and, here she is, at 38, vying to be the first woman in history to be governor of Maryland. “So many people told me not to run, or they told me to run for a lesser office,” she says as she walks through the Bethesda Farm Women’s Market in Maryland on a breezy morning, chatting with shoppers and vendors while her husband, Collin O’Mara, hangs back with their 3- month- old daughter, Alana, in his arms.
Krishanti "Krish" O'Mara Vignarajah is of Sri Lankan Tamil descent and resides in Maryland. She is a daughter of two Baltimore City public school teachers, Sothy and Ely Vignarajah. Her mother started teaching at Poly High School in 1970, and after taking time to raise her family and going back to get her PhD in her 60s, finished her career teaching at Morgan State University. Her father retired from Western High School in Baltimore City at 80 after a career spanning 53 years.
O’Mara is CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, but today he’s on baby duty. “Collin was actually the biggest proponent for me running,” says Vignarajah, who has a friendly smile and a gift of listening with her entire body. To talk with Vignarajah is to feel not so much heard as absorbed. “After watching President Trump come to power, we both felt that there was too much at stake for me not to.”
Having spent five years working for the Obama administration, Vignarajah found it hard, she says, to watch as “President Trump reversed or threatened to reverse everything from our efforts on climate change to girls’ education to bipartisan issues like labeling on food so parents know exactly what their kids are eating.”
But Trump’s rise to power hit her on a deeply personal level as well. As the child of Sri Lankan immigrants who fled that country’s impending civil war in 1980 with $200 when she was 9 months old, Vignarajah is, as she likes to say, “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare.” Her parents were public school teachers. She grew up in a basement apartment in the Baltimore suburb of Woodlawn and attended public schools from kindergarten through high school before heading to Yale, and then Yale Law School—an immigrant daughter who excelled as a direct result of public education programs currently disappearing in Maryland.
Under her watch, Vignarajah says, education will come first. “I lived the American dream that a lot of us worry is slowly fading. My daughter is growing up in this world, and I’m worried that it’s going to hell in a handbasket,” she says. Maryland is a blue state, with Democrats leading two to one, but current governor Larry Hogan is a Republican. Under him, the Maryland Vignarajah knew has changed. “We have always led the country in terms of education, having a thriving economy, and protecting our natural resources, and all of that has been questioned or threatened by Governor Hogan’s leadership,” she says. “The opportunities I had growing up would not exist if we continue on the path we’re headed down.” With her choice of former Baltimore Teachers’ Union president Sharon Blake— an African-American woman—for lieutenant governor, Vignarajah’s becomes the first gubernatorial ticket in history to include two women of colour.
Since Trump was elected, a lot of women have decided to run for public office: 423 women are planning to run for the House of Representatives— the highest figure in American history—52 for Senate, and 78 for governor.
Vignarajah's friends have always teased her about how driven she is. She was the captain of the Division III tennis team at Yale and won pretty much every academic prize you can think of while she was there. “I am trying to create a world in which being a mother is not an obstacle.”