Midterms full of firsts for female, Black, LGBTQ candidates
A Massachusetts Democrat is the country’s first openly lesbian candidate to be elected to the office of governor. In Maryland, voters elected the state’s first Black governor. Vermont will finally send a woman to Congress, after being the only state never to have had female representation in the House.
Across the country, women, LGBTQ and Black candidates broke barriers Tuesday as part of a new generation of politicians elected to governor’s offices and seats in Congress.
The number of women serving as governors will hit double digits for the first time in 2023, with at least 12 women set to lead states. Ten had already won their races; two other races had not been decided but featured women candidates in both parties.
The U.S. has never had more than nine female governors in office at a time, a record set in 2004, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. The new record numbers mean nearly one fourth of the country’s states will be run by women. The party majority for female governors is still not clear.
One of the winners, Maura Healey, is the first woman to be elected to Massachusetts’ top post and also makes history by becoming the country’s first openly lesbian candidate to be elected governor.
“Tonight I want to say something to every little girl and every young LGBTQ person out there,” Healey said to supporters at a downtown Boston hotel after her victory Tuesday night. “I hope tonight shows you that you can be whatever, whoever you want to be and nothing and no one can ever get in your way except your own imagination and that’s not going to happen.”
If Democrat Tina Kotek wins Oregon’s gubernatorial race, where The Associated Press has not declared a winner, she may join Healey in making history as a lesbian candidate elected governor.
In Maryland, voters chose Democrat Wes Moore, who will be the state’s first Black governor. He is only the third Black candidate in the country to be elected governor.
Moore, a combat veteran, led one of the nation’s largest anti-poverty organizations and campaigned on creating equal opportunity for his state residents. He flips a governor’s office from Republican to Democratic. The current Republican Gov. Larry Hogan is term limited.
Florida, meanwhile, is sending the first member of Gen Z to Congress, with the comfortable victory of Democrat Maxwell Frost, a 25-year-old Black man with Cuban heritage.
Frost said that Gen Zers, those born from 1997 to 2012, are voting at higher levels, even though roughly half of the generation isn’t yet old enough. In an Associated Press interview, he praised President Biden’s focus on climate change and student debt cancelation.
Frost campaigned on gun control and Medicare for all and secured highprofile endorsements from progressive U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The seat had been left open when Val Demings decided to run for Senate, but Florida’s 10th District, which includes the Orlando area, is reliably Democratic.
“I’m just excited to work in Congress and advocate for these broad universal programs and things that will really, Number 1., help peoples’ day-to-day life, but also, Number 2, from a political standpoint, these things excite people because it shows folks that government can work,” he told The Associated Press.
Also marking a first, Vermont, which elected its first female governor in the 1980s, had been the only state that had never sent a woman to Congress. Democrat Becca Balint, president of the Vermont Senate, will reach that milestone and also become the first openly gay person to fill the state’s single seat in the U.S. House.