2017 ELECTION ROUNDUP

November elections (and one very big one in December) flooded our hearts with hope, relief, and joy, as progressives swept races across the country, even in unlikely districts. The elections delivered a giant smackdown to the Bannon/Trump vision of America, with a large number of people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and immigrants winning up and down the ballot. And women showed up and meant business – as candidates, organizers, and voters – and the nation is now on notice. Of the winning candidates, 152 of them are Emerge graduates, including nine in Maine. And young people ran for office and won. Here, for your revelry and inspiration, is an assuredly incomplete list of victories.  We’d love to see your name on a future election roundup. Run Local, Emerge Maine, and Run for Something offer training programs on how to run for public office at all levels. Make plans now to vote or run this year, in all elections from school board to the statehouse. That’s how we make lasting change. We show up.

• Maine made national headlines as the first state to expand Medicaid by referendum, a rebuke to Governor LePage, who had vetoed similar legislation five times. LePage is doing everything he can to put up obstacles to the implementation of the voters’ will, but he lacks the authority to override a referendum, so the voters will prevail. See our C2A on this.

• In December, after an inspiring all-hands-on-deck grassroots effort in Alabama by fired-up members of Indivisible, NAACP, and many other groups, Democrat Doug Jones won the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Jeff Sessions. Some of us even helped from here; see our C2A on this race. Roll tide!

• Democrats saw big gains as they picked up local council and mayoral seats across Pennsylvania. In Delaware County, several county government seats flipped blue, and two Democrats were elected to the county council, the first ones to serve there in over 30 years.

• In the crucial Virginia gubernatorial race, Ralph Northam, who critics had said was not exciting enough, handily beat Ed Gillespie, who had campaigned on a Trump-style platform of fear-mongering and hatred toward minorities and immigrants.

• Thirty-three-year-old Danica Roem, the first openly transgender person elected to a statehouse, will replace the Virginia legislator who introduced that state’s “bathroom bill.”

• Virginia’s House of Delegates will also welcome its first two Latina women (Hala Ayala and Elizabeth Guzman), first Asian woman (Kathy Tran), and first openly lesbian woman (Dawn Adams). And Justin Fairfax was elected as Lieutenant Governor, becoming the second black person to hold a state-level office in 140 years. And as of this writing, the statehouse might even flip blue (pending recounts in close races).

• With the election of Lisa Middleton and Christy Holstege, the five-member city council of Palm Springs, CA is now entirely LGBTQ.

• Sheila Oliver became New Jersey’s first black lieutenant governor.

• Twenty-six-year old (and lesbian) Allison Ikley-Freeman won a seat in the Oklahoma Senate in a conservative district that DJT won by 40 points last year.

• Yvonne Spicer, who is black, became the first mayor of Framingham, MA, which decided to become a city this year.

• Melvin Carter became the first black mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota.

• Democratic Socialists of America candidates won 15 races in 13 states, joining the 20 members of this party already in office.

• Albuquerque elected the progressive Tim Keller as its new mayor.

• Santa Barbara, CA elected Cathy Murillo, the city’s first Latina mayor.

• Wilmot Collins, a refugee from the Liberian civil war, became the first black mayor of Helena, Montana.

• Traditionally conservative Aurora, CO elected a slate of progressive candidates to the city council and school board, including three Emerge graduates. One of them, Crystal Murillo, is a twenty-three-year-old daughter of Mexican immigrants.

• Another Emerge graduate, Janet Diaz, became the first Latina elected to the city council in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

• Iowa City elected Muzahir Salih, a Sudanese-American woman and a Muslim, to its city council.

• Six LGBTQ candidates across North Carolina were voted into office, most in town councils.

• Deborah Gonzales and Jonathan Wallace won seats in the Georgia legislature in a special election. Both were previously held by Republicans and were uncontested in November 2016.

• In Georgetown, South Carolina, Brandon Barber, a longtime member of the city council, became the city’s first black mayor.

• Erie’s Tyler Titus became the first openly transgender person elected to a school board in Pennsylvania.

• Two cities in Georgia elected their first black mayors: progressive Jonathan McCollar in Statesboro and 28-year-old Booker Gainor in Cairo.

• In Milledgeville, Georgia, Mary Parham-Copelan, who is black, became the city’s first woman to serve as mayor, defeating the incumbent by five votes. Voting matters!

• Ravi Bhalla, a turban-wearing Sikh, was elected as mayor of Hoboken, N.J., in spite of a racist flyer campaign by his opponent to try and associate him with terrorism. He is the first Sikh mayor in New Jersey and one of only a few in the country.

• Progressive Joyce Craig became the woman elected mayor of Manchester, NH.

• Six women of color were elected to the 13-member Boston city council, including the millennial Lydia Edwards, the first woman to run in her district in 25 years.

• Progressive Larry Grasner, a civil rights attorney who has represented Black Lives Matter, was elected District Attorney of Philadelphia by over 40 percentage points.

• Manka Dhingra’s newly won state Senate seat representing suburban Seattle flipped the Senate blue, giving Democrats control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship.

• In New York, Democrats flipped the office of county executive in Westchester and Nassau Counties, with George Latimer and Laura Curran, respectively, winning those races. Curran is the first woman to hold office of executive on Long Island.

• In other Long Island elections, Laura Gillen became the first Democrat elected town supervisor in Hempstead in 100 years, and Laura Jens Smith became the first woman supervisor ever in Riverhead.

• In Charlotte, NC, Vi Lyles became the first black woman mayor in an election she won by 18 points despite being massive out-spent by her opponent. And Black Lives Matter activist Braxton Winston won a city on the city council, one of several millennials elected to the council.

• Andrea Jenkins will take her new seat on the Minneapolis city council as the first openly trans black woman elected to any office in the country.

• Racist flyers circulated against Edison, New Jersey school board candidates Jingwei (“Jerry”) Shi and Falguni Patel sparked outrage, and the two both won.

• Jenny Durkan became Seattle’s first woman mayor since 1928, and she’s a lesbian.

• Democrat Frank Gilliam defeated a Republican incumbent to become mayor of Atlantic City.

• And Ashley Bennett won a county seat in New Jersey, defeating an incumbent who had asked if the Women’s March would be over in time for the women to make dinner. (Who wants to tell him it’s just getting started?)

Happy 2018, everyone. See you at the polls – and the voter registration drives and candidate meet-and-greets and canvassing days. Let’s do this!