Black women notch historic Senate wins in an election year defined by potential firsts

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Black women notch historic Senate wins in an election year defined by potential firsts

2024-11-06 13:56 Last Updated At：14:01

WASHINGTON (AP) — Voters for the first time elected two Black women to serve simultaneously in the Senate and sent an openly transgender lawmaker to Congress on Tuesday. They’re among historic choices in nearly a dozen races showing Americans opting for more diverse representation even with issues such as affirmative action and LGBTQ inclusion driving deeper divisions.

Delaware’s Lisa Blunt Rochester and Maryland’s Angela Alsobrooks prevailed in their races, doubling the number of Black women ever elected to the Senate – from two to four. And Delaware voters elected Sarah McBride in an at-large House race, making her the first openly transgender person elevated to Congress.

The victories come in an election year defined in part by historic firsts.

“Marking these milestones does two things: One, it celebrates the increasing diversity that we are seeing in women’s political representation, whether it be in a state or nationally,” said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics.

“But at the same time, it reminds us that we have more work to do,” said Dittmar, noting that U.S. women overall aren’t represented equitably in elected offices and that Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans, as well as Native Americans, lag behind their share of the population.

Other historic firsts in the Senate on Tuesday include New Jersey’s Andy Kim, who became the first Asian American elected to represent the Garden State in the Senate and also the first Korean-American elected in the Senate. Republican Bernie Moreno of Ohio became the first Latino to represent the state.

Never in the Senate have two Black women served at the same time. Kamala Harris was only the second Black woman and first South Asian woman to serve in the Senate, before she was elected vice president. From 2021 to 2023, the chamber was without Black female representation until California Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed Laphonza Butler to a vacancy created by the death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Blunt Rochester, a Democrat who currently represents the at-large congressional district of Delaware, becomes the first woman and first Black person to represent Delaware in the Senate. Alsobrooks, a Democrat and former executive of Prince George’s County, Maryland, is also the first Black woman to represent her state in the Senate.

“It's remarkable to think that in two years, America will celebrate its 250th birthday,” Alsobrooks said during a victory speech Tuesday evening. “And in all those years, there have been more than 2,000 people who have served in the United States Senate. Only three have looked like me.”

“And so I want to salute all those who came before me, who made it possible for me to stand on this stage tonight, whose sacrifices and stories I will continue to carry with me,” she added to cheers from supporters.

Their victories raise the number of Black members of the Senate to five, the most to serve together in history. Still, the Senate’s 100 members have historically been, and continue to be, mostly white men.

“We increased our representation of Black women in the Senate by 100%,” said Aimee Allison, founder and president of She the People, a national organizing hub for recruiting and electing women of color in politics.

“I’ve been in electoral politics for 30 years and, for the vast majority of that time, Black women have played an outsized role as voters and organizers, but had been defeated, often by fellow Democrats in primaries, because we were dismissed as being unelectable,” Allison said.

“It’s a testament to the evolution of Black women as political players in this country,” Allison added. “Some of the things that stumped us are kind of baked into a system that have kept Black women out of the Senate. We have figured out additional paths to be successful.”

McBride, a Democratic state senator in Delaware, already made history in 2020 when she was elected the only openly transgender state senator in the country. That followed a rise in national recognition for McBride, who became the first transgender speaker to address a major party convention during the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

Her elevation to Congress comes as transgender issues have proven divisive in American politics. From bans on biological males playing in women’s and girls’ sports and bans on books with LGBTQ themes, to debates over gender-affirming pronouns and gender-neutral bathrooms, visibility of transgender people in politics could keep those issues at the forefront of debates about acceptance and tolerance.

After winning her primary in September, McBride said she was not running for Congress to make history, but instead “to make historic progress for Delawareans.”

In the 50 years since the Center for American Women and Politics began tracking gender equality and racial diversity in politics, progress often comes when Democrats do better in the election cycle.

“We have not seen those same levels of gains in the Republican Party,” said Kelly, the center’s research director. “It’s very clear that it’s kind of a one-sided story. And if we want to get to gender parity in elected office, it’s going to be hard to do that on one side of the aisle, just numerically.”

Allison said the youngest generation of future American voters may not always see racial and gender diversity as a crucial, if longstanding problems of social and economic inequality go unaddressed by their parents’ generation.

“You can’t make an argument about representation only,” she said. “It’s hard to do that because it’s not enough. The first step in creating this multiracial democracy is creating an American government that serves all people.”

Trump flips Georgia and moves closer to reclaiming the White House

2024-11-06 13:58 Last Updated At：14:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump has won the battleground state of Georgia, the onetime Republican stronghold that had voted for Democrats four years ago.

With his earlier win in North Carolina, Trump narrowed Kamala Harris’ pathways to victory and expanded his routes to reaching the 270 electoral votes needed to become the next president.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump won the battleground state of North Carolina on Tuesday, fending off a challenge from Kamala Harris, who was looking to flip the state and expand her pathways to 270 electoral votes.

The former Republican president had made stops to the state in each of the last three days of the campaign to deprive Harris of the pickup.

The Democratic vice president’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, told staff in a memo after polls closed that the “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was now the Democrat’s “clearest path” to victory, according to a copy obtained by The Associated Press.

Polls were closed in additional battlegrounds — Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — but the results in all remaining swing states were too early to call.

Trump won Florida, a one-time battleground that has shifted heavily to Republicans in recent elections. He also notched early wins in reliably Republican states such as Texas, South Carolina and Indiana. Harris won Virginia, a state Trump visited in the final days of the campaign, and took Democratic strongholds like New York, New Mexico and California. Harris also won an Electoral College vote in Nebraska that was contested by Republicans.

The crowd at Harris’ watch party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, began to file out after midnight Wednesday. Harris did not speak at the party. Cedric Richmond, co-chair of the Harris campaign, spoke instead, telling the crowd there were still votes to count and states to be called.

“We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted. That every voice has spoken,” he said. “So you won’t hear from the vice president tonight, but you will hear from her tomorrow. She will be back here tomorrow.”

Trump was expected to speak early Wednesday from an event in Florida.

The Trump campaign bet that it would cut into Democrats' traditional strength with Black and Latino voters, with the former president going on male-centric podcasts and making explicit racial appeals to both groups. Nationally, Black and Latino voters appeared slightly less likely to support Harris than they were to back Joe Biden four years ago, and Trump’s support among those voters appeared to rise slightly compared to 2020, according to AP VoteCast.

The fate of democracy appeared to be a primary driver for Harris’ supporters, a sign that the Democratic nominee’s persistent messaging in her campaign’s closing days accusing Trump of being a fascist may have broken through, according to the expansive survey of more than 110,000 voters nationwide. It also found a country mired in negativity and desperate for change. Trump’s supporters were largely focused on immigration and inflation — two issues that the former Republican president has been hammering since the start of his campaign.

In his recent visits to North Carolina, Trump seized on the heavy damage caused Hurricane Helene, spreading false claims about the federal government’s response and using GoFundMe to collect millions in donations for impacted residents. Trump initially trumpeted the Republican nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, and hailed him as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” but distanced himself after a CNN report that alleged Robinson had made explicit racial and sexual posts on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago.

Robinson, who lost his race Tuesday to Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, denied writing the messages and sued CNN for defamation last month.

In another positive sign for the GOP, the party took control of the Senate, with Trump-backed Bernie Moreno flipping a seat in Ohio held by Democrat Sherrod Brown since 2007. They picked up another when Republican Jim Justice won a West Virginia seat that opened up with Sen. Joe Manchin’s retirement.

Those casting Election Day ballots mostly encountered a smooth process, with isolated reports of hiccups that regularly happen, including long lines, technical issues and ballot printing errors. Federal election security officials said there were minor disruptions throughout the day but there was no evidence of any impact to the election system. Officials determined that bomb threats that were reported in multiple states were all not credible and did not impact the ability of voters to cast their ballots.

Harris, 60, would be the first woman, Black woman and person of South Asian descent to serve as president. She also would be the first sitting vice president to win the White House in 36 years.

Trump, 78, would be the oldest president ever elected. He would also be the first defeated president in 132 years to win another term in the White House, and the first person convicted of a felony to take over the Oval Office.

He survived one assassination attempt by millimeters at a July rally. Secret Service agents foiled a second attempt in September.

Harris, pointing to the warnings of Trump's former aides, has labeled him a “fascist” and blamed Trump for putting women's lives in danger by nominating three of the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. In the closing hours of the campaign, she tried to strike a more positive tone and went all of Monday without saying her Republican opponent's name.

Voters nationwide also were deciding thousands of other races that will decide everything from control of Congress to state ballot measures on abortion access in response to the Supreme Court’s vote in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade.

In Florida, a ballot measure that would have protected abortion rights in the state constitution failed after not meeting the 60% threshold to pass, marking the first time a measure protecting abortion rights failed since Roe was overturned. Earlier Tuesday, Trump refused to say how he voted on the measure and snapped at a reporter, saying, “You should stop talking about that."

In reliably Democratic New York, Colorado and Maryland, voters approved ballot measures aimed at protecting abortion rights in their state constitutions.

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in Palm Beach, Florida, Darlene Superville and Eric Tucker in Washington, Manuel Valdes in Las Vegas and Marc Levy in Allentown, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.