A “Z” in Congress, an openly lesbian governor, a first black governor in Maryland and a major vote on abortion… As the ballots for the midterm elections in the United States continued to be counted On Wednesday, the results hinted at important breakthroughs for young people, diversity and the protection of abortion rights. Overview.
Generation Z in Washington
At the age of 25, Maxwell Frost ushers Generation Z into Congress. The Democrat will sit in the House of Representatives after being elected on Tuesday in his district of Orlando, Florida. His presence will contrast with the average age of the lower house, which is around 60, of which more than 80% of the members are from generation X or baby boomers.
‘Gen Z and millennials make up about a third of the country, but we’re nowhere near a third of the government […] we need a government that looks like the country,” he told CBS on Wednesday.
Cuban-born Maxwell Frost became an activist when he was 15 after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012. He has made gun violence his main focus during this election campaign, even going so far as to call themselves “the generation of mass shootings”.
In an interview with CNN, Maxwell Frost reports that when Joe Biden called him on Wednesday to congratulate him, the president compared his journey to his. Biden was 29 when he was elected senator.
A first openly lesbian governor
The United States appointed its first openly lesbian governor on Tuesday. This is Maura Healey, elected in the State of Massachusetts. The lawyer, who had been state attorney general since 2015, beat her Republican opponent, Geoff Diehl, dubbed by Donald Trump.
Other breakthroughs for LGBTQ+ people have been confirmed, including the arrival in the House of Representatives of Robert Garcia, Mayor of Long Beach, California and a native of Peru, who will be the first gay-identified immigrant to sit in the lower house.
For the first time in the country’s history, LGBTQ+ people were candidates in each of the 50 American states during these midterm elections, almost all under the Democratic banner. With some 678 LGBTQ+ people, this is an 18% increase from the 2020 election, according to an analysis conducted by the LGBTQ Victory Fund.
A first black governor in Maryland
Wes Moore, an Afghan war veteran, former nonprofit leader and author, is the first black person elected governor of Maryland. In US history, he is only the third elected black governor.
The Democrat defeated Donald Trump-backed Republican Dan Cox. Wes Moore thus takes over a Democratic stronghold occupied by Republican Governor Larry Hogan for two terms. He will be joined by Lieutenant Governor Aruna Miller, a former member of the Maryland House of Delegates. Of Indian origin, she becomes the first immigrant to hold this position in the state.
First major vote on abortion
In addition to electing several political representatives, millions of Americans in Vermont, California and Michigan were to vote for the first time on Tuesday on an amendment to their state constitution to protect the right to abortion. A major vote since the Supreme Court overturned the Roe vs. Wade case last June.
At the end of the vote, the three States ratified the right to abortion in their constitution. The stakes were high for the Midwestern state since the popular vote invalidated a 1931 law deeming any termination of pregnancy a criminal act.
In the conservative states of Kentucky and Montana, voters had to vote on measures restricting access to abortion. In Kentucky, citizens rejected the proposed amendment to enshrine in the constitution that it “does not guarantee the right to abortion” or its funding. Montana, whose results were still awaited at the time of this writing, proposed giving a legal “person” status to embryos and fetuses.