Two years ago, a historic number of women, including the state’s first openly transgender lawmaker, won seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates.
And on Tuesday night, female candidates helped turn the state legislature Democratic for the first time in 20 years. Female Democrats held onto their seats from 2017, and newcomers like Ghazala Hashmi, the first Muslim woman elected to the Virginia legislature, flipped key seats to help give Democrats a majority in both the House of Delegates and the state Senate.
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The fact that so many of those women won — and more picked up seats on Tuesday — is a counterweight to a persistent narrative that women aren’t “electable” when they run for office. That narrative got its latest support from a recent New York Times/Siena College poll that showed former Vice President Joe Biden, but not Sen. Elizabeth Warren, beating President Trump in several battleground states.