A gender + politics fact for every state voting on Super Tuesday

 

Today is Super Tuesday. Voters in 14 states are going to the polls, making this the day when the most delegates will be allotted to Democratic presidential candidates: more than a third of all delegates for the Democratic National Convention are up for grabs on this one day.

Here’s a gender + politics fact about each state heading to the polls today:

Alabama

  • The current governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, is the state’s first Republican woman governor. Interestingly, Ivey campaigned for Lurleen Wallace’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign; Wallace won and became the state’s first (and only) Democratic woman to serve as governor.

Arkansas

  • The first woman elected to the U.S. Senate, Hattie Caraway, was elected in Arkansas in 1932.

California

  • In 1992, California became the first state to have an all-woman team in the U.S. Senate: Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.

Colorado

  • Colorado is one of only two states (Nevada is the other) to currently have a female majority is even one of its chambers: Colorado’s lower house has three more women than men.

Maine

  • Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was the first woman to be elected to both houses of Congress: the House of Representatives in in 1940 and U.S. Senate in 1948. She also ran for president in 1964!

Massachusetts

  • Elaine Noble was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1974, becoming the first openly lesbian or gay candidate elected to a state legislature.

Minnesota

  • For the last 27 years, every Lt. Governor in Minnesota has been a woman, starting with Marlene Johnson in 1983.

North Carolina

  • When she was elected in 2017, Vi Lyles became the first Black woman mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city.

Oklahoma

  • Oklahoma was the second state to elect a woman to Congress: Alice Robertson in 1921. Robertson was also the first woman to defeat an incumbent representative in a general election.

Tennessee

  • Tennessee is 1 of just 6 states (MN, MS, NY, OH, and UT are the others) to have never had a major party woman gubernatorial candidate.

Texas

  • Miriam “Ma” Ferguson of Texas was one of the first woman to be elected governor of a state. She and Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming were both elected governor in 1925.

Utah

  • When she took office in 2015, Mia Love became the first black Republican woman elected to Congress.

Vermont

  • Vermont is the only state that has never elected a woman to Congress.

Virginia

  • When she was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2017, Danica Roem became the first openly transgender state legislator.

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