By Maryam Saleh
The group Women Winning has
become a fixture in Minnesota politics after working to support
pro-choice women running for office for the last 32 years. Among the
success stories listed on its website is the story of Margaret Anderson Kelliher —
“the second woman to serve as Speaker of the Minnesota House and the
first woman to receive a major party’s endorsement for Governor in
Minnesota.”
Kelliher lost her shot at the state’s
highest office in 2010, despite securing the endorsement of the
Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the Democratic Party is known in
Minnesota, and she has been out of politics ever since. But after a
shake-up in Minnesota Democratic politics created a rare opening in the
state’s 5th Congressional District in June, Kelliher decided to enter
the fray once more.
Primary voters in the district tend to
be mostly female, and an endorsement by Women Winning, a political
action committee that is essentially the local equivalent of EMILY’s
List, carries a lot of weight. Given that Women Winning already touts
Kelliher on its website, one might presume that the group’s endorsement
was a given. But in a sign of the changing times — at a moment when
insurgent candidates are working to defeat the old guard of the
Democratic Party — the group overlooked the candidate it champions as
core to its success. It instead opted to endorse Ilhan Omar,
a freshman state representative, in the 5th District race. Omar
participated in the organization’s training program for candidates and
earned its backing during her 2016 entree into politics.
The crowded primary field includes
Somali-American activist and engineer Jamal Abdulahi and former
Republican Frank Drake, but is largely viewed as a three-way contest
between Kelliher, Omar, and Patricia Torres Ray, who has been a state
senator for 12 years. The 5th District seat is highly coveted: Its
current occupant, Keith Ellison, is just one of three people to hold
that job in the last 55 years.
Click here for the full article.
Source: The Intercept_
No comments:
Post a Comment