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From left: Tammy Baldwin, Keturah Herron, and Sarah McBride
There were some bright spots.
There were some notable victories for LGBTQ+ candidates and causes in Tuesday’s election, despite the devastating results that saw Donald Trump win the presidency and Republicans take control of the U.S. Senate and possibly the House of Representatives.
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Sarah McBride, currently a Delaware state senator, won election as the state’s sole representative in the U.S. House. She will be the first out transgender member of Congress, and she was the first trans state senator in the nation. She is a Democrat, as are all the LGBTQ+ politicians mentioned here, unless noted otherwise.
Tammy Baldwin appears to have won reelection as a U.S. senator from Wisconsin in a tight race over Republican challenger Eric Hovde, who ran a campaign marked by thinly veiled homophobia. If her final margin of victory is less than one percentage point, Hovde can request a recount. Baldwin, a lesbian, will be the only LGBTQ+ senator, as lesbian Democrat Laphonza Butler and bisexual independent Kyrsten Sinema decided not to seek reelection.
Emily Randall was elected to the U.S. House from Washington State’s Sixth Congressional District. Randall, a lesbian, will be the state’s first LGBTQ+ member of Congress, and the first LGBTQ+ Latina elected to that body from any state. She is currently a state senator.
Another lesbian, Julie Johnson, was elected to the U.S. House from Texas’s 32nd Congressional District. Currently a Texas state representative, she will be the first LGBTQ+ member of Congress from any southern state.
All incumbent LGBTQ+ U.S. House members won reelection: Becca Balint of Vermont, Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, Ritchie Torres of New York, Eric Sorensen of Illinois, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, Angie Craig of Minnesota, Sharice Davids of Kansas, and Robert Garcia and Mark Takano of California. Their reelection plus the election of three new representatives brings the number of LGBTQ+ House members to 12, an all-time high.
The race hasn’t been called for Evan Low, seeking a House seat in Northern California, but he’s trailing fellow Dem Sam Liccardo — in California, the top two vote recipients in the primary advance to the general election, regardless of party. In Southern California, gay man Will Rollins’s race against incumbent Republican Ken Calvert hasn’t been called either. Black gay man Mondaire Jones lost his bid to return to Congress from New York, after being elected in 2020 and losing the Democratic primary in a different district in 2022. Republican Mike Lawler bested him in the general election Tuesday.
At the state level, Keturah Herron, who is genderqueer, became the first out LGBTQ+ woman and first queer person of color ever elected to the Kentucky state Senate. Herron was unopposed. They previously made history by being elected as the first out LGBTQ+ member of the Kentucky House of Representatives in 2022.
Aime Wichtendahl was elected as the first transgender member of the Iowa legislature, winning a state House seat from District 80 in eastern Iowa. In 2015, she became the first trans elected official in the state by being elected to the Hiawatha City Council.
In Montana, trans woman Zooey Zephyrwas reelected to the state House, meaning she can go back to the House floor after being banished from there nearly two years ago by Republicans after she said those who supported banning gender-affirming care for minors would have blood on their hands.
Bisexual woman Molly Cook won a full four-year term as a Texas state senator after winning a special election earlier this year to succeed John Whitmire, who was elected mayor of Houston. Whitmire’s term went only until the end of the year, so Cook had to run again in the general election. She is Texas’s first out state senator.
Marriage equality won in all three states where it was on the ballot. Voters in California, Colorado, and Hawaii approved ballot measures amending their constitutions to remove language banning same-sex marriage by significant margins. The constitutional provisions were unenforceable since the U.S. Supreme Court's marriage equality decision in 2015, but if the court overturned that ruling, they could have become enforceable again.
In seven of the 10 states where abortion rights were on the ballot, measures to enshrine these rights won. The measures passed in the blue states of Colorado, Maryland, and New York as well as in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada and the deep-red states of Missouri and Montana. They failed in Nebraska and South Dakota, where only a simple majority was needed, and in Florida, where 60 percent of the vote was required. A majority of Floridians did approve the measure, at 57 percent, three percentage points shy of the threshold.
