The midterm elections are only getting closer. With less than two months to go until voters across the United States turn out for what’s widely perceived as a chance to vote on President Donald Trump’s policies even though the man himself isn’t on the ballot, Barack Obama has thundered back on the scene with an endorsement of what’s now hundreds of Democratic candidates. This week, months after a previous round of endorsements, he unveiled support for 260 specific Democrats running for office across the country.
Supported candidates range from Florida’s incumbent U.S. Senator Bill Nelson and gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Gillum to Maryland’s gubernatorial candidate Ben Jealous.
In his comments accompanying the endorsements, he touted the fact that Democrats have put forward an incredibly diverse roster of candidates this year, exclaiming:
‘Our incredible array of candidates up and down the ticket, all across the country, make up a movement of citizens who are younger, more diverse, more female than ever before.’
Obama is certainly onto something. Half of the new candidates nominated this year by Democrats for seats in the U.S. House are women; overall, including incumbent candidates, still over 40 percent of Democratic picks are women. Just over 10 percent of all Republican candidates for the U.S. House this year are women; some 18 percent of the specifically new GOP Congressional picks are female.
The Democratic Party as a whole could be said to be onto something, too. They’re expected to take control of the U.S. House in the midterms, sailing to a majority while the tyrannical Trump remains in power and thereby enacting a check on his authoritarianism.
Although it’s strictly possible and not expected at this point, Democrats could become the majority party in the U.S. Senate come the midterms as well.
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