Category: Youth

It’s true that it’s early, but the math looks promising for the candidate originally out of Mid-City Los Angeles, otherwise known as Congressmember Bass, who’s represented the 37th District of California at the nation’s capitol since 2011. According to the L.A. Times, “Independent analysts suggest that a minimum of 300,000 ballots remain to be counted, the vast majority of them mail-ins. Bass pulled from behind in the vote count in the June primary on the strength of mail-in votes, and the new totals this week — with the congresswoman gaining three-fifths of the total 82,510 new votes over two days — suggested a possible repeat of that pattern.”

While many voters will be left wanting by her election, for many others–especially women of color–her victory is a homecoming, if not a welcome break from the usual order of business in the halls of power.

In the U.S. House of Representatives (where Bass has served), out of 435 seats, only 151 are held by women. Next door, only 24 out of 100 U.S. Senators are women; even locally, at L.A. City Hall, the last four years saw at best only four of fifteen seats occupied by people other than men (and before that, much less); figures like these are why a U.N. report recently noted that at the current rate, it will take another 40 years before gender parity may be established in national congresses or parliaments across the globe.

One gets the sense, though, that elections like Bass’ to the mayor’s office in the second largest city in America will have something to say about that. Congrats are thus in order.

J.T.