In 2017, there will be 4 new women Senators and a grand total of 21, an all time high, up by one.
The four new women Senators are all Democrats, and altogether, there will be 16 Democrats and 5 Republicans.
California replaces Barbara Boxer, retired, with Kamala Harris, who is multi racial—a mother born in India, and her father being a Jamaican American from the Caribbean island—replacing Boxer, after having been Attorney General for six years.
Tammy Duckworth, who had been a Congresswoman from Illinois, replaced Senator Mark Kirk, and she is Asian American, born to a white American father and a Thai-Chinese mother in Thailand. She served in the military for 22 years, and was seriously wounded in the Iraq War, losing both legs and damaging her right arm.
Catherine Cortez Masto replaced Harry Reid, retiring, in Nevada. She was Attorney General of Nevada from 2007-2015. She is Latina with a Mexican American father and an Italian-American mother.
Maggie Hassan, the Governor of New Hampshire, defeated Senator Kelly Ayotte for her seat. She served two two year terms as Governor, after having served in the state legislature for three two year terms.
Pending the outcome in Louisiana (a runoff), Election 2016 marked the first time in U.S. History that a presidential election with U.S. Senate races having matched 100 percent in coattails. (This means, the same party carried states at the presidential/senatorial levels. With Elections 2004, 2008, and 2012, same-party coattails were about 80 percent. Credit for reporting this goes to Harry Enten: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-were-no-purple-states-on-tuesday/ .)
Hillary Clinton won Democratic holds of Illinois and New Hampshire. This means that the incumbent Republican U.S. senators from those states, Mark Kirk and Kelly Ayotte, were unseated by their Democratic challengers, Tammy Duckworth and Maggie Hassan, in part because voters in those states check-marked the same party at both levels. Numbers wise, in spreads, there 2.79 percentage points between Hillary Clinton and Tammy Duckworth in Illinois; in New Hampshire, the spread between Hillary Clinton and Maggie Hassan was just 0.22 percentage points.
Partisanship matters. It’s contributing to a lot of election results, whether one is okay with such outcome, nowadays in politics.
Thanks so much for this, D, bad news for Democrats short term and long term!