Virginia Democrat Jennifer Wexton, Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (left) and Sen. Tim Kaine(right) speaks at her 10th District primary night party in Sterling, Va., on Tuesday June 12th, 2018. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

By Kendrik Icenhour & Katie Pruitt

Women candidates won big on Tuesday June 12th, as Virginia, South Carolina, Maine, Nevada, and North Dakota held their primary elections for state and national offices.

Virginia continued the trend started in the state’s 2017 general election trend, where voters elected an historic number of women to the House of Delegates, by electing women in droves. On Tuesday night, six out of the 16 winners in congressional primaries were women (5 Democrats, 2 Republicans); in every district that a woman ran, a woman won.

My name is Evelien van Gelderen and I am a rising sophomore at Swarthmore College located in Swarthmore, Penn. Though I have yet to declare a major, I’m considering economics and biology. However, I’m also interested in policy and politics. My family has always been engaged in the news, and growing up, dinner conversation was often centered around social issues and recent news events.

In the eighth grade, my civics teacher tasked me with writing and delivering a speech on what my ideal American president would be like. Standing up in front of my class, I declared that my preferred president would be a woman. A male classmate criticized my speech because he believed that gender was irrelevant to whether someone can be an effective president. His comment upset me. Gender may not have been relevant to him but it sure was relevant to me. The state that I’m from, Virginia, has never elected a governor or a senator who was not a heterosexual man. Women are 51% of the U.S. population, yet they make up only 19.8% of Congress and 25% of state legislatures. Gender was important to me because I wanted a role model.

By RepresentWomen intern Lindsay Richwine

Four cities in the Bay Area—San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and San Leandro—have made the switch to an electoral system called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). RCV is a voting system that allows voters to rank candidates as their first, second, third choice and so on. If no candidate has a majority when votes are counted, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated, and ballots that have those candidates marked as their first choice are counted towards the candidate they selected as their second choice.

Last semester, one of my professors told me that political scientists have a bad habit of hypothesizing really broadly about the nature of our political systems and then hoping those theories “stick”. Though this feels overly simplistic, I am somehow completely on board with the theory that “descriptive representation” can help fix everything -- that is, electing representatives whose identities reflect the diverse identities of their constituents. Descriptive representation means women, LGBTQ folks, and people of color in office. It means we can look at our government and see ourselves represented there. It brings Washington D.C. closer to home. It means issues and policy needs that no committee of white men could have imagined are brought to the table. And it gives more people stake in the process, which is the most fundamental part of our participatory democracy.

My apologies for not including this in round one!

Four states held primaries/runoffs this week: Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Arkansas. I worked hard in 1989 to elect Douglas Wilder to be the first male Black governor elected in the United States so it's particularly exciting to report that Stacey Abrams won the primary in Georgia and now moves forward to the general election. A win in November would make Abrams the first female Black governor in the US. The New York Times reported on her win and Kelly Dittmar from the Center for American Women & Politics provides yet another terrific summary of election outcomes:

Among the notable results for women in Tuesday’s primaries in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Texas (primary runoffs):