By Millennial Politics Team
While Pennsylvania’s congressional districts have been redrawn over the past few weeks, candidates are doing their best to acclimate and adapt to the changing campaign landscape. Districts changing mid-cycle was unexpected, but PA-10 candidate Shavonnia Corbin-Johnson is certainly up for the challenge.
Corbin-Johnson’s first foray into politics was in college, when she worked for Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, who is currently one of the ten Democratic senators running for re-election in a state won by Donald Trump in 2016. Corbin-Johnson then went on to work in Obama’s White House, where she served as the advisor and assistant to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
If she wins the primary in May, Corbin-Johnson will go on to the general election to challenge Freedom Caucus member Scott Perry, who notoriously suggested that ISIS was responsible for the mass shooting in Las Vegas last year. If elected, Corbin-Johnson would be the first woman, person of color, and woman of color to represent Pennsylvania’s 10th in the U.S. House as well as the first woman of color to ever represent Pennsylvania in Congress. Additionally, though there are numerous women candidates running for Congress in Pennsylvania, currently, not a single member of Pennsylvania’s 18-seat congressional delegation is a woman. According to FairVote’s RepresentWomen, “in its history, Pennsylvania has never elected a woman to the U.S. Senate and has elected only seven women to the House, three of whom were elected in special elections following their husbands’ deaths.
We welcomed Shavonnia Corbin-Johnson on the podcast to talk about Pennsylvania’s congressional redistricting, what it’s like being a Black woman running for public office in a conservative district, and the opioid epidemic.
Listen in iTunes or directly in your browser below:
https://millennialpolitics.co/shavonnia-corbin-johnson/