This election cycle has seen a wave of women running for office and a record number have been elected to the House of Representatives.
It was a night of firsts in the U. S. midterms with voters electing two Native American women and two Muslim women for the first time, along with the country’s first openly gay governor. While the GOP tightened its grip on the Senate, Democrats wrestled back control of the House, driven by a more diverse, more progressive and more female group of candidates. At least 100 female House candidates from both parties were projected to win seats early Wednesday morning, a record number.
Currently, there are 84 women in the House of Representatives and by 03:30am EST, 95 female candidates were confirmed as winning their races. This year’s midterms saw a wave of women running for office and many of them were first-time candidates. In fact, more than twice as many women ran for Congress this year than in 2016 and most of them were Democrats. The following infographic shows how America’s political landscape is undergoing a female transformation. The number of women running for office really took off in 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman. That year, 24 female candidates won seats in the House of Representatives, the largest number to ever enter the House in a single election up to that point.
* Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)
Total number of women elected to the U. S. House of Representations Statista
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