A progressive Democrat winning an election in a traditionally conservative district is no easy task.  Apparently no one gave that memo to Maryland’s newly elected Congressional representative Donna Edwards.  Edwards was sworn into Congress on June 17th making her the first African American Congresswoman in Maryland’s history.  Edwards took the February primary victory over 8 […]

The oft-repeated joke on the Senate floor whenever a Democrat-sponsored a “women’s bill” comes up is that Republicans would be voting for the measure if only they had a woman in their caucus. Well, joke no more.With her primary win, Republican Assemblywoman Mimi Walters is likely headed for the state Senate, where she will find herself part of a growing caucus in the Legislature’s upper house.After tallying up the results of the June 3 primary, there could be as many as 14 women in the state Senate in the state Senate in the 2009-10 session

Governor Releases May Budget Revisions.
Parks Win, but Education Still Takes Huge Hit.

With the April 15 income tax filing deadline past and the state now having a better sense of actual revenues for 2008-09, on May 14 the Governor released his revised state budget proposal based on a worsened projected shortfall of $17.2 billion, up $7.5 billion from January.

While the nation’s political attention has been focused on the Democratic presidential primary election, our Democratic women candidates here in California ran competitive campaigns in really difficult races AND won! However, yesterday’s primary was a bittersweet victory.

The pendulum is swinging away from the great strides we made in the early 90’s to even the playing field in the California legislature. Our dreams of equal representation for women are slowly declining. The trend seems to be that we lose two to three elected women legislators every election cycle. Despite yesterday’s victories, we could potentially lose more women legislators in November. Considering less than 28% of the California state seats are held by women, we must remain vigilant to maintain gender representation.

Currently there are 32 elected women in our California State Senate – that’s about 20% Last week I met with Assemblywoman Patty Berg, former chair of the Women’s Caucus to discuss the upcoming primary election. It is sad to report, but our predictions were grim. Pundits and pollsters are predicting that we could […]

Clint Reilly has a post today that gets it right in a post today, The Bay Congresswomen Power Bloc. He writes,
It is a remarkable fact that while women make up 64 percent of the Bay Area’s Congressional delegation, only 16 percent of the total members of the House of Representatives are female. Even within […]

Senate District 19 is the KEY State Senate race this year. This is the district that is most likely to flip from Republican to Democratic, delivering a majority large enough to actually pass budgets over Republican obstructionism. Hannah-Beth Jackson is the Democratic candidate for State Senate District 19.

Last year as I watched Debra Bowen being sworn in as Secretary of State I couldn’t help but feel this was a momentous achievement in history. As Secretary of State, Debra Bowen would be heading the governmental body in California responsible for overseeing voter rights and the accountability of the State’s electoral process. […]

While attending UC Berkeley, I ran the ASUC student body elections and that is where I first met Nancy Skinner who was a candidate for Academic Affairs. Nancy was a young woman who had already recognized her future in the political arena. Nancy won that election to become Vice President of the ASUC […]

As the June 3rd primary approaches, it is vital that we as voters take stock of the tremendous decline in our elected women here in California. In 2008, ten female legislators, 7 Democrats and 3 Republicans, will be lost due to term limits. This could seriously affect our pool of elected women which is […]