White men now represent the minority in the pool of Democratic House candidates, a new Politico analysis shows.
According to news outlet’s research, more than half of the nominees — 65 — are in the 125 districts where a Democratic incumbent is set to leave office or a Republican seat is at risk of turning blue in November are women.
Politico added that its analysis also showed an overlapping group of those women to be people of color. So far, 30 people of color have won their Democratic primaries this year and 73 candidates in the candidate pool are minorities who have never even run for elected office before.
“These grass-roots candidates came out of nonpolitical, nontraditional networks, meaning that they’re running very different kinds of campaigns than we’ve ever seen,” Martha McKenna, a Democratic consultant, told Politico of the findings.
{mosads}“When a state legislator runs for Congress, that’s a formula we know. But when a nurse or a mom or a young veteran decides to run, their campaign looks and feels different, and in 2018, there’s a lot of power in that,” McKenna said.
“The way these new candidates will govern will also be different from what we’ve ever seen before,” she added.
Kara Eastman, a social worker and first-time candidate who beat former Democratic Rep. Brad Ashford in Nebraska this year for the nomination, told the Politico when “you think about the reasons for why someone may have voted for Trump, they were looking for someone who’s going to get into Washington and break up the system.”
“I represent some of that as a political outsider who’s new to this, running to fundamentally change the system,” Eastman added.
The analysis arrives as record numbers of women, minorities and first-time candidates have won Democratic primaries this year as the party seeks to take a majority in the House in the November midterms.