Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken democratic socialist, came to personify the ideological lines dividing the Democratic Party in 2018. | Mario Tama/Getty Images Elections ‘Something has actually changed’: Women, minorities, first-time candidates drive Democratic House hopes White men are in the minority among Democratic House nominees.

A flood of women, minorities and first-time candidates is poised to radically alter the composition of Congress next year after winning Democratic primaries in record numbers in 2018.

White men are in the minority in the House Democratic candidate pool, a POLITICO analysis shows. Democrats have nominated a whopping 180 female candidates in House primaries — shattering the party’s previous record of 120, according to Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics. Heading into the final primaries of 2018 this week, Democrats have also nominated at least 133 people of color and 158 first-time candidates to run for the House.


The numbers are even starker in the districts without Democratic incumbents. In the 125 districts where a Democratic incumbent is leaving office or a Republican seat is at risk of flipping, according to POLITICO’s race ratings, more than half the nominees (65) are women. An overlapping group of 30 Democratic primary winners are people of color, and 73 of them have never run for elected office before, tapping into voter disdain for politics as usual.

Their success in primaries could herald a major shift in Congress, which is majority-white, majority-male and still mostly made up of former state legislators who climbed the political ladder to Washington. And the candidates could also mark the beginning of a new era for the rebuilding Democratic Party, which is counting on new types of candidates to take back the House.

“These grass-roots candidates came out of non-political, non-traditional networks, meaning that they’re running very different kinds of campaigns than we’ve ever seen,” said Martha McKenna, a Democratic consultant who once led EMILY’s List, the pro-abortion rights group. “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.”

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“The way these new candidates will govern will also be different from what we’ve ever seen before,” McKenna added.

(See POLITICO’s “Women Rule” Candidate Tracker.)

Republican women could also make history in a handful of House districts, though the GOP's 52 female nominees are dwarfed by Democrats' totals. In California, former state legislator Young Kim would be the first Korean-American woman to serve in Congress if she can hold a tough open seat for the GOP, while Lea Marquez Peterson, president of the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, would be the first Latina to represent Arizona in Congress.

But it was the Democrats' new wave of candidates that pulled some of the most stunning upsets of the primary season — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, both women of color, knocked off a pair of 10-term white congressmen in the Northeast: Reps. Joe Crowley of New York and Mike Capuano of Massachusetts.

They have also come out of nowhere to galvanize liberal activists with their personal stories and make some longtime Republican districts competitive by force of personality.

Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot who had never run for office before, defeated a fixture of Kentucky Democratic politics in a primary and is now threatening GOP Rep. Andy Barr in a conservative district. MJ Hegar, a fellow female veteran from Texas, also raised millions of dollars online after producing a viral Web video on her compelling life story, potentially dragging Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) into his first-ever tough race in his current district.

Hundreds of women signed up to run for office in 2017, but the results out of the early primary contests in Texas last spring signaled to national operatives that, “‘Oh, wow, this is sticking, and something has actually changed,’ we all were suddenly saying to each other after the first couple of primaries,” said Delacey Skinner, a Democratic consultant.

Now, fully half of the Democrats on the House ballot in Texas are women, while Colin Allred, an African-American former pro football player, beat out million-dollar Democratic primary opponents to take on Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) in what could be the state’s top battleground district.

“When you look at this large class of women candidates, it’s obvious, it’s no longer your average white guy in a red tie running,” said John Lapp, a Democratic consultant who led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006. “These candidates look and sound different from what we know Congress to be right now, so they start with credibility of being outside of that.”

Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken democratic socialist, came to personify the ideological lines dividing the Democratic Party in 2018. But nationwide, the diverse array of candidates coming out of Democratic primaries had an equally diverse range of views on popular liberal policies currently animating the left, like “Medicare-for-all“ and abolishing U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement.

Former Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, a moderate Democrat, won a hard-fought primary battle in Arizona, even after she was booed at a candidate forum for calling for reforms to ICE, rather than abolishment. Meanwhile, Kara Eastman, a first-time candidate and social worker, beat former Blue Dog Democratic Rep. Brad Ashford in Nebraska after running an unapologetically liberal campaign. Ashford, a former state legislator and one-term congressman, had the backing of the Washington establishment, including the DCCC, but Eastman said she was buoyed by the “momentum for candidates who want to represent real people.”

“If 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,” Eastman said. “I represent some of that as a political outsider who’s new to this, running to fundamentally change the system.”

Tom Steyer, a billionaire Democratic megadonor and potential 2020 presidential candidate, acknowledged that “there’s a lot of cacophony,” around the Democratic Party’s direction, “but it’s democracy, and it means that people are going to be able to get a chance to listen and make up their minds,” he said.

One more major House primary remains for Democrats, pitting Maura Sullivan, a veteran and first-time candidate who worked in the Obama administration, against Chris Pappas, an openly gay member of the state executive council. Both are fairly mainstream, conventional Democrats, and while a handful of progressives in the race to replace retiring Rep. Carol Shea-Porter have gone to their left, the battle between the frontrunners has boiled down to biography and resources more than ideology.

Sullivan, a 38-year-old former Marine, emphasized in her ads and in an interview with POLITICO that she’s “a part of a group of women veterans running, and I think we approach service and the job differently because we come with a focus on the mission,” she said.

EMILY’s List President Stephanie Schriock called Sullivan “the right candidate for this critical moment,” but Sullivan can’t put away questions about her residency. She moved to the area in June 2017 and acknowledged that she was asked in 2017 to consider running for Congress in Illinois or Virginia.

Pappas, in contrast, has focused on his local roots, touting his endorsements from both New Hampshire senators and arguing that Democrats across the country must “find our way forward from the local level up, so that requires a ground up operation … that’s how we retake the House,” Pappas said. “We shouldn’t be waiting for something to fall out of Washington D.C. to know what we should be talking about [in our districts].”

Republicans have seized on many of these first-time candidates, hoping to personally disqualify them this fall. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the flagship GOP House super PAC, rolled out more than a dozen TV ads in recent weeks, detailing everything from arrest records to sexual harassment allegations against the wave of new candidates.

But some Republican strategists acknowledged that the unprecedented number of female candidates could put the GOP further on defense in the general election.

Female candidates attract female suburban voters, “who are not trending toward us right now,” said Mike Noble, a Republican consultant based in Arizona. “Those suburban women are a key bloc that we’re tracking, and they’re not big fans of Trump.”