Politics

LGBTQ lawmakers win primaries in 3 states

Mauree Turner in their campaign announcement video.
Mauree Turner in their campaign announcement video. Photo: Screenshot / YouTube

The most recent round of primary elections this week saw wins for LGBTQ lawmakers in at least three states ahead of November’s general election.

Former meteorologist Eric Sorensen won the Democratic primary for Illinois’s 17th Congressional District, putting him on track to be the first out LGBTQ lawmaker ever elected to Congress from the state. He’ll face off against Republican nominee Esther Joy King in November in a race that the New York Times is calling a toss-up.

Related: Tuesday’s primaries marked significant wins for LGBTQ candidates

In Colorado, incumbent Gov. Jared Polis (D) will defend his seat against Republican nominee Heidi Ganahl. The only out gay man elected governor of a U.S. state, Polis ran unopposed in the Democratic primary.

Elsewhere in the state, incumbent state Rep. Brianna Titone (D), the first transgender person to serve in the Colorado legislature, will now face Republican nominee Christina Carlino in the race to represent Colorado’s 27th congressional district.

Oklahoma state Rep. Mauree Turner (D), the first nonbinary person elected to any state legislature, handily beat challenger Joe Lewis in the Democratic primary, and will now go on to face independent Jed Green in the general.

In Utah, state Sen. Derek Kitchen (D), the only out LGBTQ member of the state’s legislature, leads challenger Dr. Jennifer Plumb by two points. That primary has not yet been called.

Tuesday’s elections also saw Rep Marie Newman (D-IL) lose her race against fellow incumbent Rep. Sean Casten. The two lawmakers found themselves competing in the same district after Illinois legislators redrew the state’s congressional map. Newman, whose daughter is transgender, was seen as the more progressive of the two Representatives. The defeat would seem to bring to an end her ongoing battle with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), whose office is located across from hers, over a trans Pride flag Newman posted outside her door.

Meanwhile, anti-LGBTQ extremist Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) won her primary after denouncing the separation of church and state, one of the cornerstones of American democracy.

“And I’m tired of this ‘separation of church and state’ junk, that’s not in the Constitution. It was in a stinking letter and it means nothing like what they say it does,” Boebert recently told the crowd at the Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt, Colorado.

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