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First Two Latinas Are Elected to Virginia House of Delegates, Making History



First Two Latinas Are Elected to Virginia House of Delegates, Making History




Two Latinas, Elizabeth Guzmán and Hala Ayala made history in Virginia; they are the first Hispanic women elected to the state's House of Delegates.
The two women not only beat long-term incumbents, but flipped their districts from Republican to Democrat. Ayala’s opponent, Richard Anderson, ran unopposed in 2015, but while the Democrats did not even run a candidate against Anderson in the 51st District, Ayala beat Anderson by almost six percentage points and mobilized fourteen thousand voters to win. Similarly, Guzmán was able to increase turnout in Prince William by 72 percent and was able to win by a comfortable nine point margin.
Guzmán, who is Peruvian-American, is a public administrator with a background in social work whose platform includes expanded preschool and family and health services, including mental health, and more accessibilty to these services in local schools.
Ayala is a cyber-security specialist who helped organize the historic Women's March — she was a local president for the National Organization of Women —and quit her job to run for office in the county where she grew up. She told a reporter during her campaign that she believed Pres. Trump and his administration would "discriminate against people who look like me." During the campaign, she spoke of how she had been on Medicaid several years ago to be able to obtain the health insurance that saved one of her two sons, and vowed to fight for these programs.

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