As the nation recovers from the eternal 2020 election season, Virginians are preparing for our state elections in November 2021. We have all three executive offices on the ballot and all 100 House of Delegates members. The election in 2021 presents an opportunity to move forward in historical strides in the contests for governor by electing champions that personify our determination to achieve racial and economic justice and ensure social, legal and political equality.
Virginia’s blue shift these past years reveals an electorate ready to lead the way forward. Many groups and individuals here in the Commonwealth have worked for years, indeed decades, to elect policy makers who reflect the true values and the broad diversity of our communities across the state. That is why we are asking/requesting/demanding that equal consideration by the press, the party, the donors and the voters be given to the sterling, super qualified women candidates in the top statewide race. They are both winners: State Senator Jennifer McClellan and Delegate Jennifer Carroll-Foy.
We are reminded that when Black voters, especially the women, carried Joe Biden to the finish line in his quest for the presidential nomination, they expected him to nominate a woman of color as his running mate to earn their vote or prepare to lose the election in 2020. They did not name any one individual but instead suggested that there were many qualified, distinguished, forceful women to fill the slot from the U.S. Senate, U.S. House members, and several mayors and a handful of picks who were outside the realm of elected officials. Former Vice President Biden listened and delivered by picking Senator Kamala Harris and ultimately won.
That is what we’re doing right now here in Virginia. In fact, it is our duty because equal opportunity and women’s equality are in our agendas and in our hearts. We put our beliefs into electoral action and the results were historic wins for Democrats since 2017. In 2018, women voters, Democratic voters, especially women minority voters, sent three experienced Democratic women to Congress. In 2019, these same voters took back both chambers of the General Assembly. Now we’re asking that the Democratic Party and the press acknowledge that the time has come for women to break that final glass ceiling in Virginia. An historic opportunity is before us now to uplift two qualified women of color to compete and shine in the upcoming months before the June 2021 primary.
The undersigned resolve that it is time for Virginia’s formal name for the Governor as “His Excellency” to acknowledge the other half of Virginia with “Her Excellency” by becoming the first state in the nation to elect a woman of color to lead us into the future. Therefore, the leading women of Virginia will put all of our efforts in 2021 behind our women candidates for Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. We hope you will join our efforts and sign this letter and forward it to your friends and neighbors.
Emails to sign our letter HerExcellencyVA2021@gmail.com and susanplatt@gmail.com
Facebook @Her-Excellency-Va2021 and Twitter @HVA2021