WASHINGTON — As the nation remained gripped by widespread protests against police brutality and systemic racism, black and Hispanic women won elections in multiple states on Tuesday while Representative Steve King, a nine-term congressman with a long history of racist remarks, was ousted in a Republican primary in Iowa.
And as the coronavirus pandemic upended the election process, with millions of absentee ballots flooding clerks offices and consolidated polling locations leading to hourslong waits in cities across the country, a determined electorate pushed turnout past 2016 levels in nearly all of the eight states that held primary contests.
In Philadelphia, voters strode past National Guard troops deployed amid the protests to drop off their absentee ballots. In Washington, D.C., voters observing social-distancing measures waited in line for close to five hours, some not returning home until after midnight, long after the curfew that had been set by the city.
The result was a dramatic night for candidates of color up and down the ballot, largely in Democratic primaries for Congress, state legislatures and city halls, at a time when national leaders like former President Barack Obama are encouraging a nation reeling from the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and other black Americans to embrace civic action and vote.
In New Mexico, 17 women won Democratic primaries for the state legislature. In Iowa, 11 women won primaries for the statehouse. In Monroe County, Pa., Claudette Williams, the first black woman to serve as county chair, won her primary to represent a competitive state House district, a seat that state Democrats are hoping to flip. And in Washington, D.C., Janeese Lewis George, a self-described democratic socialist, beat a sitting city councilman whose mailers said Ms. George wanted “to cut police in Ward 4.” She prevailed by 10 percentage points.
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