Texas elections: first-time female candidates aim to ride 'blue wave' to victory
Motivated by the rise of Donald Trump, female candidates, including Jana Lynne Sanchez and Laura Moser, hope to retake the House and offer resistance to his administration
For Jana Lynne Sanchez, America’s new dawn felt like a plunge into darkness. She recalls exchanging stunned messages with friends in the hours after the result of the 2016 election was known. Now, she’s spending much of her time talking to strangers.
Sanchez is one of many first-time female candidates motivated by the rise of Donald Trump and aiming to surf the so-called “blue wave” that, Democrats hope, will see the party retake the House and offer meaningful resistance to the real-estate mogul’s administration.
Because she lives in small-town Texas, Sanchez knows this wave will not be a tsunami, submerging Republicans in November’s midterms The electorate is more energised than normal but she still has to provide the spark. And so on a recent Sunday afternoon in suburban Fort Worth, she set out to make the kind of below-the-surface moves that might just make the difference: going from home to home, working from a dated database of likely Democratic voters.
When there was no answer, Sanchez scribbled a message with her phone number on a hanger and attached it to a door handle. When a door opened, she spent almost as much time correcting contact details as she did asking if she could count on residents’ votes in the runoff on 22 May.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/08/texas-elections-female-candidates-first-time-blue-wave
