This year, over 400 LGBTQ candidates are running for office in the United States. Hundreds more are running around the world—and are being elected. Al Jazeera’s program, The Stream hosted by Femi Oke and Malika Bilal, recently covered how LGBTQ politicians are breaking the glass ceiling around the globe. They interviewed officials like Victory-endorsed official Rep. Leslie Herod, Venezuelan National Assembly Member Tamara Adrian, and Victory Fund President and CEO, former Hou

Ireland’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Luxemburg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel, Serbia’s Prime Minister Ana Brnabic, Belgium’s former prime minister, Elio Di Rupo, and Iceland’s former prime minister, Johanna Siguroardottir, all come from different places but belong to the same club. Each of them was elected while openly gay. LGBT politicians are slowly stepping out of the shadows and reaching their nation’s highest offices, something unfathomable until very recently. In 2017, 33

These races are obviously interesting to both the Democratic Party and to third parties, as evidenced by the relatively high donations and external spending. That spending has really heated up the races, with some fairly strong words back and forth. But we can’t say yet how it will affect the race, because there simply isn’t much public polling. Plus, the small size of these races makes them unpredictable. The financial numbers don’t show whether a candidate has, for example,

But where we truly need the change is offscreen. A record number of queer female candidates are running for political office in this year’s midterm elections. One of them, Leslie Herod, was the first black LGBT woman to be elected to Colorado’s State Legislature. She’s taking her battle to the House of Representatives. The first stop is the June 26 primary. Let’s hope that voters send her to the general election, along with other candidates like Delaware’s Kerri Evelyn Har

Join Curious for a panel discussion about Race, Oppression, and Slavery in our schools and classrooms. How do we teach and how should we teach our next generation about America's fraught racial legacy of enslavement, oppression, and violence? Without guidance and support from educators, many students leave school without grappling with how our nation's past continues to shape our country today in both systemic and personal ways. Without careful examination of curriculum, many

Polis also frequently faces criticisms that he’s unelectable in Colorado’s highest-profile statewide race – assertions that tend to make mention of his roots in ultra-liberal, tax-friendly Boulder County. But state Rep. Leslie Herod of Denver, the first openly lesbian black woman elected to state office in Colorado, reads in these predictions a coded subtext about Polis’s sexual identity. “I do think there have been some homophobic undertones to a lot of those statements, fro

Even a decade ago, being an openly LGBTQ candidate was typically a “deal breaker,” according to Brian Harrison, a political scientist at Northwestern University. “That’s changing,” he said, noting “being LGBTQ isn’t nearly the liability that it used to be.” Still, there are only 559 known openly LGBTQ elected officials in the U.S., just 0.1 percent of elected officials nationwide, according to a new Victory Institute report. To achieve proportionate representation, America’s

“Legislative efforts passed this year, which were designed to more effectively and appropriately reduce the number of inmates through improved parole processes and better targeted use of community corrections. These changes should have meaningful impacts over the coming months and years.” “The working group put forward concrete recommendations to help address prison capacity, and combined with bills we passed this year, our corrections system has many tools at its disposal t

Jared Polis wants you to know he doesn’t answer to anyone but the people of Colorado. No “special interests” or corporations. No big individual donors. He says he’s unshackled and that’s why his campaign for governor has prioritized small meet-and-greet events with voters across the state instead of big-donor fundraisers. He could be spending time at Denver steakhouses courting support from millionaires, he says, but he insists that’s not the kind of person or politician he i

(June 20) – Today, members of the Joint Budget Committee reaffirmed the work from the 2018 legislative session on pushing for meaningful reforms in Colorado’s corrections system to address prison population and capacity needs. The Joint Budget Committee (JBC) met today to hear the quarterly revenue forecast and to consider interim supplemental requests, including one from the Department of Corrections (DOC) once again asking for funding to add private prison beds. JBC memb