This article has been updated since it first appeared online.
Jennifer McClellan gets a hug from her daughter, Samantha Mills, 7, after her acceptance speech, winning a special election for the state’s 4th Congressional District against Leon Benjamin Tuesday. She is holding hands with U.S. Reps. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia’s 7th District and Bobby Scott of the 3rd. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Virginia will send its first Black woman to Congress.
With roughly 75% of the vote, state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-9th, defeated the Rev. Leon Benjamin, the Republican nominee, in Tuesday’s special election to succeed the late Rep. Donald McEachin, D-4th. McClellan, who was first elected to the House of Delegates in 2005, won McEachin’s state Senate seat after he was elected to Congress in 2017. He defeated Benjamin for the second time in November with 65% of the vote, just weeks before his death from cancer.
In a special election for McClellan’s seat on March 28, Del. Lamont Bagby, D-74th, handily defeated Republican Stephen Imholt.
The commonwealth becomes the 23rd state to send a Black woman to Congress, according to the Pew Research Center, and McClellan will be the 58th elected to the national legislature. In her victory speech Tuesday night, McClellan, 50, pointed to the struggles her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents faced in the Jim Crow South.
“I took that legacy and the legacy of my parents and decided I’m going to work to make this country, this commonwealth, this city a better place,” she said.
McClellan’s victory in the 4th Congressional District, which stretches from Richmond in the north to Emporia to the south and Chesapeake in the east, doesn’t alter the balance of power in the GOP-led House of Representatives, but it does send an experienced legislator and political leader with a track record of consensus-building to Washington.
“We can prove that when we come together and we care more about doing the work and solving the problems than the soundbites and the show that we can help people, we will make the commonwealth and this country a better place for everyone,” McClellan said at the conclusion of her speech. “I am ready to get to work.”
