Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto Takes Nevada Senate Seat
- By Emily TamkinEmily Tamkin is a staff writer at Foreign Policy. She writes for FP’s The Cable, a real-time take on the news in Washington and the wider world. She has been at FP since the fall of 2016, before which she was an associate editor at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. She has a B.A. in Russian literature from Columbia University, an M.Phil. in Russian and East European studies from the University of Oxford, and studied Soviet dissidence in archival centers in Moscow, Tbilisi, and, on a Fulbright, in Bremen — all of which means that at FP, she writes when she can on Russia and Central and Eastern Europe.
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Tuesday night saw very little good news for Hillary Clinton and U.S. Democrats, but it did have a silver lining for Catherine Cortez Masto. She just became the first Latina senator in U.S. history.
The former Democratic state attorney general beat GOP Rep. Joe Heck, Congress’s highest-ranking soldier. Masto, for her part, worked on terrorism and transnational crime as her state’s attorney general.
Heck cited “changing demographics” as the explanation for why the Senate race was so close for so much of the election. Those changing demographics were not enough for many Democrats in much of America on Tuesday.
But in Nevada, they likely helped elect a senator who didn’t break the hardest, highest glass ceiling, but who nevertheless became a first.
Photo credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
