23 August 2007
U.S. Officials Increasingly Reflect American Diversity
Many minority group candidates sought and won political office in 2006
Washington -- American political candidates are increasingly coming from diverse racial and ethnic origins and religious beliefs, upholding a tradition of political pluralism and participation that dates to the founding of the United States.
The 2008 presidential contest is clearly marked by this diversity. The two leading Democrats vying for their party’s nomination are a woman, Hillary Clinton, and an African American, Barack Obama.
From 1788, when Pennsylvanians elected three German Americans to the First Congress, to 2006, when the mayors of the nation’s three largest cities -- New York, Los Angeles and Chicago -- boast of Jewish-, Mexican- and Irish-American heritage, and the mayor of the fifth-largest (Philadelphia) is an African American, Americans have elected as their representatives men and women of all races, ethnicities and creeds.
In the most recent U.S. elections in 2006, several African Americans were major party candidates for some of the 33 contested U.S. Senate seats. They included Republican Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele in Maryland and Democrats Erik Fleming in Mississippi and U.S. Representative Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee.
In the aftermath of the 2006 midterm contest, the 435-member House of Representatives has 42 African-American members. The election also resulted in the first African-American governor of the state of Massachusetts. Governor Deval Patrick is only the second elected black governor in U.S. history, after Virginia’s L. Douglas Wilder, who served from 1990 to 1994.
Another first was the election of Keith Ellison from Minnesota as the first Muslim member of the House of Representatives. Ellison’s victory makes him the highest-ranking Muslim elected official in the United States. (See related article.)
The new 110th Congress includes 16 women senators, the highest number ever. The 2006 elections also raised the number of female members of the House of Representatives from 70 to 74. At the state level, there are eight women governors.
Some minority groups are entering the political arena in greater numbers. Although Hispanic Americans are the nation's largest minority group, many have not yet reached the voting age of 18. Even so, two Hispanics were elected to the Senate in 2004, and 27 currently serve in the House of Representatives. Among the representatives are also four Asian Americans and one American Indian. There are also two Asian American senators.
These figures reflect steady efforts by both major political parties to attract candidates that will appeal to an increasingly diverse population.
In September 2006, a national conference of Hispanics held in Los Angeles pledged to recruit 1 million new Hispanic voters. Louis DeSipio, a political scientist at the University of California at Irvine, praised the strategy. "Marches can get people's attention, but [they don’t] necessarily get a higher percentage of the community involved in civic participation. That's what things like get-out-the-vote and voter registration drives do," he told the Los Angeles Times.
Both the Arab and Muslim communities in the United States (which partially overlap) launched voter registration drives in 2006 and increased financial donations to political campaigns. Fully 84 percent of registered Muslims cast ballots in the 2004 election, a rate significantly higher than the national average.
Like most officeholders, ethnic political leaders typically begin their careers in neighborhood or local office. As the more successful move on to state or national office, they must appeal to and represent the interests of many diverse groups.
During his campaign in Massachusetts, for instance, Governor Deval Patrick called for an "education renaissance" among African Americans and promised full-day kindergarten and early education for all the state’s 3- and 4-year-olds.
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
