Lucy McBath

Lucy McBath personifies the 2018 midterms, and how Democrats' performance then can be repeated.

The HBO documentary 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets documents the death of Jordan Davis, a seventeen-year-old boy shot in a Florida gas station because he was playing his vehicle's radio too loud.  Lucy McBath is Davis’s mother.

McBath,elected by a narrow margin to represent Georgia's Sixth Congressional District, ran on a platform of growing the economy, funding education, and addressing climate change.  Because of the manner of her son's death, and the HBO documentary about it, she is also inescapably connected to the issue of gun reform.  But whatever her effect on that issue, McBath’s victory this past November bodes well for Democrats, in that it indicates:

• that Democrats are making inroads in suburban Republican districts
• that record numbers of women can be elected to public office despite the misogyny that is a feature of the Trump era
• that gun-rights appeals may not any longer be able to safeguard Republican districts

McBath also personifies another important fact - that of the nine new African-American candidates elected to Congress in 2018, all were Democrats, and five were women