Danica Roem made history two weeks ago as America’s first openly transgender state lawmaker, and she already has a lot on her mind. [...]
The fact that Roem and dozens of other minority and LGBTQ candidates won state and municipal elections made Election Day 2017 a historic one. But the centerpiece of Roem’s campaign was fixing Route 28, a highway that has been prone to traffic jams for decades.
Her Republican opponent, incumbent Del. Robert Marshall, didn’t hesitate to try to turn Roem’s gender identity into a campaign issue. He once called himself Virginia’s “chief homophobe” and refused to debate Roem. In the runup to Election Day, the Virginia Republican Party paid for campaign flyers repeatedly referring to Roem with male pronouns and displaying a header that read: “Danica Roem, born male, has made a campaign issue out of transitioning to female.” [...]
My strategic assumption during the Democratic primary, when I was facing three other people, was that field was the most important thing — whoever knocked on the most doors would win. Whoever had the most quality conversations at the doors would win. The volunteers that we had come out, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people knocked doors for us. That’s how you win.
We set out to knock 20,000 doors during the last four days of the election for get out the vote. We made a full pass through our universe of our targeted doors the first day, which means that over the next few days, we hit every single door again — whichever doors hadn’t responded. [...]
As I said on election night, discrimination is a disqualifier. One of my mantras for the campaign was, “Flip the script.” Anytime anyone did something negative to me, I would flip it and turn it into a positive. And when they went all in on gender, when they used an anti-transgender slur, “transgenderism,” which isn’t even a word, it’s just made-up bullshit.
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