EMILYs List Congratulates Lydia Edwards on Her Victory in Massachusetts State Senate Race
For Immediate Release
January 11, 2022
EMILYs List Congratulates Lydia Edwards on Her Victory in Massachusetts State Senate Race
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, EMILYs List, the nation’s largest resource for women in politics, congratulated Lydia Edwards on her victory in the special election to represent the 1st Suffolk and Middlesex District in the Massachusetts state Senate. Laphonza Butler, president of EMILYs List, released the following statement:
“We are thrilled to congratulate Lydia Edwards on her historic victory, becoming the first woman, woman of color, and Black person to represent her district in the Massachusetts state Senate. We are confident that as a state Senator, Edwards will continue her advocacy for affordable housing, tenant rights, labor protections, and environmental protections. We look forward to continuing to support Edwards as she fights for every East Boston resident and know she will be a key leader in the community’s ongoing COVID-19 recovery efforts.”
Lydia Edwards received her J.D. from American University Washington College of Law and received an LLM in taxation from Boston University School of Law. She went on to serve as a law clerk with the Massachusetts Superior Court and the Massachusetts Appeals Court, a public interest attorney with Greater Boston Legal Services, and as deputy director of the mayor’s Office of Housing Stability. Edwards served as the statewide campaign coordinator for the Massachusetts Coalition for Domestic Workers, which advocated for the passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. In 2015, she was named a Bostonian of the Year honorable mention by the Boston Globe. She first ran for Boston City Council in 2017 and won reelection in 2019. Edwards is the first woman, woman of color, and Black person to represent her district, as well as the only Black person in the state Senate.
EMILYs List, the nation’s largest resource for women in politics, has raised over $700 million to elect Democratic pro-choice women candidates. With a grassroots community of over five million members, EMILY's List helps Democratic women win competitive campaigns – across the country and up and down the ballot – by recruiting and training candidates, supporting and helping build strong campaigns, researching the issues that impact women and families, running nearly $50 million in independent expenditures in the last cycle alone, and turning out women voters and voters of color to the polls. Since our founding in 1985, we have helped elect the country's first woman as vice president, 159 women to the House, 26 to the Senate, 16 governors, and more than 1,300 women to state and local office. More than 40% of the candidates EMILYs List has helped elect to Congress have been women of color. After the 2016 election, more than 60,000 women reached out to EMILY's List about running for office laying the groundwork for the next decade of candidates for local, state, and national offices. In our effort to elect more women in offices across the country, we have created our Run to Win program, expanded our training program, including a Training Center online, and trained thousands of women.
