EMILYs List Endorses Eleni Kounalakis for California Lieutenant Governor

For Immediate Release
March 29, 2022

EMILY's List Endorses Eleni Kounalakis for California Lieutenant Governor

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, EMILYs List, the nation’s largest resource for women in politics, endorsed Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis for reelection in California. Laphonza Butler, president of EMILYs List, released the following statement:

“EMILYs List is proud to endorse Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis for reelection in California. Since 2019, Lt. Gov. Kounalakis has led with integrity and fought for equality throughout her state. After becoming the first woman elected as California’s lieutenant governor, she introduced the Gender Equity in Leadership Act to ensure that California’s state laws were gender inclusive and that others can follow in her footsteps. Lt. Gov. Kounalakis has a distinguished record of advancing justice and opportunity, and EMILYs List is eager to support her as she continues catalyzing change in California.”

Eleni Kounalakis is the current lieutenant governor of California and the first woman elected to the position. Kounalakis has a long history of Democratic activism dating back to her work on the 1992 election in which California elected two women to the U.S. Senate and went blue. After the election, Kounalakis spent 18 years delivering homes to middle-class families, working her way up to President of her family business, AKT Development. In 2010, Kounalakis was appointed by President Barack Obama as the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary where she served through 2013. As lieutenant governor, she established a Transgender Advisory Council in order to create a forum to discuss issues impacting the transgender community in California. She and her husband, Dr. Markos Kounalakis, have two sons, Neo and Eon.

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.