SEATTLE (Diya TV) — Sen. Pramila Jayapal, who has represented Washington’s 37th legislative district in the state senate since 2015, could be on the fast track to becoming the first woman of Indian origin to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives after receiving her latest endorsement from Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.
“Pramila… is not afraid to take on powerful special interests. She’s fought for immigrant rights, opposed the war in Iraq, and worked to protect Social Security. She’s also running her campaign with our political revolution,” Sanders said in an e-mail to donors last month.
This endorsement is just one in a long line which includes the likes of nearly a dozen of her state senate counterparts, a pair of retired state supreme court justices and an endorsement from EMILY’s List, an influential national group that raises and bundles donations to Democratic women candidates.
Jayapal met with Sanders in September of last year, a meeting in which the two discussed a variety of topics including gender, race, mass incarceration and guns. The two reportedly connected on every level, and the spark was created.
“He has engaged a whole swathe of people. He has fundamentally changed the political process by getting these new groups into politics. He is pulling the Democratic Party platform to the left, something that many people in this country have been yearning for,” Jayapal said.
After spending part of her career as a banker on Wall Street, Jayapal made her way to the non-profit sector in 1991. The turmoil of living in a post-9/11 world drew her to the political arena, as the event occurred just months after she became a U.S. citizen, she said. Jayapal proceeded to found Hate Free Zone, which later became OneAmerica, a group which sought to organize and advocating for diversity in American communities. The organization sued the Bush administration for the deportation of Somalis and fought against the administration’s infamous Patriot Act legislation.
“In 2006, we felt that the elected officials were not listening to us sufficiently.
“Then we started a new voter registration campaign enrolling 23,000 new voters. In 2014, when the State Senate seat opened up, I felt that there should be more representation of diversity in the legislature, and so I decided to run and the rest is history,” said Jayapal.
Since her election to the state senate, Jayapal, in a Republican majority, has been the champion of several progressive laws for Washington. Of her personal favorites is a program which ensures low-income, uninsured women access to contraception.
“I have been good at taking up controversial and complex issues and building common ground even with people who think very differently from me,” she said. “The English major has made me a good communicator,” she said jokingly.
