In the Nov. 3 general election, anti-Trans measures were on the ballot. Federal Medicaid cuts loomed. And on Tuesday night, voters in South Seattle responded.
Jaelynn Scott, a Democrat and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won the open House seat in Washington's 37th Legislative District in a landslide. She is set to become the first openly Transgender member of the Washington Legislature, and the first out Black Trans woman to serve in any state legislature in the country.
It wasn't close: Scott took 28,465 votes, or 87.2%, in King County's election-night count for Position 2 (with 53% of the vote counted). Independent Evon McCorkle, a college student, had 3,899, or 12%. The county will certify the results on Nov. 24.
"This is a historic moment for the state, and it is not about me, but I'm excited for the community," Scott said in an election-night interview. Pressed on that, she allowed with a grin: "It's a little about me. Just a little."
She knows how her victory reads beyond Seattle. "What does it say that we have decided in the 37th to send the first openly Trans rep in the state of Washington, in the face of these attacks?" she asked. "It sends a signal to all [in the] Trans community that they are welcome here, that this is a sanctuary state."
The 37th is one of Washington's most diverse districts. It runs through the Central District, Beacon Hill, Rainier Valley, and Columbia City, then out to Skyway and part of Renton. The seat opened when Rep. Chipalo Street ran for the district's state Senate seat.
Challenges ahead
Scott will arrive in Olympia as the state faces a budget shortfall, and she has already picked her side. "I'm going to resist the call to just take budget cuts and cuts to critical services that we know that we need right now, while billionaires are getting record tax breaks," she said. Everyone, she said, has to pay "their fair share in taxes."
Exxon and Chevron are "making record profits, while our gas prices are nearly $6 a gallon," she said.
The stakes, as Scott tells it, are measured in lives. New federal work requirements could push more than 100,000 people off Apple Health, the state's Medicaid program, she said. She warned the losses could set back hard-won progress against HIV and AIDS.
Her prescription is for Washington to act as a firewall against Washington, DC: to fight "any illegal cuts to Medicaid," protect coverage for gender-affirming care, and backfill the money communities lose.
To skeptics who doubt state government can change much, she offers the pandemic as evidence. COVID relief money flowed into community violence intervention and a network of nonprofits, she said, and Seattle had zero gun deaths this June. Now many of those groups are "falling apart."
"We had thriving communities," she said, "and now we're reversing course."
Coalition
Scott did not win alone, and she is not shy about who carried her. She credited a coalition of communities of color and the Democratic Socialists of America, which she said played "a pivotal role" through its organizing and policy work.
That machinery is coming with her. The plan, she said, is to bring constituents into the Capitol "to drown out the noise from lobbyists and special interests."
She is betting on a "radically different" legislature and a Democratic supermajority in the House. Her likely seatmate, Kelabe Tewolde, was leading longtime Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos for the district's other House seat, about 62% to 37%, on election night.
Asked about voters who still flinch at the word “socialism,” Scott ticked off fire departments, libraries, Social Security, universal school meals, and the Working Families Tax Credit as examples. Those programs, she said, grew from the Black radical tradition and a simple belief: Government should meet people's basic needs.
"That's all socialism is," she said. "When you explain it and break it down like that, then it takes away the scary" part.
Scott grew up in Mississippi, but Washington is where she found herself, she said, and where she finally felt safe enough to come out.
"I owe a debt to the community that welcomed me and allowed me to become who I am today," she said. She intends to repay it by keeping Washington a refuge for people fleeing states "where they're terrified."
And if one of them someday wants her job?
"If they want to be a state legislator," she said, "we create the space and environment and training for them.”
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