WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today EMILY’s List, the nation’s largest resource for women in politics, congratulates California Secretary of State Shirley Weber on advancing to the general election. EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler released the following statement:
“EMILY’s List is thrilled that Secretary Shirley N. Weber is advancing to the general election to continue representing Californians as their secretary of state. Since being appointed in 2020, Weber has been a vocal advocate for civil, voting, and reproductive rights while preserving and protecting California’s elections. We can count on this historic candidate to continue leading with integrity, and we know that Weber has what it takes to win in November.”
Dr. Shirley N. Weber was born to sharecroppers in Hope, Arkansas during the segregationist Jim Crow era. Although her family moved to California when Weber was three years old, her family’s experience in the Jim Crow South, including her father being threatened by a lynch mob and denied the right to vote, have shaped her public service career. Weber attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she received her bachelor’s, master’s, and a doctorate degree. Weber worked as a professor at San Diego State University in the Department of Africana Studies for 40 years. She then served four terms as an Assembly member representing California’s 79th Assembly District. She was nominated to serve as California secretary of state by Gov. Gavin Newsom in December 2020. Secretary Weber is California’s first Black secretary of state and only the fifth Black person to serve as a state constitutional officer in California’s 170-year history.
EMILY’s 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 EMILY’s 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.
Original source can be found here.
