Forbes: Women To Watch In The 119th U.S. Congress Freshman Class

The 119th Congress marked the first since 2016 with a decrease in women’s representation when it officially kicked off on January 3. It’s a slight decline: 150 women will serve, down from the 151 who were in office on Election Day. Of those lawmakers, 21 (18 House representatives and three senators) were sworn in for the first time.

While seniority largely rules the day in the halls of Congress, history has seen quite a few freshmen who’ve made an early mark. In 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former bartender from Queens, quickly became one of the most talked-about politicians in America, amassing a large social media following, starring in a Netflix documentary and even appearing on magazine covers. In 1987, 47-year-old Representative Nancy Pelosi had already made such an impression in her very first week of Congress her colleague Representative George Miller introduced her as “the future first woman speaker of the House.” Immediately after taking her oath in 2017, political pundits shortlisted freshman California Senator Kamala Harris as a party favorite for the White House.

As work in the new Congressional calendar gets underway, here are some of the newcomers who could, like Ocasio-Cortez, Pelosi and Harris, become future political heavyweights:

Yassamin Ansari

In the House, Yassamin Ansari, a Democratic representative from Arizona’s 3rd district, had already solidified her rising star status when she was voted the House Democrats’ freshman class president. Ansari, who previously served on the Phoenix City Council, is Congress’ youngest new member at 32 years old. In a Congress that’s older than the last—the third oldest in history, in fact—with a tendency to elevate older members to higher ranks, Ansari’s leadership role lends a rare voice of authority to an underrepresented generation.

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