Beyond the Headlines: The Other Firsts of 2026

The headlines on election night belonged to a handful of names. Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman elected governor of a U.S. state. Aaron Ford, David Crowley, Gina Hinojosa and Deb Haaland broke barriers in Nevada, Wisconsin, Texas and New Mexico, and we have written about each of them. But the 2026 midterms produced a much longer roll of firsts, many of them won further down the ballot, in territories, or in states where Black, Latino and Native candidates had never held a given office. This roundup gathers the ones we have not yet highlighted, with a sentence or two on each and a link to the reporting behind it.

Black Women Who Broke the Ceiling

Stacey Plaskett, Governor-elect, U.S. Virgin Islands. The five-term delegate to Congress and her running mate, Senate President Milton Potter, won 62.8 percent of the vote against four independent tickets, making Plaskett the first woman elected governor of the territory. Alongside Bottoms, she is one of the first two Black women elected governor anywhere in the United States.

Adrienne Adams, Lieutenant Governor-elect, New York. The former City Council speaker from Southeast Queens won on Gov. Kathy Hochul's ticket to become New York's first Black woman lieutenant governor. Hochul and Adams are also the first all-woman ticket New Yorkers have elected. Adams was already the first Black speaker of the City Council.

Penny Brown Reynolds, Secretary of State-elect, Georgia. The former Fulton County judge became the first Black woman elected to run Georgia's elections, the office at the center of the 2020 fight over the state's count.

Tanya Miller, Attorney General-elect, Georgia. The former prosecutor and state representative defeated Sen. Brian Strickland to become Georgia's first Black woman attorney general, promising that "the highest legal office in our state should answer only to the people it was created to serve."

Reynolds and Miller were two of eight Black women who won statewide office in Georgia on Nov. 3, a sweep that grew directly out of the organizing traced in our Southern series.

Black Men in New Places

Hakeem Jeffries, Speaker-in-waiting. With Democrats taking the House, the Brooklyn congressman is expected to become the first Black speaker of the House when the 120th Congress convenes in January, a line that runs back to Shirley Chisholm's Brooklyn.

Byron Donalds, Governor-elect, Florida. Donalds becomes Florida's first Black governor and the first Black Republican elected governor in U.S. history. The first is real, and so is the record: he ran on the agenda of Ron DeSantis, whose administration rewrote Black history standards and dismantled DEI programs in Florida's public universities. We examined that tension in The Florida Crossroads.

Latino Firsts

Xavier Becerra, Governor-elect, California. The son of Mexican immigrants and former Health and Human Services secretary is the first Latino elected governor of California. The state's only earlier Latino governor, Romualdo Pacheco, served briefly in 1875 without being elected.

Denise Powell, Representative-elect, Nebraska's 2nd District. The daughter of immigrants from Cuba and Chile flipped the Omaha seat with 56.4 percent, becoming the first Latina elected to Congress from Nebraska and the first woman to hold the district.

D.C.'s Neighborhood Firsts

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Alexis Vida Rangel, ANC 1A10 (Columbia Heights, Ward 1). Rangel is the first trans woman of color elected to office in the District of Columbia. She directs operations in the Mayor's Office of Talent and Appointments.

Dana White, ANC 6B04 (Capitol Hill, Ward 6). White is the first Black trans and nonbinary person elected in D.C., after years of work to end homelessness in the city. Both commissioners take office in January.

Native Nations, Native Firsts

Peggy Flanagan, Senator-elect, Minnesota. A citizen of the White Earth Nation and Minnesota's outgoing lieutenant governor, Flanagan defeated Michele Tafoya to become the first Native American woman elected to the U.S. Senate.

Claire Valdez, Representative-elect, New York's 7th District. A citizen of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo and a state assemblywoman, Valdez is the first Native American elected to Congress from New York. She succeeds Rep. Nydia Velázquez.

Sean McCann, Representative-elect, Michigan's 4th District. A citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, McCann unseated Rep. Bill Huizenga to become the first Native American elected to Congress from Michigan.

Clara Pratte, Arizona Corporation Commission. A citizen of the Navajo Nation, Pratte became the first Indigenous woman elected to statewide office in Arizona, on the body that regulates utilities across tribal lands.

Crystalyne Curley and Tina Abrams, Tribal Nations. Sovereign nations held their own elections too. Unofficial results show Curley elected the first woman president of the Navajo Nation, with certification pending and her opponent contesting the result. The Seneca Nation elected Abrams its first woman president, alongside the Nation's first all-women executive branch.

Why the List Matters

Firsts are easy to celebrate and easy to forget. Most of these victories came in places where the barrier was not the absence of talented candidates but structures built to keep them out: at-large systems, closed party pipelines, and maps drawn around communities rather than for them. A first is the visible end of years of invisible work, and the test now is whether the offices these leaders hold become ladders for the people who come next.