With 54 percent of the vote (so far), say hello to your new Congresswoman, Oregon!

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Suzanne Bonamici has long been projected to win this race against Rob Cornilles, taking over the Congressional seat stretching from West Portland to Astoria that David Wu vacated mid-term last year.

The hustle and bustle of the campaign party after the results were called at 8pm tonight was pretty insane—as media swarmed the new Congresswoman, each reporter got the chance for only one question. Bonamici is only the state's fourth sixth female Congressional representative and tomorrow is a big celebration of women winning the right to vote in Oregon, so I asked her about WOMANHOOD.

One question interview:
MERCURY: How do you feel like being a woman has affected your political perspective?
SUZANNE BONAMICI: "I'm excited about the opportunity to represent this district. Being a woman doesn't have much to do with it, I didn't have any say in the matter. I think there are certainly a lot of young women who have this night as quite an accomplishment, because they want women around the table in leadership. But I've always said, I don't want people to vote for me because I'm a woman, I want them to vote for me because I'm qualified and because of the priorities we share."

Interesting!

That's a bit different than Governor Barbara Roberts' perspective, when I talked to her earlier in the evening about her thoughts on having a female representative for Oregon.

One question interview:
MERCURY: Do you think there will be an impact to having a woman, specifically, in our delegation?
GOV BARBARA ROBERTS: "It's been embarrassing to me to have an entire congressional delegation, no matter how good they were, without a single woman representing the gender that I belong to. This is a really important step for Oregon, to give us a better sense of representation for more than half of our population."

That's all! Goodnight!