Misty Snow | |
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| Personal details | |
| Born | July 19, 1985 Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. |
| Party | Democratic |
Misty Kathrine Snow (born July 19, 1985) [1] is an American political candidate who was one of the first openly transgender people in the United States to have been nominated by a major political party for a federal office. [2] [3] Snow was the Democratic nominee in the 2016 United States Senate election in Utah. This also made her the first transgender person to become a nominee for the United States Senate as well as the first LGBT person to be a major-party nominee for statewide office in Utah. [4] [5]
Snow was born in 1985 in Salt Lake City and has lived in Salt Lake County, Utah for her entire life. She worked in a grocery store and comes from a working-class family. [6] She was raised as a Latter-Day Saint, but as she grew up, she left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. [7] [8] She is the daughter of Linda Pace and the eldest of four children. [9] [10]
Snow was the first openly transgender candidate to win a major party primary for the U.S. Senate. [11] She won the Democratic primary, defeating fellow Democrat Jonathan Swinton 59.5% to 40.5%. [12]
On November 8, 2016, with 27% of the vote, Snow lost her Senate bid to Republican incumbent Mike Lee, who received 68% of the vote. [13]
Snow is a progressive and self-described Bernie Sanders-like Democrat. Policy priorities include increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, paid maternity leave, expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, clean energy, and LGBT nondiscrimination efforts. [14]
On April 13, 2017, Snow formally announced her run against Chris Stewart, the Republican incumbent representative for Utah's 2nd congressional district. [15] She dropped out of the race in March 2018, and the Democratic candidate was instead Shireen Ghorbani.
Snow: You know, I was raised LDS myself so I kind of know that culture. Most of my family's LDS. A lot of my friends are LDS. ... I didn't, like, have a lot of support to transition when I was younger, so I ended up doing it kind of more, like, a more - like, over the last few years. ... Yeah. When I was, like (unintelligible) I didn't have support from my mother to transition and, you know, so I put that off for a long time.
Media related to Misty Snow at Wikimedia Commons