A black woman has won a major party primary for governor for the first time

No major party in any state has ever nominated a black woman to be their candidate for governor.

Until Tuesday night.

Stacey Abrams, the 44-year-old former minority leader of the Georgia General Assembly, became the Democratic Party’s nominee for this fall’s gubernatorial race, receiving 75.5 percent of the vote.

"Tonight, communities that are so often overlooked — whose values are never voiced — stood with us to say: Ours is the Georgia of tomorrow,” Abrams said in a Facebook post Tuesday night. "The road to November will be long and tough, but the next step is one we take together.”

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At her victory rally Tuesday night, Abrams indulged in her history-making victory, quoting the Book of Esther: “We were born for such a time as this.”

If Abrams wins in November, she will make history again, this time as the first black woman governor in the United States and the first woman governor in Georgia. Abrams is counting on the state’s changing demographics, a comprehensive voter registration effort, and an energized Democratic base to pull an upset in conservative Georgia. Donald Trump won the state by 5 percentage points in 2016 and the state hasn’t elected a Democrat as governor since 1998.

“It’s still a red state, even though it’s getting more purple every year,” Kerwin Swint, chairman of the political science department at Kennesaw State University, told the New York Times.

Abrams will face off against either Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle or Secretary of State Brian Kemp. Neither of them received a majority of the vote Tuesday night and so they are headed for a runoff election in July.

Abrams wasn’t the only woman of color to prevail in a contested primary Tuesday night. Former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez became the Democrats’ nominee for governor of Texas, the first latina and openly gay major party nominee for the job ever. And Air Force veteran Gina Ortiz Jones, a Filipina-America, beat out Rick Trevino in a run-off election to challenge Republican Rep. Will Hurd in Texas’s 23rd district.

Win or lose this November, Abrams, Valdez, and Ortiz Jones are yet another sign of the changing face of American power, which is becoming less male and less white after a near-monopoly for 200-plus years.

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Cover image: Democratic candidate for Georgia Governor Stacey Abrams speaks during an election-night watch party Tuesday, May 22, 2018, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)