Watch the emotional moment Massachusetts’ Ayanna Pressley knew she won

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• Progressive Ayanna Pressley, the first woman of color ever elected to the Boston City Council, defeated Rep. Mike Capuano for Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District, in a race long billed as a referendum on the future of progressivism in the Democratic Party. Pressley took home almost 60 percent of the vote. She ran on the campaign slogan “Change can’t wait” and portrayed herself as part of a much-needed wave of “activist leadership.” Pressley will now almost certainly head to Congress, where she’ll become the first woman of color to represent Massachusetts. The district is so liberal that no Republican even bothered to run. Watch the moment Pressley knew she won here.

FYI: Pressley’s victory is sure to draw comparisons to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win over Rep. Joe Crowley in New York. While Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez supported each other, their races weren’t all that similar.

• In less stunning news, Sen. Elizabeth Warren won her Democratic primary. That’s easy to do when you’re running uncontested. (All six women campaigning for statewide executive office also ran uncontested.)

FYI: President Donald Trump may love to call Warren “Pocahontas,” and her critics charge that Warren used claims of Native American ancestry to advance her career, particularly at Harvard Law School. But this week, the Boston Globe released the results of “the most exhaustive review undertaken of Elizabeth Warren’s professional history” and “found clear evidence” that Harvard never considered her ethnicity in Warren’s hiring process.

Kansas’ Democratic gubernatorial candidate just won a Republican governor’s support. Former Kansas Gov. Bill Graves endorsed state Sen. Laura Kelly for governor Tuesday, since she has “all the qualities, all the capabilities, that we’re looking for to lead this state during this difficult time,” he said. But Graves, who’s never endorsed a Democrat before, didn’t mention the far-right elephant in the room: Kelly’s opponent Kris Kobach, who’s a Trump favorite best known for crying “voter fraud!”

A biracial, LGBTQ woman is trying to unseat a Democratic incumbent in Delaware. Air Force veteran Kerri Evelyn Harris is running against Democratic institution Sen. Tom Carper in Delaware’s primaries Thursday. While Harris said she doesn’t necessarily consider herself a democratic socialist, she does support go-to progressive policies like Medicare for All and a $15 minimum wage. There’s little polling available on the race, but Carper is out-fundraising Harris by multiple millions. Then again, Capuano had a $1 million head start on Pressley and look how that turned out.

Wardrobe malfunction: Harris, who comes from a working-class background, told Broadly last month that her campaign must watch every dollar. Minutes before Harris debated Carper, she had to sew up a hole in her slacks. “I don’t have the money to buy much more,” Harris said. “Before I went on stage, I was worried the thigh of the pants was going to wear through.”

The only black woman serving in Vermont’s state Legislature just ended her re-election campaign over racist attacks and threats. Democrat Kiah Morris spent four years in the Vermont House, but she’s done with the vitriol: Late last month, Morris announced that she’d withdrawn her re-election bid, after dealing with online threats, a home invasion, and vandalism. “Even the woods near my house, where we’d go and walk frequently as a family, had swastikas painted all over the trees there," Morris told Vermont Edition. "And that’s what this moment is showing, in a really glaring way, that this is right here. It’s here in our hands.”

A New York state Senate candidate is facing questions about her heritage. Democratic socialist Julia Salazar gets compared to Ocasio-Cortez, just like every other young, progressive woman daring to challenge an incumbent. But allegations that Salazar misled people about her background have rocked her campaign in recent weeks. Salazar wasn’t born in Colombia but in the United States, New York City & State reported; that means she wouldn’t have immigrated to the United States as a child, as Salazar previously claimed. “I understand now why this would be confusing, but I mentioned before I felt that we had a home in Colombia,” Salazar explained. Both Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America are sticking by Salazar.

Tennessee Senate hopeful and current Rep. Marsha Blackburn is running for office in a year when most GOP women would rather run for cover. But Blackburn, who’s going up against Democrat Phil Bredesen (and remains behind him in fundraising), isn’t shying away from her red roots. Instead, she’s leaning into her conservative, pro-Trump base. As Joel Ebert writes for the Tennessean:

While most polls show the race between Blackburn and Bredesen close, the eight-term congressman has hardly tilted toward the center in the lead-up to the November election.

Instead, she’s hoping to earn support by reminding them of who she is — a self-described force for positive conservative change — and what President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have accomplished: tax cuts, ending the Iran deal, low unemployment, and advancing conservative judges.

Women on the Senate Judiciary Committee aren’t letting Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh off easy. California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and Hawaii Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono, who are all running for re-election this year, went after Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings this week. While Klobuchar and Hirono tried to slow Tuesday's hearing down, Feinstein told Kavanaugh that she won’t go back to the days before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide and women died trying to get the procedure. “How you make a judgment on these issues is really important to our vote,” she said on Wednesday, “as to whether to support you or not, because I don’t want to go back to those death tolls.”

“It’s not like we are a monolithic voice. We’re coming from very different backgrounds, very different experiences, but I think this moment in history is speaking to all of us in the same way. And that is, we’re not gonna try and be the guy. We’re gonna say we’re authentic. We need a place at the table. If we want the planet to survive, [if] we want this country to survive, we need women at the table.”

— Mimi Methvin, a Democrat running for Congress in Louisiana’s 3rd Congressional District.

Methvin, a former federal judge, said Lindy Boggs, the first woman ever elected to represent Louisiana in Congress, inspired her as a young woman. Methvin said she first encountered Boggs while working in U.S. Rep. Gillis Long’s office, where Boggs would meet with the rest of Louisiana's congressional delegation — who were all men. Today, Louisiana is still one of 11 states represented in Congress by only men.

“At the time, you know, 1973, 1974, I think most women felt like, ‘Wow, we’re living in this historic time. Women are making huge strides,’” Methvin recalled. “We have not made inroads that were expected in the 1960s and 1970s.”

When New Hampshire Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter announced she’d retire this year, she released the Democratic hounds — 11 candidates will tussle for the Democratic nomination in the deep-blue state’s 1st Congressional District on Tuesday. At 400 members, New Hampshire’s state House is not only the nation’s largest but also the fourth-largest English-speaking governing body in the world. As a whole, New Hampshire's state Legislature has elected more than 100 women every year since 1975 — which widens the pipeline for female politicians and may explain why New Hampshire elects so many women to office. Right now, New Hampshire has the country’s only all-women, all-Democratic congressional delegation. But that could be in jeopardy: Though Iraq War veteran Maura Sullivan handily out-fundraised her opponents, the race remains wide open (and increasingly churlish).

Eleven states have no women in Congress, so I reached out to the 23 women running to change that. Fourteen got back to me — and the similarities in their stories were striking. While everyone reassured me that they weren’t relying on their gender for votes, they also said that voters were excited for the chance to elect a woman.

Read more about their campaigns, and their challenges, here.

Feinstein may try to pin down Kavanaugh’s feelings on Roe v. Wade, but it’s unlikely that the Supreme Court nominee will give her a straight answer. It’s practically a tradition for nominees to duck questions about the ruling and claim they don’t have a firm stance on one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions in American legal history.

That’s all for this week, but if you want to say hi — or send any tips — email me here. You can also find me on Twitter at @carter_sherman. Thanks to Leslie Xia for the design.

Cover image: Boston City Councilor Ayanna Pressley, center, celebrates victory over U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Mass., in the 7th Congressional House Democratic primary, Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2018, in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)