Days after America’s midterms, and days before Conservatives selected her for Aylesbury, Jane MacBean used a Facebook post seen by The National Pulse to cheer a string of Democrat victories — among them Biden’s Interior Secretary, who said she is “wholeheartedly against fracking and drilling on public lands”; Minnesota’s new senator, who backed making her state a “trans refuge”; and Ohio’s new governor, whom Republicans called “the COVID lockdown doctor.”
As this publication reported on Monday, the Conservative Party selected MacBean on Saturday for the Buckinghamshire seat Labour took by 630 votes in 2024. She is a net-zero campaigner who has written that rooftop solar would “help us reach our 2050 net zero emissions target,” and who has appeared on Conservative Environment Network platforms.
The post was written after the November 3 elections and before her November 7 selection. She said the original wording was “stolen from a message from a friend” but that did not “lessen the impact.” “Our sisters over the pond are breaking barriers and glass ceilings today!” she wrote. “These are a few – there will be more!”
She listed Deb Haaland as the first Native American woman elected governor of a U.S. state; Peggy Flanagan, “a citizen of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe,” as the first Native American woman elected to the U.S. Senate; Gina Hinojosa as the first Hispanic woman elected governor of Texas; Keisha Lance Bottoms as “the first Black woman to serve as governor anywhere in the US”; Amy Acton as “Ohio’s first female governor”; and said “Three Black women will serve for the first time in the US Senate next term: Juliana Stratton from Illinois, Lisa Blunt Rochester from Delaware, and Angela Alsobrooks from Maryland.”
The six 2026 races she named did happen, on unofficial returns from November 3. Three of her “firsts” do not hold as she wrote them. Blunt Rochester and Alsobrooks were elected in 2024 and have sat in the Senate since January 2025. Axios noted that when Stratton takes office in January, three black women will serve in the Senate simultaneously for the first time — not that all three had just been elected. Acton is the first woman elected governor of Ohio, not the state’s first female governor: Republican Nancy Hollister served 11 days from December 31, 1998, after George Voinovich left for the Senate. Bottoms is the first black woman elected governor of a U.S. state; the same night, Delegate Stacey Plaskett was elected governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, a territory.
She tagged the post #AskHerToStand, a campaign run by 50:50 Parliament, a cross-party charity launched in 2018 to get more women to stand for office — not a Conservative Party operation — and shared a meme of the women’s restroom symbol in a cape: “It was never a dress.”
She has also been photographed with the Conservative Party’s leadership: with Kemi Badenoch at Conservative Party Conference last month, in a crowd holding “STRONGER ECONOMY / STRONGER COUNTRY” signs; with Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith, the Member of Parliament for Arundel and South Downs, who sits in the same Conservative Environment Network caucus this publication noted on Monday; and with James Cleverly, the former Foreign Secretary, who left the Shadow Cabinet in late August to run for London mayor.
Who She Was Cheering.
Haaland, the New Mexico governor-elect and former Biden Interior Secretary, told the Guardian in 2019: “I am wholeheartedly against fracking and drilling on public lands.” The paper reported she is “a staunch supporter of the Green New Deal” and “would ultimately like to see fossil fuel development phased out completely on the federal domain.” As Interior Secretary, she suspended Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Coastal Plain leases, then canceled the remaining seven, covering 365,000 acres, in September 2023. A 2024 rule on the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska protects more than 13 million acres of Special Areas and bars new oil and gas leasing on 10.6 million acres — more than 40 percent of the reserve. In June 2023, she withdrew land within ten miles of Chaco Culture National Historical Park — in her own state, the second-largest oil producer in America — from new oil, gas and mining leases for 20 years.
Flanagan, Minnesota’s lieutenant governor under Tim Walz since 2019 and now its senator-elect, backed Walz’s March 2023 order making Minnesota a “trans refuge.” She said: “When our children tell us who they are, it is our job as grown-ups to listen and to believe them. That’s what it means to be a good parent.” Her own site backs Medicare for All, a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, a $17 federal minimum wage, and says she “would have joined” Senators Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar in voting to halt offensive weapons sales to Israel. It also says she “believes that ICE is out of control and that we must dismantle the agency.” Bernie Sanders rallied for her in Minneapolis before she beat Rep. Angie Craig in the August primary.
Hinojosa, a five-term Austin state representative, toppled sitting Republican governor Greg Abbott, who had sought a fourth term. The Texas Tribune said she had “ranked among the most liberal members of the Texas House” and was vice chair of the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus, before dropping the “progressive” label for “populism.” The same piece said she turned to Fight Agency, “whose strategists have shaped high-profile, competitive campaigns from those of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. John Fetterman.” Abbott called her “Gender Bender Gina.” His campaign said she wants “boys in girls’ sports and men in women’s private spaces” as well as “no police” and “violent criminals out of jail and terrorizing Texas streets.”
Acton, Ohio’s former health director under Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, beat Vivek Ramaswamy to become the first Democrat elected Ohio governor in 20 years — and the first woman elected to the job, not the first woman to hold it. She signed the March 14, 2020, order closing Ohio’s K-12 schools and the March 22 statewide stay-at-home order. On March 16, she ordered polls closed on the eve of Ohio’s primary. She resigned on June 11, 2020, amid lawsuits, legislative moves to curb her powers, and protests at her home. DeWine has said, “The buck stops with the governor… I made those decisions.” Republican ads called her “the COVID lockdown doctor.”
Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor and a Biden White House adviser, is Georgia’s governor-elect. Atlanta recorded 157 homicides in 2020, the most since 1996. After the June 12, 2020, shooting of Rayshard Brooks she called for Officer Garrett Rolfe to be fired; the police chief resigned and the Wendy’s where Brooks was shot was burned. A special prosecutor later dropped all charges against Rolfe, finding the force justified. On May 29, 2020, Bottoms told rioters, “This is not a protest… this is chaos,” and “If you care about this city, then go home… You are disgracing our city.” In 2018, she also signed an order permanently ending the Atlanta City Detention Center’s receipt of ICE detainees, saying “no one should be jailed solely because they seek the American Dream.”
Stratton, Illinois lieutenant governor under J.B. Pritzker since 2019 and now its senator-elect, lists among her Senate priorities “Securing Medicare for All,” “Fighting for a $25 Minimum Wage,” restoring Roe, “Passing Common Sense Gun Safety Laws,” and “Abolishing ICE.” Under the Pritzker–Stratton administration, Illinois became the first state to end cash bail, on September 18, 2023. She supports that policy; she did not write the statute. Her Republican opponent, Don Tracy, attacked a “Pritzker / Stratton Pro-Criminal Agenda.”
Blunt Rochester, the senator from Delaware since January 2025, voted yes on the Assault Weapons Ban as a House member in July 2022 and no on the Laken Riley Act in March 2024. In the Senate, she and Maryland Sen. Angela Alsobrooks both voted no on final passage of the Laken Riley Act on January 20, 2025, which passed 64–35.
