![\"Jennifer](\"http:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/boysko.jpg\")
Jennifer Boysko saying goodbye to the Virginia House of Delegates in January after winning election to the Virginia Senate. Photo: Bob Brown\/Richmond Times-Dispatch<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n When the last vote gets counted this November, Jennifer Boysko \u201989 will have run in eight elections over a six-year period.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not aware that any of my colleagues have been through quite this pace,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n If Boysko wins her re-election bid to serve the 33rd<\/sup> state Senate district, which covers parts of Loudoun and Fairfax counties, the progressive Democrat won\u2019t have to campaign again for four years. \u201cI\u2019ll be able to take a deep breath finally,\u201d says Boysko.<\/p>\n She\u2019ll also have the opportunity to immerse herself in the part of the job she likes best: working for her constituents, whether that means making calls on behalf of a single mom tangled up in bureaucracy or writing legislation to ensure children of undocumented immigrants qualify for in-state college tuition rates.<\/p>\n \u201cI get to know my constituents very well and can help them with a variety of things,\u201d Boysko says. \u201cI can drive from one end of my district to the other in about an hour, and I like that kind of accessibility.\u201d<\/p>\n Boysko\u2019s fan club includes Linda Brooks, head of the Virginia Women\u2019s Democratic Caucus. Northern Virginia voters like Boysko, she says, for her genuineness and her fierce work ethic. \u201cShe truly wants to know what she can do for her community,\u201d Brooks says.<\/p>\n Path to Richmond<\/strong><\/p>\n After graduating from Hollins, Boysko, who majored in French and psychology, worked in the U.S. Senate office of Richard Shelby from her home state of Alabama. Later, she took a job at a D.C. government-relations firm as a legislative assistant.<\/p>\n While putting her career on pause to raise her two girls, Boysko, who lives in Herndon, volunteered as a grassroots organizer for numerous progressive candidates. Her daughters were in elementary school when Boysko served as the Virginia codirector for Howard Dean\u2019s 2004 presidential campaign. \u201cThe older one would make calls and stuff envelopes,\u201d Boysko recalls. \u201cWe did door-to-door together.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2008, Boysko began working as an aide to Fairfax County Supervisor John Foust. A few years later, she decided to make her first run for office after feeling increasingly frustrated by her representative in the House of Delegates, Tom Rust, a Republican. In 2013, she lost her bid by a mere 32 votes to take out the incumbent.<\/p>\n When Rust announced his retirement in 2015, Boysko ran again. She easily won the seat. In 2017, voters chose to send her back to Richmond, with nearly 69 percent of the vote.<\/p>\n Last November, Boysko\u2019s friend Jennifer Wexton rode the blue wave to take Virginia\u2019s 10th congressional district. That opened Wexton\u2019s seat in the state Senate representing district 33. Boysko announced her intention to run the day after Wexton\u2019s victory.<\/p>\n In a firehouse primary held later that month, voters overwhelmingly picked Boysko as their candidate for the state Senate. She only had a few weeks to campaign for the special election, held on January 9, 2019.<\/p>\n Luckily, Boysko had a lot of supporters. They included former first lady, New York Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who sent out a tweet reminding folks in Boysko\u2019s district to hit the polls the morning of the election. \u201cTo have her cheering me on from the sidelines is a huge honor,\u201d Boysko says.<\/p>\n In the same breath, Boysko mentions the numerous volunteers who worked to put her in office. \u201cI had hundreds of people who came and talked to voters individually,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s the most important thing about any of this. It\u2019s not having star power.\u201d Voters elected Boysko with close to 70 percent of the vote. She was sworn into office January 11.<\/p>\n From her first day, Boysko could tell she\u2019d made the right career move. \u201cThe Senate is smaller,\u201d she explains, \u201cso you get to know everybody in the chamber fairly well, and you find ways to work together.\u201d<\/p>\n New perspectives<\/strong><\/p>\n Virginia voters have elected a mere seven women to the U.S. House and none to the Senate; they\u2019ve never tapped a woman to serve as governor or lieutenant governor.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s certainly room for optimism. A record number of women were elected to Virginia\u2019s House of Delegates in 2017. Currently, women take up 37 out of 140 seats in the General Assembly.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving more women is making a difference,\u201d Boysko says. \u201cIt\u2019s bringing up issues that in the past would not be addressed or taken seriously.\u201d Case in point: This year\u2019s General Assembly passed legislation to lower the sales tax on feminine hygiene products and diapers.<\/p>\n As a delegate, Boysko had introduced similar legislation several times without success. When she moved to the Senate, Delegate Kathy Byron, a Republican in the 22nd<\/sup> district, which includes parts of Bedford County and Lynchburg, took the baton there, while Boysko introduced a bill to exempt menstrual supplies from the sales tax in the Senate.<\/p>\n Boysko knew how to work with Byron from when both women sat on the Broadband Advisory Committee in the House. \u201cI’ve been able to forge relationships with people on both sides of the aisle,\u201d Boysko says, \u201cbecause I\u2019ve been collaborative and pragmatic.\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately, Boysko agreed to lower the tax to 2.5 percent rather than seeing it eliminated altogether, but she was happy to get it reduced by more than half. \u201cI was thrilled to get that done,\u201d Boysko says.<\/p>\n A champion of women\u2019s rights since her days at Hollins, Boysko advocates for equal pay for equal work, reproductive rights, and paid maternity leave. She helped pass the bill to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in the Senate; it later stalled in the the House. Boysko wants to improve Virginia\u2019s mental health system and to help families struggling with the opioid epidemic. She\u2019s long advocated for common-sense legislation to prevent gun violence.<\/p>\n A bit of a policy wonk, Boysko is an authority on the importance of broadband in rural areas and can wax poetic about infrastructure funding. \u201cWhat we do at the state level really impacts our lives at a greater level than a lot of the federal stuff,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n And that, Linda Brooks will tell you, is what motivates Boysko: her genuine desire to make the world better. \u201cShe\u2019s not there for the credit or a crown on her head,\u201d she says. \u201cShe just really cares about affecting change.\u201d<\/p>\n Beth JoJack lives and writes in Roanoke.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jennifer Barton Boysko \u201989 has moved from Virginia\u2019s House to the Senate, inspiring voters with her \u201cgenuine desire to make the world better.\u201d By Beth JoJack \u201998 When the last vote gets counted this November, Jennifer Boysko \u201989 will have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8835,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[76],"class_list":["post-8697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-summer-2019"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8697"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8700,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8697\/revisions\/8700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}