U.S. Representative Lauren Underwood

U.S. Representative Lauren Underwood (1986- ), nurse and politician. Lauren Ashley Underwood was born in the Cleveland suburb of Mayfield Heights and moved to the Chicago suburb of Naperville as a small child. Although she grew up in an overwhelmingly white community, she was inspired by Oprah Winfrey and then-Senator Carol Moseley Braun; “to me,” she later recalled, those were the two most powerful black women in the world. It made me feel I could do whatever I wanted to do.” She was also inspired to seek a career in health care by the doctors and nurses who helped her after she was diagnosed with a heart condition at the age of eight. While a student at Neuqua Valley High School, she served on the city’s fair housing advisory commission. She earned a degree in nursing from the University of Michigan, where a course on nursing politics led her to pursue a career in healthcare policy. After completing her bachelor’s degree she worked in pediatric intensive care, discharge planning, psychiatric programs, and medical-surgical units while also earning master’s degrees in nursing and public health from Johns Hopkins University.

In 2010 Underwood went to work at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), tasked with helping to implement the Affordable Care Act that had massively expanded Americans’ access to health care since its passage earlier that year. She also became an adjunct professor in advanced practice nursing at Georgetown University. In 2014 she was appointed a special assistant in President Barack Obama’s administration, working to address public health emergencies and disasters such as bioterror threats and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Two years later she was appointed to the position of senior advisor at HHS. In 2017 she returned to Naperville to work as senior director of strategy and regulatory affairs at Next Level Health, a managed care company in Chicago. That year she also took part in the first Women’s March, which was held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, brought more than three million people together in various cities around the country, and sought to mobilize women to get involved in politics. “I’m one of the women who marched in the Women’s March and decided to campaign,” she later said, “’Time Magazine called us ‘The Avengers.” What was very clear is that women have been mobilized in a very specific and concrete way to engage in our country.”

In 2017, Underwood decided to become even more involved in politics. Her Naperville home is part of Illinois’ 14^th Congressional District, a large, seven-county district that includes the far western Chicago suburbs, small towns, and largely rural areas. As of the 2010 census the district is 86% white, and the Democrats had won only three of thirty-five elections since 1938. This Republican dominance included staunch conservative Randy Hultgren, who had easily defeated his Democratic opponents in the previous four elections. In 2017 Underwood attended a public event at which Hultgren promised to protect health coverage for people with pre-existing conditions: medical conditions that occurred before the person sought or received health insurance. Later that year, though, he voted in favor of a bill that would repeal the Affordable Care Act and make it easier for health insurance companies to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, which included Underwood, many of her patients, and 25% of all Americans under the age of 65. Hultgren’s vote motivated her to challenge him for his seat in Congress; leaving the meeting, she told herself “It’s on. I’m running.” In the Democratic primary against six other candidates, all white men, she won 57% of the votes, with no other candidate receiving more than 13%. This meant that she would now go up against Hultgren in the general election in November 2018. Underwood ran on a platform that focused on health care, especially defending and improving the Affordable Care Act, but also on job creation, infrastructure, universal background checks for firearm purchases, greater funding for college education, environmental protection, immigration reform, and paid family leave. Although the racial and political demographics of her district were not in her favor, she told reporters, “I learned to be a black woman in this community. This is my home, and the idea that I might not be a good fit is an idea I never gave a lot of consideration to.” She sought to get female voters and young voters of all genders involved and to mobilize the support groups created after the Women’s March, she also traveled throughout her district, including the most rural and conservative areas, to reach out to those voters as well. She also received the endorsement of her former boss Barack Obama, who in 2008 had been the only Democratic presidential candidate in the 21^st century to win a majority of votes in the 14^th District. On 6 November 2018, Underwood defeated Hultgren, winning 156,035 votes (52.5%) to his 141,164 (47.5%). She was part of a national wave that saw the Democrats garner ten million more votes than the Republicans, pick up 40 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives (their largest gain since 1974), and take back control of the House. On election night she told a crowd of supporters, “a regular middle-class woman, working full time, is able to…figure out how to get on the ballot, knock doors, get signatures, invite herself to political events and conversations…in the United States of America, we the people come together to make our community, our country, a better place, and tonight we the people have stood up to say that health care is a human right.”

Underwood was sworn into Congress on 3 January 2018. At the age of 32, she is the youngest black woman to ever serve in Congress. She is also the only black congressperson in Illinois history to represent a district entirely outside the Chicago city limits. The 116^th U.S. Congress is the most diverse in U.S. history, with the House now including 102 women, 56 African Americans, 44 Latinx, 15 Asian Americans, 4 Native Americans, and eight LGBT members. This Congress, she declared, “is what [she] always hoped the United States Congress could look like.” The same day that she was sworn in, the House passed a rules package that she co-wrote to combat sexual harassment against women working for members of Congress. “In the Democratic Majority, when the American people have elected the most diverse Congress with more women serving than before,” Underwood said, “we are demonstrating a commitment to conducting the business of our Nation with the highest standards of ethics and decency…’Time’s Up’ has come to the halls of Congress.”

© David Brodnax, Sr.