Clinton Wins Senate: First Former First Lady Elected

She won a Senate seat while still living in the White House. Hillary Clinton defeated Republican Rick Lazio by twelve points in New York on November 7, 2000, a state she had never lived in before 1999. Bill Clinton was still president. She was technically still First Lady on election night. The campaign required moving to Chappaqua, a suburb in Westchester County, and buying a house there to establish residency. The decision to run was controversial even within the Democratic Party. No sitting First Lady had ever sought elected office, and critics argued she was a carpetbagger with no connection to the state. Her opponent, originally the popular Mayor Rudy Giuliani, dropped out of the race due to prostate cancer and a messy personal life, replaced by the lesser-known Lazio. Clinton won by running a disciplined listening tour across all sixty-two New York counties, including rural upstate districts where Democrats rarely campaigned. She served two terms in the Senate, focusing on health care, military affairs, and the economic recovery of New York City after the September 11 attacks. She ran for president in 2008, losing the Democratic primary to Barack Obama in a contest that went down to the final primaries. Obama appointed her Secretary of State, a position she held from 2009 to 2013 during the operation that killed Osama bin Laden and the Benghazi attack that became the subject of years of congressional investigation. She won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major American party, and won the popular vote by nearly three million votes while losing the Electoral College to Donald Trump.