Donna Edwards, the progressive outsider

There's a reason Donna Edwards netted Daily Kos's first endorsement of the 2016 Senate cycle more than one year ago. In that post, Markos wrote, "I'm not sure I've ever typed more enthusiastic words in an endorsement," because since our first endorsement for her in the House in 2007, "Edwards has remained true to the values that attracted us to her in the first place. She wasn't someone who just supported the things we cared about, but actively led efforts to enact them." 

This Baltimore Sun profile helps explain what has driven Edwards to be all that.

What Edwards offers is a perspective she says is sorely lacking in the Senate — that of a single mother, an African-American woman, a person who knows the sting of supplementing a trip to the grocery store with help from a food bank.

Around the time she was attending law school, Edwards lost, in rapid succession, her car, her job and her marriage. She and her son — he was about 3 at the time — moved into her mother's home.

Later, when she suspected her son was behind in reading, she skipped a mortgage payment to pay to have him tested. Jared had a visual spatial disorder that was delaying his learning.

He turned out fine. But the experiences shaped her public life.

"A number of things at inconvenient times can really send you to the brink," Edwards told The Baltimore Sun. "I wouldn't really tell anyone about it because it was just really embarrassing."

Long before she was elected to Congress, she lobbied for 1994's Violence Against Women Act as a citizen activist, "march[ing] from office to office to sell members on the idea that domestic violence had become so pervasive it required a federal response—that Congress, in other words, had to do something." She helped make that happen. She knows governing from both sides and she's lived making government responsive to people's lives.