Us midterm polls: 4 Bangladeshi origin candidates see victory

Bangladeshi origin Nabilah Islam, 32, made history in the US midterm elections, becoming the first-ever Muslim and the youngest woman to be elected to the Georgia Senate.

She is one of the four Bangladeshi origin candidates to have been elected in the polls from different states -- a victory that Bangladeshi expatriates in the US are rejoicing.

The other three are Georgia State Senator Sheikh Rahman, Connecticut State Senator Md Masudur Rahman and New Hampshire House of Representative Aboul Khan, reports Noman I Sabit, US-based freelance journalist and photographer.

Sheikh Rahman has been elected for the third time unopposed in the state of Georgia. Nabilah won the Georgia State Senate election for the first time. Masudur also won the Connecticut State Senate polls for the first time. They all ran for Biden's Democratic Party.

On the other hand, Republican candidate Aboul won the post of New Hampshire House of Representatives for the fifth time in a row.

Nabilah tweeted, "We won with 53 percent of the vote in a challenging year. Our margin of victory is a testament to our brilliant team & hard-working volunteers. We ran a strong campaign & fought hard. My sincerest thank you to the voters who put their trust in me to be their voice in the state senate."

Raised in Gwinnett County, Nabilah describes herself as a lifelong fighter, organiser, and community advocate dedicated to advancing Democratic causes and values, according to information available on her website.

She graduated from Gwinnett County Public Schools and put herself through college at Georgia State University by working at a luggage store in Peachtree Corners.

As the daughter of working-class immigrants from Bangladesh, Nabilah watched her parents work long hours to put food on the table. When she was in high school, her mother was injured at the warehouse she worked at as an order puller.

In 2020, Nabilah served as a senior adviser to the Gwinnett Democratic Party where she helped lead outreach to Vietnamese, Korean, and Latino communities -- leading to the strongest Democratic performance in the county in decades and helping to elect President Joe Biden.

During the critical Senate runoffs, Nabilah led an organisation called Save Our Senate, which knocked on over 34,000 doors, turning out Black and Brown voters across Gwinnett for senators Ossoff and Warnock.

At the national level, she worked on Hillary Clinton's 2016 Presidential Campaign and later at the Democratic National Committee.