By: Isabelle Kaneza
On November 4, 2014, West Virginia elected the youngest lawmaker in the country, 18-year-old Saira Blair. Saira, the daughter of West Virginia’s Republican senator Craig Blair, won the republican primary in the spring of 2014 – still a senior in high school – against the 67 year old republican incumbent.
Saira ran her campaign from her dorm room on the campus of West Virginia University with Senator Blair as her campaign manager. For days, Blair and her supporters hand wrote letters to voters all while keeping up her GPA and staying an active member of her university.
As an extreme right wing conservative, she based her campaign on her anti-abortion, anti-Common Core, and anti-same sex marriage beliefs stating, “marriage is the holy union of a man and a woman as husband and wife under God.” Saira also supported voter ID laws and planned to make West Virginia a right-to-work state. Above all, her campaign focus was a promise to create jobs in the state in an effort to persuade millennials to stay in West Virginia even after college.
Despite her staunch conservative opinions, Saira has made a massive step in getting young people involved in the decision process at the House of Delegates. She will be missing months of school in the spring to take part in the first House of Delegates session and will be making up missed days of school in the summer.
