Tammy Duckworth
Illinois

Tammy Duckworth makes her second bid for Illionois’s Senate seat, running on the Democratic line. During her first campaign for the U.S. Senate, she was the target of ableist, racist, and misogynistic comments from her peers and the public, all of which she handled with elegance and strength. Her political life began in 2006 with an unsuccessful run for Congress. She was first successful in a political campaign in 2012 in Illinois’s general election for the U.S. House of Representatives, against Republican incumbent John Walsh. At 52, her career is solid.

Ladda Tammy Duckworth was born on March 12, 1968 in Bangkok to an American father and Thai-Chinese mother. As her father (a veteran of World War II and the Vietnam War) was American, she herself was a natural-born U.S. citizen. During childhood, she lived in various cities in Southeast Asia, and is consequently fluent in Thai and Indonesian, in addition to English. Duckworth’s family relocated to Hawaii in the 1980s, where she started her post-secondary studies. She graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1989 with a B.A. in political science. She then received a master’s in international affairs from George Washington University. She started on the PhD track at Northern Illinois University, but her studies were interrupted by her war service. She later received her PhD from Capella University in 2015 after her military career ended.

Continuing the tradition of military service on her father’s side of the family (his ancestors served in every major military conflict the U.S. has been involved in since the Revolutionary War), Duckworth enrolled in the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in 1990, while she was still a student at George Washington University. She became a commissioned officer in the United States Army Reserve in 1992. She eventually became a helicopter pilot as that was one of the few combat positions open to women at the time. She was deployed to Iraq in 2004. She lost both her legs, and partial use of her right arm, when her helicopter was hit by a grenade in November of that year. Duckworth received the purple heart and was soon after promoted to Major.

Duckworth was appointed as director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs in 2006, and is celebrated for starting a program to aid veterans struggling with PTSD and brain injuries. Later that year Duckworth won the Democratic primary for Illinois’s seat in Congress, left open by Republican Henry Hyde. She went up against Peter Roskman and lost by two percent. Five years later, Duckworth announced her intention to run again for Congress in Illinois’s eighth Congressional District. Duckworth defeated Republican incumbent Joe Walsh by ten percent in 2012, making her the first Asian-American from Illinois in Congress. Duckworth ran again in 2014 and defeated Republican Larry Kaifesh.

Duckworth first ran for Senate in 2016 with active endorsement from Barack Obama, defeating Republican incumbent Mark Kirk (who hurled the most virulent insults at Duckworth). One of Duckworth’s notable accomplishments while in the Senate was defending (and saving, some would claim) the Americans with Disabilities Act, which protects disabled citizens (including veterans) from discrimination. Duckworth has been openly critical of President Trump, referring to him as a draft dodger, and was particularly critical of his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Barrett’s opposition to in vitro fertilization (IVF) is personally offensive to Duckworth, as she has given birth twice thanks to the process, also becoming the first U.S. Senator to give birth while in office.

To date, Duckworth’s most impressive political claim is as a candidate for Secretary of Defense in the Biden Administration.