Female politicians and celebrities often get mixed up. That’s because the two professions are intertwined with each other in many ways. Politicians become celebrities once they’re famous enough, and celebrities often start politicking to get themselves into more powerful positions. To celebrate female politicians that we like (and some that we don’t), we’ve compiled a list of the 20 hottest and powerful women in US politics right now – from governors to members of Congress, mayors, and state representatives.
1. Pam Bondi
Pamela Jo Bondi is an American lawyer, lobbyist, and politician. She was born on November 17, 1965. She was the first woman to be elected as the Attorney General of Florida. She was the 37th Attorney General from 2011 to 2019. Bondi worked as an Assistant State Attorney in Hillsborough County, Florida, as a prosecutor and spokesman. Bondi resigned from this job to run for Florida Attorney General. She has been a guest on Scarborough Country with Joe Scarborough and many other MSNBC cable news shows. She has also been a guest host for Fox News.
See also: Fox News Anchors Reporters
2. Alejandra Campoverdi
Alejandra Campoverdi (born September 20, 1979) is a former White House assistant and advocate for women’s health in the United States. Campoverdi was the first Deputy Director of Hispanic Media at the White House while Barack Obama was in office.
Following her master’s degree, Campoverdi was hired by then-Senator Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign to work in the Chicago headquarters after working for the Agricultural Worker Health Initiative at The California Endowment. This health-focused foundation helps underserved communities in California get better, more affordable health care. She relied on credit cards to get by, didn’t have health insurance, and lived in subsidized housing. During the campaign, Campoverdi worked hard to reach out to many different groups of voters, especially Latinos.
3. Joni Ernst
Joni Kay Ernst (née Culver) is an American politician and former military officer who has served as the junior United States Senator representing Iowa since 2015. She served in the Iowa State Senate as a Republican from 2011 until 2014. From 1993 through 2015, Ernst served in the Iowa Army National Guard, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. At the outset of her 2014 Senate campaign, Ernst was considered a “long shot.” Despite this, he received a lift from the Koch brothers’ backing and an ad that went viral in which she mentioned her expertise in castrating pigs and promised to “reduce pork” in Congress. She has also been seen as a strong supporter of President Donald Trump, and despite her harsh criticism of President Barack Obama, she was thought to be a possible running mate for him in 2016.
4. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a politician and activist in the United States. As a member of the Democratic Party, she has served as the U.S. Representative representing New York’s 14th congressional district since 2019. The district encompasses the eastern Bronx, north-central Queens, and New York City’s Rikers Island.
On June 26, 2018, Ocasio-Cortez won the Democratic primary election for New York’s 14th congressional district, which caught the attention of people all over the country. She beat Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley, who had been in office for 10 terms, in what was mostly seen as the biggest surprise win of the 2018 midterm election primaries. She comfortably defeated Republican Anthony Pappas in the November general election. In the 2020 election, she defeated John Cummings and was re-elected.
5. Elizabeth Halseth
Elizabeth Halseth is an American politician, born on February 5, 1983. She served in the Nevada Senate as a Republican from November 2010 until February 2012. Halseth is the youngest woman in Nevada’s history to be elected to the legislature. In 2018, she sought a seat in the Nevada Senate but lost.
Halseth announced her retirement from the Senate on February 17, 2012. She said that it was hard to balance being a senator and a single mother. She also said in her resignation letter that she might look for work outside of Nevada because it was hard for her to find work there. She also quit because she was accused of not going to meetings and not returning phone calls. Daniel Halseth, who was her husband at the time, was eventually charged with three crimes: compulsion, violence, and open and gross lewdness.
6. Huma Mahmood Abedin
Huma Mahmood Abedin (born July 28, 1975) is an American political adviser who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Abedin was Clinton’s deputy chief of staff from 2009 to 2013, when Clinton was Secretary of State of the United States. She was also Clinton’s traveling chief of staff and assistant when she ran for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in 2008.
Abedin began working as an intern at the White House in 1996 while still a student at George Washington University when assigned to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. She worked as an associate editor for the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs from 1996 until 2008. For numerous years, she was Clinton’s personal aide’s backup. During Clinton’s victorious 2000 U.S. Senate race in New York, she formally took over as Clinton’s aide and personal advisor. She later served as Clinton’s traveling chief of staff and “body lady” during her failed 2008 Democratic presidential campaign. According to multiple Clinton colleagues, Abedin is a trusted counselor to Clinton, especially in the Middle East, where she has become renowned for her knowledge.
7. Kristi Lynn Noem
Kristi Lynn Noem is the 33rd governor of South Dakota, having taken office in 2019. She was a member of the Republican Party and served in the South Dakota House of Representatives for the 6th district from 2007 to 2011. She was the U.S. Representative for South Dakota’s at-large congressional district from 2011 to 2019. Noem was elected governor of South Dakota in 2018, making her the state’s first female governor.
8. Tulsi Gabbard
She was the United States Representative representing Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021. She is an American former politician and United States Army Reserve officer. She was the first Hindu member of Congress and the first Samoan-American voting member of Congress when elected in 2012. She launched her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election in early February 2019.
Gabbard was elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives at 21 in 2002. Gabbard was in the field medical unit of the Hawaii Army National Guard in Iraq from 2004 to 2005. From 2008 to 2009, she was the leader of an Army Military Police battalion in Kuwait. She was the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2013 until 2016, when she quit to back Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination for president.
9. Carey Torrice
Carey Torrice (born Carey Shawn Scarlet Valentine DeJaeghere on February 13, 1986, in Detroit, Michigan) is a Macomb County, Michigan politician. She was dubbed “Hottest Politician in the USA” by TMZ.com in 2007 and “America’s Sexiest Politician” by Inside Edition in 2008.
Torrice was elected to Macomb County’s Board of Commissioners in 2006. In 2008, she was re-elected to a second term. Torrice was the Chairperson of the Public Services Committee and the Veterans Services Committee during her term in office. According to a press release while on the commission, she procured medicine for animals at the Macomb County Animal Shelter and transitioned the shelter to a no-kill facility. In honor of her late father, USMC Sgt. Larry DeJaeghere also pushed to have the Veterans Service millage passed.
10. Michelle Obama
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (born January 17, 1964) was the first lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. She is an American attorney and novelist. She was the first African-American woman to hold this post in the United States.
She is the former First Lady of the United States and the wife of former President Barack Obama. Following law school, Obama worked as an associate at the law firm Sidley & Austin in Chicago, where she met her future husband, Barack Obama. She worked on marketing and intellectual property law at the firm. She still retains her legal license, but she has maintained it on a voluntary inactive status since 1993 because she no longer requires it for her job.
She worked as an Assistant to the Mayor and as an Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development in the Chicago municipal administration in 1991. She then became the Executive Director of Public Allies’ Chicago office in 1993, a non-profit organization that encourages young people to work on social issues in nonprofit organizations and government institutions. She spent over four years there, setting fundraising records for the organization that was still in place twelve years later. Obama subsequently remarked that before working “to develop Public Allies,” she had never been happier in her life.
11. Sandra Kay Fluke
Sandra Kay Fluke is an American lawyer and proponent of women’s rights. Sandra Kay Fluke first gained notoriety when Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee refused to testify on the importance of requiring insurance plans to cover birth control during a debate over whether medical insurance should have a contraception mandate in February 2012. She later talked with Democratic lawmakers.
12. Krysten Lea Sinema
Arizona’s senior United States senator is an American politician, university instructor, former social worker, and lawyer. She spent three terms as a state representative for Arizona’s 15th legislative district from 2005 to 2011, one term as a state senator for the 15th legislative district from 2011 to 2012, and three terms as the United States Representative for Arizona’s 9th district from 2013 to 2019.
Sinema began her political career as a member of the Arizona Green Party. She became well-known as a progressive activist who fought for LGBT rights and was against the war on terror. In 2004, she switched from the Green Party to the Arizona Democratic Party, and in 2012 she was elected to the United States House of Representatives. After she was elected, she joined the New Democrat Coalition, the Blue Dog Coalition, and the nonpartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. This gave her one of the most conservative voting records in the Democratic caucus.
She won the 2018 Senate race to replace Jeff Flake. She beat the Republican candidate, Martha McSally. Sinema was elected to the House of Representatives in 2012 and to the Senate in 2018. She was the first openly bisexual woman to do so, and after Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, she was the second openly LGBT woman to do so. She was also the first woman elected to the Arizona Senate.
13. Sarah Louise Palin
Sarah Louise Palin was the 9th governor of Alaska from 2006 until her resignation in 2009. She is an American politician, pundit, author, and reality television star. She was the first Republican female vice presidential contender and the second female vice presidential nominee of a major party, after Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, when she ran with Arizona Senator John McCain in 2008. Unfortunately, the McCain-Palin ticket lost the 2008 election against then-Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden of the Democratic Party.
14. Gretchen Whitmer
Gretchen Esther Whitmer (born August 23, 1971) is an American lawyer and politician who has been serving as Michigan’s 49th governor since 2019. She served in the Michigan House of Representatives from 2001 to 2006 and in the Michigan Senate from 2006 to 2015. She is a Democrat.
Whitmer grew up in the state of Michigan. She attended Forest Hills Central High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan State University, and the College of Law at Michigan State University. She campaigned for the statehouse unsuccessfully in the 1990s before being elected in 2000. She was elected to the state legislature in 2006 and served until term restrictions forced her to resign in 2015. From 2011 until 2015, she served as the Senate’s first female Democratic leader.
15. Ayanna Soyini Presley
Ayanna Soyini Pressley (born February 3, 1974) is an American politician who has represented Massachusetts’ 7th congressional district since 2019. Her district encompasses the northern third of Boston, the majority of Cambridge, sections of Milton, and all of Chelsea, Everett, Randolph, and Somerville.
Pressley, a member of the Democratic Party, ran unopposed in the general election after defeating ten-term incumbent Mike Capuano in the primary. She was previously elected to the Boston City Council as an at-large member in 2010. Pressley was the first black woman elected to the Boston City Council and the first black woman elected to the Massachusetts State House of Representatives.
16. Patricia Nell Scott Shroeder
Patricia Nell Scott Schroeder (born July 30, 1940) is an American politician who served in the US House of Representatives from 1973 to 1997, representing Colorado. Schroeder was the first female U.S. Representative elected in Colorado, and she was a member of the Democratic Party.
In 1979, the Supersisters trading card set was released, with Schroeder’s name and photo on one of the cards. In 1985, Schroeder was honored by the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame. In 1988, Schroeder was mocked on Saturday Night Live in a sketch in which Nora Dunn, playing Schroeder, fell into tears repeatedly while moderating a Democratic primary discussion.
17. Mary Bono Mack
Mary Bono is an American politician, entrepreneur, and lobbyist who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1998 to 2013, representing Palm Springs and much of central and eastern Riverside County, California. Bono’s district was renumbered as the 36th district after the 2010 census, and it was made somewhat more Democratic and Hispanic than its predecessor. Democratic rival Raul Ruiz, a physician, beat her with 53 percent of the vote to Bono’s 47.1 percent in a major shock.
18. Maria Cantwell
Maria Ellen Cantwell is a Washington-based American politician who has served as the junior United States senator since 2001. She previously served in the Washington House of Representatives from 1987 to 1993 and in the United States House of Representatives, representing Washington’s 1st congressional district from 1993 to 1995 as a member of the Democratic Party.
20. Judy Chu
Judy May Chu (born July 7, 1953) is an American politician who has served in the United States Congress since 2013, representing California’s 27th congressional district. She has been a member of Congress since 2009 and was the representative for California’s 32nd congressional district until the lines were changed in 2011. Judy Chu is the first woman of Chinese descent to be elected to Congress in the United States.
