Sharice Lynnette Davids (/ʃəˈris/;^[1] born May 22, 1980) is an American attorney, former mixed martial artist, and politician serving as the U.S. representative from Kansas’s 3rd congressional district since 2019.^[2] A member of the Democratic Party, she represents a district that includes most of the Kansas side of the Kansas City metropolitan area, including Kansas City, Overland Park, Prairie Village, Leawood, Lenexa, and Olathe.

Elected in 2018, Davids became the first Democrat elected to represent a Kansas congressional district in a decade.^[3] She is the first openly LGBT Native American elected to the U.S. Congress, the first openly lesbian person elected to the U.S. Congress from Kansas, and one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress, along with Deb Haaland of New Mexico.^[4][5][6] She defeated incumbent Kevin Yoder in the 2018 election. She is also the second Native American to represent Kansas in Congress, after Charles Curtis, who was Herbert Hoover‘s vice president. Davids is currently the only Democrat in Kansas’s Republican-dominated congressional delegation.

An attorney educated at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and Cornell Law School, Davids was a professional mixed martial artist in the 2010s.^[7]

Davids was born on May 22, 1980, in Frankfurt, West Germany.^[8] She is a member of the Ho-Chunk people, and an enrolled member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin.^[9]

Her maternal grandfather, Fredrick J. Davids, a United States Army veteran, was born into the Mohican Nation Stockbridge-Munsee Band, in Oneida, Wisconsin.^[10] Sharice was raised by her single mother, Crystal Herriage, who served in the U.S. Army.^[11]

Davids attended Leavenworth High School, Haskell Indian Nations University, Johnson County Community College, the University of Kansas, and the University of Missouri–Kansas City, graduating from the latter with a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 2007.^[12][13][14] She earned her Juris Doctor from Cornell Law School in 2010.^[15] She lives in Roeland Park, Kansas and was endorsed for reelection by the Kansas City Star in 2022.^[16][17]

Davids began competing in mixed martial arts (MMA) as an amateur in 2006, and went professional in 2013. She had a 5–1 win–loss record as an amateur and a 1–1 record as a professional.^[18] She tried out for The Ultimate Fighter but did not make it onto the show, leading her to shift her focus away from MMA to travel the U.S. and live on Native American reservations to work with the communities on economic and community development programs.^[13]

Professional

Amateur

Davids began her legal career at SNR Denton in 2010.^[21] She later directed community and economic development for the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.^[22]

In 2016, Davids worked as a White House Fellow in the Department of Transportation during the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations.^[12]

In 2018, Davids ran for the United States House of Representatives in Kansas’s 3rd congressional district. In the August Democratic primary election, she defeated Brent Welder, who had been endorsed by Bernie Sanders, 37% to 34%.^[23]

During a July 2018 episode of the Millennial Politics Podcast, host Jordan Valerie Allen asked Davids whether she supported abolishing ICE, the agency that enforces immigration laws and falls within the oversight of the Department of Homeland Security, to which Davids responded, “you asked me about defunding, which I think is probably essentially the same thing. But yeah.”^[24][25] Despite denials by Davids through campaign statements and a television advertisement, the Associated Press fact checker ruled that she did in fact lend her support to ending the agency.^[26]

Kansas City NPR member station KCUR fact-checked the claims that incumbent Representative Kevin Yoder and Davids made in separate interviews on its station and gave Yoder an “F”. Yoder said that immigrants were making false asylum claims and would increase crime. Davids said that she supported single-payer health care, but it could not be enacted with Republicans in the White House. Meanwhile, she supports short-term goals like allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices and getting generics to market faster. KCUR said that Davids’s claim that teachers are not paid enough and can no longer take tax deductions for buying their own school supplies, was “partly true and partly false” since the tax deduction had been reinstated.^[27]

Davids defeated Yoder in the November 8 general election by 53.6% to 43.9%.^[28][29] Upon her swearing-in on January 3, 2019, she became the first Democrat to represent Kansas in the House since Dennis Moore left office in 2011.^[3] She is also only the second Democrat to represent what is now the 3rd since 1963.

In 2019, Davids and Deb Haaland of New Mexico, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, became the first Native American women to serve in Congress. In March 2021, Haaland left Congress to become the Secretary of Interior in the Biden administration.^[30]

In 2020, Davids was unopposed in the Democratic primary, winning 74,437 votes.^[31]

Davids faced the Republican nominee, Cerner Corporation executive and former Kansas Republican Party chairwoman Amanda Adkins, in the general election.^[32] Davids was endorsed by the Kansas City Star.^[33]

Davids defeated Adkins with 53.6% of the vote to Adkins’s 43.6%.^[34]

In 2022, Davids ran for reelection in the newly drawn 3rd district. Redistricting made the 3rd somewhat more Republican; it lost most of Kansas City while picking up some exurban territory to the west. Despite this, Davids defeated Amanda Adkins for the second time with 54.9% of the vote to Adkins’s 42.8% and 2.3% for the Libertarian Steve Hohe. She improved on her 2020 margin by 2.1%.

On December 18, 2019, Davids voted to impeach President Donald Trump and was the only person representing Kansas to do so.^[35] In March 2020, Davids quarantined herself for possible exposure to coronavirus. Before that, she had mostly switched her congressional office from physical to digital.^[36]

Davids was named a vice-chair of the 2020 Democratic National Convention.^[37]

Davids voted with President Joe Biden’s stated position 100% of the time in the 117th Congress, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. This results in a Biden Plus/Minus score of +10, indicating more support for Biden’s priorities than would be expected given the makeup of her district.^[38]

Davids voted for the America COMPETES Act of 2022, which passed on a party-line vote. The bill authorized billions of dollars of government spending on American manufacturing and scientific research in an effort to compete with China.^[39] Davids added an amendment to the legislation that would include small and medium-sized manufacturers in a $500 million pilot program for producing personal protective equipment and medical supplies.^[40]

Davids voted to provide Israel with support following the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.^[41][42]

• Committee on Small Business^[43]
  • Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Tax and Capital Access
• Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure^[44]
  • Subcommittee on Aviation
  • Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management
• Committee on Agriculture^[45]
  • Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities, Risk Management and Credit
  • Subcommittee on Conservation, Research and Biotechnology

• Chief Deputy Whip^[46]

• Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus (Co-chair)^[47]
• Congressional Native American Caucus (Vice Chair)^[48]
• New Democrat Coalition^[49] (Vice Chair for 118th Congress)^[50]
• House Pro-Choice Caucus^[51]
• Congressional Coalition on Adoption^[52]

In 2019, Representative Cheri Bustos, then chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, took note of Davids, “rating her toward the top of the freshman class in terms of doing things the right way.”^[53]

In June 2019, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, an event widely considered a watershed moment in the modern LGBTQ rights movement, Queerty named Davids one of the Pride50 “trailblazing individuals who actively ensure society remains moving towards equality, acceptance and dignity for all queer people”.^[54][55] She was also named to the 2021 Fast Company Queer 50 list.^[56]

• United States congressional delegations from Kansas
• List of LGBT members of the United States Congress
• List of Native Americans in the United States Congress
• Women in the United States House of Representatives
• 2020 Kansas elections

• Congresswoman Sharice Davids official U.S. House website
• Campaign website

• Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Financial information (federal office) at the Federal Election Commission
• Legislation sponsored at the Library of Congress
• Profile at Vote Smart
• Appearances on C-SPAN