Karen Carter Peterson

Peterson served as State Representative for District 93 from 1999 to 2010. Peterson served as House Speaker Pro Tempore from 2008 to 2010.[4]

In 2010, Peterson won a special election to the Louisiana State Senate from the 5th district after her predecessor, Cheryl Gray Evans, resigned. Peterson served the remainder of Evans' term. In 2011 and 2015, Peterson was re-elected to full four-year terms.[5]

On June 8, 2017, Peterson shouted an obscenity at Representative Dodie Horton of Haughton after Horton asked a group of senators present on the House floor to stop talking so that the budget proceedings being considered could be heard. Peterson later apologized for her verbal attack.[6]

In the spring of 2012, Senator Peterson was elected Chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party by the Louisiana Democratic State Central Committee, ousting former chair Claude "Buddy" Leach by a vote of 85 to 75.[1]

Peterson is a political protégé of Jim Singleton, a former city councilman and the leader of the powerful Black Organization for Leadership Development (BOLD), which has repeatedly aligned itself in opposition to William J. Jefferson and his Progressive Democrats. With the help of BOLD, Peterson was elected in 1999 to the Louisiana state legislature as a representative for the 93rd district, which encompasses New Orleans, the upper French Quarter, and parts of Central City and Mid-City. In the state legislature, she was one of the most vocal supporters of a plan to reform the New Orleans public school system by putting it under state control. She was also a backer of levee board consolidation after the failures of the New Orleans Levee system following Hurricane Katrina.

Peterson was a candidate for U.S. Congress in Louisiana's 2nd congressional district (map) in the mid-term election of November 2006. She, along with several other candidates, challenged incumbent Democrat Bill Jefferson, who was the subject of an FBI investigation. She finished in second place with 19,972 votes (21.6% of the total votes cast), and therefore she and Jefferson entered a runoff round of voting on December 9, 2006. Jefferson prevailed by a 57%-43% margin, the lowest since his original election in 1990.

Peterson received endorsements from prominent Republican businessmen Joe Canizaro and Donald T. "Boysie" Bollinger. She was also endorsed by both the Louisiana State Democratic Party and the Orleans Parish branch of the Democratic Party. She centered her campaign around the argument that Jefferson's corruption scandal left New Orleans with a lack of credible and respected representation in Congress. Jefferson, in turn, accused Peterson of profiting from no-bid "sweetheart" contracts with the New Orleans City Council as their legal advisor for utility regulation. In 2009, Jefferson was convicted of eleven felonies.[7]

In November 2020, Representative Cedric Richmond of the 2nd district announced that he would resign from Congress in January 2021, after being appointed by President-elect Joe Biden to be Senior Advisor to the President and director of the Office of Public Liaison. Shortly thereafter, Peterson launched a campaign website, indicating her intention to run for the seat.[8]

Peterson is a proponent of Obamacare and Federal Medicaid expansion. In a statement to the state Senate, she argued that critics of Obamacare were motivated by race.[9][10] The statement drew criticism from Governor Bobby Jindal and the leader of the Louisiana Republican Party, Roger Villere.[11] As a result of the controversy, State Senator Elbert Guillory returned to the Republican Party, the party to which he was once registered but later left to run for elected office.[12][13]

Although generally a proponent of restrictions on state government spending instead of tax increases to close budgetary shortfalls, Peterson, an avowed non-smoker, supports higher taxes on tobacco and use of the consequent revenue to fund priorities of the Louisiana Healthier Families Act.[14] Her 2009 House Bill 889 (Louisiana Healthier Families Act), after heavy lobbying by both sides, failed in the Louisiana House of Representatives; she attributed the loss to "the national ambition of our governor", Bobby Jindal, whom she claime is interested in the Presidency and wants to seek that office without a tax increase on his record.[15]

In a statement as follows Peterson endorsed U.S. President Barack Obama's support for same-sex marriage:

President Barack Obama demonstrated the courage and leadership in his statement on marriage equality today that those of us who support him have always admired. It was particularly moving to hear him discuss how his views had evolved on this subject over the years. The change was not the result of some intellectual exercise or political calculation; it was the result of seeing the lives of friends and acquaintances in same sex relationships that changed his thinking on the issue. We are fortunate to have as our leader a man who is so committed to the principles of fairness and equality ...[16]

Peterson has appointed to her leadership team Stephen Handwerk, the first openly gay man to serve as an officer of the Louisiana Democratic Party. Handwerk writes a weekly column for the Lafayette Daily Advertiser and is the Democratic commentator on FM radio station KPEL in Lafayette.

In 2013, Peterson proposed repeal of the Louisiana Science Education Act, a 2008 law which permits science teachers in public schools to use supplemental classroom materials to question evolution as presented in science textbooks. The Senate Education Committee voted 3-2 on May 1 against the repeal. Over seventy Nobel Prize-winning scientists supported Peterson's bill and have urged that the state law be removed. Supporters of the law maintain that it permits critical thinking in the classroom.[17]