After returning home from a vacation in November 2004, Rep. Jennifer Longdon and her fiancé decided to stop for a quick bite to eat at a drive-through taco shop. She never could have known that she would be leaving the restaurant in an ambulance that day.
While pulling up to the restaurant, a car sideswiped their vehicle. Just moments later, shots were fired at the two, striking her fiancé in the head and her in the back. The injury Longdon sustained left her paralyzed, and she has been a full-time wheelchair user ever since.
No one was ever charged with the crime.
“It took a lot of years to claw back out of survival mode, from just learning how to be paralyzed and being constantly sick and weak from the injury,” Longdon said. “It took a couple of years to find my strength.”
Longdon said it was only after her injury that she began to raise her voice in politics. In the years that followed, she traveled across the country sharing her story and advocating for issues relating to disability and gun violence prevention.
When former President Barack Obama introduced the Affordable Care Act, Longdon organized thousands of volunteers across the state to educate the public and garner support for its passage. It was during this time that she met her longtime friend and campaign manager, Tes Harvey Rollins.
“She coordinated an incredible amount of volunteer hours calling Arizonans to help them understand the Affordable Care Act and why it was important to get passed, not just for people with disabilities, but for all people,” Rollins said.
Around that same time, Arizona legislators attempted to pass a bill that would have allowed students and faculty to carry concealed firearms on public college campuses. In opposition, Longdon spoke at a press event hosted by the national nonprofit organization, Keep Guns Off Campus.
Over the years, she remained in contact with the organization and its co-founder Andy Pelosi, garnering respect for her continued efforts to support gun regulation. In recognition of her work, Keep Guns Off Campus named Longdon as an honoree for their annual benefit taking place later this month.
“She’s a champion on all kinds of gun violence prevention issues, not just campus issues,” Pelosi said. “We felt that given her work on the gun issue over the years and in particular fighting guns on campus, that she’d be a great honoree and folks would love to hear from her.”
In the United States, Americans with disabilities account for roughly 25% of the population, yet only about 10% of elected officials have a disability. Although people with disabilities have an equal opportunity to serve in political office, there are still many social and institutional accessibility barriers that stand in the way.
When she ran in her first election for the Arizona House of Representatives in 2018, Longdon said she was the target of a whisper campaign to discredit her because of her disability. In the discussions that began to circulate, people were more critical of her physical disability than anything related to her work in politics.
“[People said things like] ‘Jen’s real nice and she’s done a lot of things, but did you see on Facebook today she said she had trouble putting on her shoes … How can she serve as a legislator if she can’t even put on shoes?’” Longdon said.
Even while in office, Longdon misses out on certain events and opportunities because they are not wheelchair accessible.
“There are events held in places like restaurants that are inaccessible to her,” Rollins said. “People would never hold an event at a place that did not accept Blacks or Jews or women … You would never do that for any other physical characteristic, yet somehow it’s still okay to do it for people with disabilities.”
Although her legislative efforts focus heavily on issues related to disability, Longdon’s work in legislature targets many other areas of policy, such as healthcare, education and abortion rights.
As a young adult, she volunteered as an abortion clinic escort. Today, she is working to pass legislation to protect access to safe and legal abortion following the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
“I’m going to fight tooth and nail to do everything I can to make sure that abortion services are available here in Arizona for the folks who want them and need them,” Longdon said. “With the way this legislation is written, [Arizona] is going to also end up banning contraception, abortion and all of its forms including miscarriage care and gender-affirming care. All of those will get wrapped up together in this horrendous legislation that in the end serves no one.”
Longdon is currently running for re-election for legislative district five. For more information regarding this year’s election candidates, visit Arizona’s webpage on Ballotpedia.org.
Contact the reporter at obystrom@asu.edu.
