For more than four decades, Maryland’s 5th Congressional District sent Steny Hoyer to Washington. From January 2027 it will be represented by a 32-year-old whose parents left Ghana for the United States in the 1980s.
Adrian Boafo won the seat in the US midterm elections on 3 November 2026. Unofficial results from the Maryland State Board of Elections gave him 68.5 per cent of the vote against 30.9 per cent for Republican Chris Chaffee. On the same night, Gabe Amo, the son of a Ghanaian father and a Liberian mother, was re-elected in Rhode Island’s 1st District.
Adrian Boafo: from Bowie council to Capitol Hill
Adrian Asiedu Boafo was born in Arlington, Virginia, on 10 May 1994 and grew up in Prince George’s County, Maryland. He graduated from DeMatha Catholic High School in 2012, earned a degree in government and public policy from the University of Baltimore in 2016, where he was student government president, and completed an MBA at American University in 2019.
His route to Congress ran straight through the man he is replacing. Boafo managed Steny Hoyer’s re-election campaigns from 2018 to 2021, after earlier press jobs with Congressmen Xavier Becerra and Ruben Kihuen. In November 2019 he won a seat on the Bowie City Council and was made mayor pro tempore, the youngest in the city’s history. Three years later he was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates for District 23 and sworn in on 11 January 2023.
When Hoyer announced his retirement, Boafo declared for the seat on 12 January 2026. The Democratic primary on 23 June drew more than 20 candidates, and he won it with about a third of the vote. The campaign was not without criticism. Some fellow Democrats attacked him for accepting millions of dollars in outside support from the pro-crypto super PAC Protect Progress and from AIPAC’s United Democracy Project.
Gabe Amo: second full term for Rhode Island’s first Black congressman
Gabriel Felix Kofi Amo was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on 11 December 1987. His father, from Ghana, runs a liquor store; his mother, from Liberia, is a nurse. He studied political science at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and went to Merton College, Oxford, as a Marshall Scholar.
Amo spent most of his career inside the White House. He worked in Barack Obama’s Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, was national political coordinator for Obama’s 2012 campaign, and later served Joe Biden as special assistant to the president and deputy director of intergovernmental affairs. In between he advised Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo.
When David Cicilline resigned from Congress in 2023, Amo left the White House to run. He won a crowded Democratic primary with 32.4 per cent, took the special election on 7 November 2023 with 64.7 per cent, and became the first Black person elected to Congress from Rhode Island. On 3 November 2026, with 97 per cent of votes counted, he led Republican Kellie Keenan by 68 per cent to 28 per cent.
What it means back home
Neither man was born in Ghana, and both built their careers entirely in American politics. But the Ghanaian connection is part of how they present themselves. Amo was honoured by the Ghana Diaspora Public Affairs Collective in 2022, and his middle name, Kofi, marks a Friday-born Akan boy.
For Ghanaians in the diaspora, the result arrived in a difficult week. The killing of 15-year-old Javits Frimpong in the Bronx on 29 October had dominated conversations about the safety of Ghanaian families in the United States. Two sons of Ghanaian immigrants winning federal office gave the same community a very different headline.
Boafo takes his seat on 3 January 2027. Amo, already a member of the Budget, Foreign Affairs, and Science, Space and Technology committees, returns for his second full term the same day.