The Women of 2018: The Pink Wave in the US House Elections ... and Its Legacy in 2020 9781685851019

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THE

WOMEN OF 2018

THE

WOMEN OF 2018 The Pink Wave in the US House Elections . . . and Its Legacy in 2020 Barbara Burrell

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2021 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Suite 314, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB www.eurospanbookstore.com/rienner

© 2021 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Burrell, Barbara C., 1947– author. Title: The women of 2018 : the pink wave in the US house elections ... and its legacy in 2020 / Barbara Burrell. Description: Boulder, Colorado : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Exploring the 2018 “pink wave” in the US House elections, offers a comprehensive study of who the women candidates were, the nature of their campaigns, and their legacy in 2020”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020047312 | ISBN 9781626379299 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781626379312 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Women political candidates—United States. | Women—Political activity—United States. | United States. Congress. House—Elections. | United States—Politics and government—1989– Classification: LCC HQ1236.5.U6 B877 2021 | DDC 320.082/0973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047312

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

List of Tables and Figures

vii

1 The Women of 2018

1

2 Gender in the Making of the 2018 Elections

27

4 Why Did They Run?

79

3 Who Were the Candidates?

5 Media Messaging on the Campaign Trail

49

97

6 The Challenges of Fundraising

107

8 From 2018 to 2020, and Beyond

135

Bibliography Index About the Book

173 189 191

7 Becoming Representatives

v

119

Tables and Figures

Tables 3.1

3.2

3.3

3.4

6.1

6.2

6.3 7.1

8.1

8.2

Number of Primary Election Candidates by Status, Party, and Sex, 2018 Nonincumbent Primary Election Success Rates by Party and Sex, 2018 Nonincumbent Female Candidate Demographic Characteristics, US House of Representatives, 2018 Nonincumbent US House Candidates’ Election Status by Race/Ethnicity and Sex, 2018 Mean Receipts, Male and Female Candidates, US House of Representatives, 2018 Mean Receipts by Party, Sex, and Candidate Status, General Election, US House Candidates, 2018 Mean Total Individual Contributions in Amounts of $200 or More, General Election, US House Candidates, 2018 First-Term US House Members of the 116th Congress and Their Occupational Histories Number of Primary Election Candidates by Status, Party, and Sex, 2020 Nonincumbent Primary Election Success Rates by Party and Sex, 2020 vii

53

55

60

65

108

109 110

122

142

149

viii

Tables and Figures

8.3

Nonincumbent Female Candidate Demographic Characteristics, US House of Representatives, 2020 Nonincumbent Female Candidate Occupations, US House of Representatives, 2020 Mean Receipts, Male and Female Candidates, US House of Representatives, 2020 Mean Receipts by Party, Sex, and Candidate Status, General Election, US House Candidates, 2020 Mean Total Individual Contributions in Amounts of $200 or More, General Election, US House Candidates, 2020 Women’s Political Action Committees’ Engagement, 2020 Election Results: Female Candidates, 2020 First-Term US House Members of the 117th Congress and Their Occupational Histories Registered Voter Turnout in 2018 by Race and Sex

8.4

8.5

8.6

8.7 8.8

8.9 8.10 8.11

152

155

158

158 158

160 161

163 166

Figures 4.1 6.1

Motivation Categories Mentioned by Candidates Tweet by Elise Stefanik

85 114

1 The Women of 2018

“Women Make History in the 2018 Congressional Primary Elections” —CAWP 2018a “2018 Midterm Elections Lead to Historic Wins for Women” —Cooney 2018

As these introductory headlines highlight, in 2018 women made historic advances running for and being elected to national and state office in the United States. Women are, however, still very much underrepresented in political leadership relative to their percentage of the population. In this book I tell the story of women’s quests for election to public office in 2018, paying particular attention to the women seeking to win a seat in the US House of Representatives where the historic nature of the election primarily occurred. Who were these women? Why did they run? What were their campaigns like and how did they succeed? Do the 2018 elections represent the emergence of a new phase of women’s electoral power that the 2020 election then built upon? In the second decade of the twenty-first century, women are 51 percent of the US population, a majority. But they are far from a majority of this country’s elected officials. They are vastly underrepresented as US senators, US representatives, governors, and state legislators. No woman has ever been elected president or vice president. In 2017, twenty-three women were US senators, 23 percent of the Senate; eighty-seven women were US representatives, 20 percent of the US House. Six women were governors, 12 percent of the fifty state governors. 1

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The Women of 2018

Women were 25.1 percent of state legislators. Only one woman had ever received a major party nomination for president, Hillary Clinton in 2016, who lost in a defeat that devastated many citizens, particularly women, who had high hopes for a major breakthrough in women’s political leadership. Rather than receding from heightened quests for public office after the 2016 election, more women than ever, 463, sought national election to the US House of Representatives in 2018, and 53 women sought a seat in the US Senate, including 13 incumbents. A record number of 61 women sought to be governor of their state. A record number of women also won nomination and election to state legislatures. The number of female nominees for state legislative office increased by 29 percent from 2016 to 2018, the largest percentage increase in women’s state legislative nominations in the past two decades. The headlines introducing this chapter highlight the story of women’s candidacies in the 2018 elections. When that election was over and the 116th Congress was sworn in, CNN announced that “no Congress has ever looked like this. . . . The 116th Congress broke barriers before it even set foot in Washington. The faces of this new class reflect the nation’s diversity in ways it has never seen before” (Foran and Mattingly 2019). The number and diversity of its new female members were the legislators who most prominently contributed to a distinctly new representative portrait of Congress in 2019. The 2018 elections were remarkable for women’s leadership in US politics. It was transformative in the number and diversity of female candidates and winners, although after all the ballots were counted, women would still remain substantially underrepresented in the highest elected offices in the United States. This book centers on describing the candidacies of the women who “threw their hat” in the ring to become US representatives in 2018. In answer to the questions posed in the first paragraph of this chapter, in the pages that follow, I describe the ways in which these female candidates were distinctive in their personhood, in the nature of their campaigns, their success rates, and how their victories contributed to the representational nature of Congress. Do the 2018 elections mark the beginning of a new era in women’s political leadership in the United States? More women than ever saw themselves as elected officials, and they did not hesitate to put themselves forward as candidates in the 2018 elections. Their candidacies highlighted that year’s elections, not only in terms of their numbers, the traditional marker of an election being a “year of the woman” described below, but also in the character

The Women of 2018

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and diversity of their campaigns, the intense media attention to the ways in which they were contesting the election, and their numerous success stories, especially upsetting incumbents in US House races. The portrait included more women of color than in previous electoral years, more lesbian and transgender candidates, and more female elected leaders with immigrant backgrounds. Notable also were the number of female candidates within both political parties who had had military and national security careers. It was not just their numbers and diversity that made women’s candidacies stand out in 2018, but the distinctive nature of their campaigns. After decades of being told how to look, how to sound, and how they should act, female candidates across the country challenged the traditional concept of female electability, proudly displaying, for example, their physical strengths in their campaign advertising that featured them boxing, mountain climbing, scuba diving, long-distance running (Schnell 2018a), and shooting guns and rifles. At the same time, they also prominently highlighted their motherhood status, which traditionally had been hidden or at least minimized on the campaign trail. Their campaigns challenged conventional wisdom and long-standing political research findings on gender in US elections. In this introductory chapter I provide an overview of the dominant theoretical perspectives concerning women running for public office that political scientists have explored in past decades. This overview serves as a prelude to an analysis of the 2018 elections and what the events of that year signify, not only for political equality between men and women in public leadership, but the quality and nature of that leadership. It concludes with a look at how the 2020 election built on this quest for political leadership. I start with a summary of what historical research has told us about women’s emergence as political candidates, what the original 1992 Year of the Woman was really all about, and what the trends have been since that election as an introduction to the new “woman’s year” in American politics in 2018. Subsequent chapters then turn to the ways in which female candidates engaged with the electoral process in 2018, making it an extraordinary and distinctive year for women’s political leadership. The chapters undertake a robust descriptive survey of the female candidates seeking election to the US House and an assessment of these candidates’ impact on electoral politics. By “robust,” I mean a broad exploration of a variety of facets of these campaigns, relying primarily on qualitative data. But I also employ quantitative data on aspects of their campaigns and how their campaigns compared with that of male candidates. In order to provide an overall profile of these candidates and

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The Women of 2018

their campaigns and the ways in which 2018 became a second “year of the woman,” much of the material presented in this work is qualitative in nature, We also need to reflect on the extent to which a “year of the woman” frame is limiting and whether the concept of “gender vulnerability” regarding women’s candidacies is outdated. The story presented here should engage scholars in the development of the testing of hypotheses and theories in a new wave of research on women’s political leadership as well as giving readers much to contemplate about women in the contemporary political life of the United States.

The Historical Research on Women and Elected Office A rich political science literature developed over many decades now exists, exploring women’s quests for political leadership and the barriers that have existed to their emergence and success as candidates for elected office. One of the first, if not the first academic accounting of women’s quests for political leadership in the United States was Martin Gruberg’s Women in American Politics: An Assessment and Source Book, published in 1968. In this work, Gruberg asked, “Where on the political power scale do women stand today as voters, as interest group members, as party members, as governmental officials? Do they have parity with men, competing as equals for any and all offices and objectives? Are there times and places at which they enjoy certain success, having a monopoly of rewards or exercising dominant authority?” After answering these questions through a compilation of the identities of the female officials elected and appointed to political leadership positions, he concluded that the record showed that “by and large, women have been fated to dwell in relative obscurity, accused of a lack of political interest or drive, and rebuffed into almost complete ineffectiveness” (v). In 1971, fifty years ago, Rutgers University created the Center for American Women in Politics (CAWP) to chronicle the numbers of women running for and being elected to public office in the United States. It continues today as the leading source of scholarly research and data about American women’s political participation. As one of its first undertakings in 1972, the center ran a conference with fifty female state senators and representatives. Scholar and later UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick compiled data from that conference into one of the first empirical studies of women in elected office, published as Political Woman in 1976. Her research goal was to determine whether the obsta-

The Women of 2018

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cles women were assumed to face in entering politics, in competing for higher office, and in functioning successfully as politicians differed in degree or in kind from the problems that aspiring male politicians faced (ix). She concluded that the women in her study were “remarkable not only because they have gained entry into a ‘man’s world’ and made a place for themselves in it but also because they manage to harmonize their political roles with conventional women’s roles. Refusing to choose between ‘women’s’ roles and participation in the ‘man’s’ world of politics they have worked out successful combinations” (239). While Kirkpatrick focused on women who had already won public office, a few years later in 1981, Ruth Mandel, then executive director of CAWP, published In the Running: The New Woman Candidate that examined women’s experiences as candidates for elective office. She concluded that “in political life women’s success [was] in transition” (250) and that their increased numbers as elected officials was making a difference in public policy.1 These early research efforts only studied women in elected office. They were not comparative analyses of gender in political leadership. In the decades since these studies were published, a substantial subfield of study on women and politics and gender in politics has developed, political science research that now extends from explorations of women as voters and citizen activists to women as public policy makers, public administrators, and judges, and the differences that exist between male and female candidates on the campaign trail. Regarding women’s candidacies for elected office, researchers have explored a variety of theories and hypotheses about many aspects of women’s political candidacies, principally focusing on what factors account for their long-standing and contemporary underrepresentation in political office, why more women have not sought elected office in large numbers, and what has happened when they have been office-seekers. Research designs involving surveys, interviews, experiments, content analysis, and campaign election and finance data have all been employed in seeking answers to these questions and exploring them from a gender lens comparing the experiences of male and female candidates. Research questions centering on the supply of female candidates, that is, why more women have not run for elected office, and questions centering on the demand for female candidates, that is, why they have not been recruited in greater numbers as candidates for elected office, have structured much of political science’s intrigue with understanding the main factors that have been the cause of women’s underrepresentation in elected office.

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The Women of 2018

Supply-side explanations focus on factors that affect women’s interest in pursuing political office, such as lack of self-confidence, the “second shift” of household work, and gender role socialization that might draw women into less competitive career paths. Demand-side explanations stress factors in the political system that limit women’s opportunities to pursue political office, in particular less frequently recruiting women due to stereotypes and discrimination against them stemming from ideas about their gender, often referred to as “gender vulnerability.” (See, for example, Lazarus and Steigerwalt 2019.) In addition, researchers have asked whether women campaign in a distinct way from male candidates and how voters have viewed female candidates. The next section of this chapter highlights the various research efforts in these different domains with an emphasis on the most recent findings. They serve as backdrops to the focus of this book, which centers on who the female candidates were and how their campaigns contributed to making 2018 such a distinctive election year. In my own career researching women’s quests for elective office I have explored three major conventional wisdom ideas about the disparity between men’s and women’s quests for political leadership. First, conventional wisdom had suggested that female candidates and their election to national office suffered primarily from voter discrimination against them. Voters were less likely to support a female candidate compared to a male candidate it was believed. Second, political party organizations recruited women primarily as “sacrificial lambs” in races in which a political party had little chance of winning. Third, when they did run, women were deficient in acquiring financial support for their campaigns. These research findings over three decades have shown that women’s experiences on the campaign trail have belied these conventional wisdom ideas (1994, 2014). The research of multiple scholars since the famous 1992 Year of the Woman election has even produced a new conventional wisdom idea: “When women run, women win.” In addition to my own work, other contemporary studies have tended to show that after accounting for partisanship and incumbency, women and men are equally likely to win elections. Seltzer et al.’s 1997 study Sex as a Variable: Women as Candidates and Voters in US Elections, and the various works of Palmer and Simon (2008, 2012) are especially notable in this regard. More recently, scholar Deborah Brooks in her 2013 book, which presented the results of her experimental study of gender stereotyping, titled the conclusion, “A Bright Day for Women Who Decide to Run for Office” (164).

The Women of 2018

7

Scholars have researched a number of refined questions about women’s entrance into elections for public office, that is “throwing their hat” into the ring, being recruited to run, and their experiences on the campaign trail relative to men’s, digging deeply into nuanced aspects of their respective challenges in contemporary times. What follows in this chapter is first an overview of the US electoral system and its impact on women being elected to public office. This overview is then followed by a perusal of the research into different aspects of the campaign process, political ambition, candidate gender stereotyping, political communication, and campaign fundraising, in which I emphasize the most recent findings, most of which suggest that women seeking elected office are no longer at a disadvantage relative to male candidates and office holders. This review serves as an introduction to the study of women’s candidacies in the 2018 elections. To place their candidacies in historical context, I end this chapter with a description of the features of the 1992 election that resulted in it being characterized as the Year of the Woman and provide an overview of trends since that election prior to 2018 regarding the election of women to the US House of Representatives.

The Structure of US Elections and Women’s Presence as Political Candidates While much research shows contemporary women to be capable and successful candidates for elected office, the long-term structural factors of US elections exert a strong negative impact on the ability of new groups to achieve political leadership equality with the dominant group of white males. The United States lags far behind other nations in the percentage of its national parliamentarians who are women. The InterParliamentary Union (IPU), located in Geneva, Switzerland, tracks and maintains a database on the number and percentage of women in national parliaments. In its November 2018 accounting just prior to the results of the midterm election, the United States ranked 103rd among national parliaments in the percentage of its members who were women (19.6 percent of the US House). Not all of these nations are parliamentary democracies, however. Of the subset of 125 countries Freedom House characterizes as electoral democracies, the United States ranked 73rd in the percentage of its parliament who were women.2 The structure of its elections exerts a strong drag on women in the United States being able to increase female membership in national elective office.

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The Women of 2018

Electoral structures consist of such factors as the rules by which candidates get their names on the ballot, the role of party organizations in the electoral process, the votes it takes to win, and how many candidates for whom voters can casts ballots. The single-member district electoral structure in the United States, often referred to as first past the post (FPTP), is the least conducive system to the election of women from a comparative electoral structure standpoint. In this electoral structure, not only do voters cast only one vote for a candidate in what are called single-member districts, but each political party competing in a district nominates only one candidate in a winner-take-all style of election. That means it is impossible for them to present a balanced slate based on sex because they have only one nominee to put forth in each district. In contrast, proportional representation systems, common in many other democratic countries, tend to use multimember districts. Instead of electing one person in each district, several people are elected. The basic principles underlying proportional representation elections are that all voters deserve representation and that all political groups in society deserve to be represented in legislatures in proportion to their strength in the electorate. In other words, everyone should have the right to fair representation. Proportional representation systems divide up the seats in these multimember districts according to the proportion of votes received by the various parties or groups running candidates. Thus, for example, if the candidates of a party win 40 percent of the vote in a ten-member district, they receive four of the ten seats, or 40 percent of the seats. If another party wins 20 percent of the vote, they get two seats, and so on. In such systems it is easier for parties to put forth a group of candidates including both men and women rather than just one candidate,3 but it is important that female candidates are represented equally within the lists and not allocated to lower slots. Some parliamentary systems are also constructed with quotas for female representation or have seats reserved for female members. The core idea behind quota systems is to recruit more than a few token women and to ensure that women are well represented in political life. Adoption of quotas for female lawmakers in many countries since the 1990s is a direct attempt at addressing the problem of underrepresentation. An extensive literature review finds that quotas generally have positive effects on attention to women’s issues, the number of women in the legislature (at least initially), and other outcomes (for a review, see O’Brien and Rickne 2016). However, quotas’ effects may not always be normatively positive. Increases in the presence of women

The Women of 2018

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in politics can also lead to backlash or problems with coordinating policy agendas as women begin to assert more political power (Kanthak and Krause 2012). An additional limiting factor for greater numerical representation for women in elected office in the United States has been that contemporary congressional elections, and particularly primary elections for those seats, have become “candidate-centered” affairs. Candidates tend to be entrepreneurs who build their own personal followings. They construct their own linkages to political party organizations and their platforms and develop other support networks. Party organizations tend not to choose nominees. They seldom provide resources in primary campaigns. To compete, candidates must raise money, develop coalitions of support, create their own campaign organizations, and construct campaign strategies. Most all candidates, regardless of sex, face hurdles in emerging as viable candidates in such an entrepreneurial environment, but this candidate-centered system in the United States seems to have posed greater challenges for women than for men. Incumbents, historically mostly men, are advantaged in such a system and typically get reelected. This system limits opportunities for new office-seekers to win office. In particular, given the limited number of open seats, opportunities for women to advance their numbers as elected officials, even if they have substantial financial backing, have been minimal. Even with a substantial increase in the number of female candidates for the US House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm election and their strong campaigns, women in 2019 still only made up slightly less than one-quarter of its membership in the 116th Congress (2019–2020). These structural challenges are important and must be considered when assessing women’s quests for political leadership. Researchers must not just focus on female candidates’ deficiencies. Chapter 3 explores this structural problem in more depth as it pertains to the presence and experience of female candidates in elections to the US House in 2018.

The Political Ambition of Men and Women Ambition theory has long dominated political science thinking on the process of candidate emergence for public office. This theory centers on the idea that political leaders are individuals who had a long-standing interest in public life that preceded their election to public office. When the opportunity presented itself to seek elected office under the right

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The Women of 2018

conditions, these individuals became candidates (e.g., Schlesinger 1966). They were inclined to act in their quest for political leadership. Strategic politicians have been described as skillful, resourceful, and articulate individuals. They tend to present an appealing physical and temperamental presence. They run effective campaigns, carefully selecting relevant issues upon which to capitalize. They tend to have extensive and diverse networks of friends and supporters and have the means to substantially finance a political campaign (Gertzog 2002: 103). Female candidates have increasingly adopted the characteristics of strategic politicians, scholars have found. Political scientist Irwin Gertzog has described contemporary female members of Congress as ambitious, experienced, rational, and skillful. They tend to be similar to men in their electability and in their campaign strategies and techniques. As strategic candidates, they carefully consider the chances of securing their party’s nomination. Their entry into a race is based on the likelihood of success (2002). But some contemporary scholars of ambition and the candidate emergence process, particularly political scientists interested in exploring the distinctiveness of women’s quests for political leadership, now see that other frameworks beyond a pure ambition model help explain how individuals decide to seek public office. Significantly in this genre, Susan Carroll and Kira Sanbonmatsu, in their study of male and female state legislators, have suggested “that the process of candidate recruitment, in which potential candidates are approached and encouraged to run, can create candidates from individuals who had never before contemplated running for office” (2013: 42). In addition to recruitment being the stimulating factor, Carroll and Sanbonmatsu have speculated that “a community concern or issue may attract a citizen’s attention, spur activism and eventually lead to a quest for elective office although a political candidacy was not something this citizen had previously considered” (2013: 42). Their study of gender in state legislators’ decisions to seek elective office in both 1981 and 2008 showed that “a traditional model of ambition, in which candidacy is self-initiated offers a less adequate account of how women reach office than of how men do so” (42). They offer an alternative model of candidacy which seems to apply more often to women than to men, one that recognizes running for office as a “relationally embedded” decision rather than a purely ambitious one. They explain that a relationally embedded decisionmaking process involves the beliefs and reactions, both real and perceived, of other people and involves considerations of how candidacy and office would affect the lives of others with whom the potential candidate has close relationships (45).

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Carroll and Sanbonmatsu (2013) asked their state legislative respondents about their initial decision to run for office to empirically test this hypothesis. Respondents were asked to choose from a three-part question about whether the decision to run was entirely their own idea, whether they had already thought seriously about running when someone else suggested it, or they had not seriously thought about running until someone else suggested it. Their female respondents were much more likely than the male respondents to be pure recruits and much less likely to be “self-starters” (49). Reflecting on female candidates and the 2018 elections, the Center on American Women and Politics concluded in its review that there was no single story about why women ran in 2018 (Dittmar 2019). A second major question regarding women, political ambition, and the quest for political leadership has centered on whether men and women express different levels of political ambition. Research has suggested that women are significantly less likely than men to be interested in running for office. The studies of Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox have led this line of research. “Have you ever thought about running for any public office—that is, any office at the local, state or federal level? Has it ever crossed your mind?” were questions Lawless and Fox asked a national survey of well-educated, well-credentialed professional men and women in their pioneering research published in their Citizen Political Ambition Study. Their findings were first published in 2005 with a replication study in 2010. Their findings have been of central importance to the broad understanding of women’s continued underrepresentation as elected officials in the United States. “Our empirical assessment reveals that despite similarities in levels of political participation, proximity, and interest, eligible women candidates are less politically ambitious than men. Women are not only less likely than men to consider running for office, but they are also less likely than men to enter actual political contests” (2010: 45). Lawless and Fox concluded that the critical finding of their research was “the presence of a pronounced and enduring gender gap in political ambition between professional men and women” (45). They determined three critical factors explained the gender gap in political ambition. First, women were significantly less likely than men to be encouraged to run for elected office. Second, women were significantly less likely to view themselves as qualified to run for office, even when they have had the same experience and credentials as men. Third, women were more likely to state they were responsible for the majority of childcare and household duties, and therefore did not have time to even think about running for office.

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The Women of 2018

Lawless and Fox replicated their study of ambition among this pool of accomplished men and women a third time in 2017 in the midst of widespread anger among American women with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency and their worldwide marches the day after his inauguration (described in Chapter 2). Notably, and of particular interest to this study of women’s candidacies in 2018, is that Lawless and Fox still found that “the overall gender gap in political ambition today doesn’t look dramatically different than it has over the course of the last 15 years. This gender gap is nearly identical to the 16-point gender gap we uncovered in political ambition in studies of potential candidates from 2001 and 2011” (2017: 10). Another lens exists from which to assess women’s ambition to run for and hold elected office, one that focuses on the organizing of women’s campaign groups to recruit and train women for political candidacies. While the “Trump effect” may not have produced more widespread expressions of political ambition among women in general, women’s campaign organizations reported a sustained surge in women expressing interest in learning more about running for office and seeking training for a potential run as part of the “Trump effect.” Stephanie Schriock, the president of EMILY’s List, the preeminent women’s campaign organization, was widely reported as noting that in the ten months before the election in 2016, approximately 1,000 women contacted her organization about running for office or getting involved in other ways. Since the election the number exploded to more than 22,000. “We have never seen anything like what we have seen over the last 12 months, if you could underline that four times, that’s what I mean” (Tackett 2017). Emerge America, a Democratic women’s campaign organization that trains female candidates at the state level, reported an 87 percent increase in applications to its training programs in the months following the 2016 election. She Should Run, a nonpartisan organization that trains female candidates, said 15,000 women inquired about running for elected office, compared to about 900 during the same period the previous year (Gambino 2017). The ways in which such action might affect general survey findings of the lack of political ambition among women is an intriguing question. Exploring ambition from this organizational lens is significantly important to this study of women’s candidacies in the 2018 elections that focuses on the subgroup of women who did get motivated (that is, had the ambition) to enter primary elections. For example, how did they describe their becoming candidates? What distinguished their “throwing their hat into the ring”? The comments cited above of the leaders of these cam-

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paign groups spotlight the role that Donald Trump’s election to the presidency played in stimulating women’s political ambition. Women’s lagging ambition to run for elected office compared to men’s ambition has also been noted to be related to the candidate recruitment process. Although comparison of men’s and women’s candidacies has shown that women have not run primarily as “sacrificial candidates” in contemporary times, contrary to earlier conventional wisdom, Lawless and Fox’s surveys have shown that women are less likely to report having been recruited to run. The growth in women’s campaign organizations noted in the previous paragraph may be altering that disparity. As I explore women’s candidacies in the 2018 elections, the way in which and the extent to which these candidates note being recruited contributes to whether a new perspective on recruitment is emerging. The opportunity to participate in campaign organizations promoting women’s candidacies provides a venue for women who have political interests and enhances their political ambition in ways that may not be reflected in general population studies.

The Financing of Women’s Campaigns The ability to finance a campaign for elected office, particularly at the state and national levels, is of prime consideration in decisions about whether to run. The cost of running for elected office is a major detriment to would-be elected leaders actually entering contests. Female candidates raise the same amount of money as male candidates in the aggregate, research has shown (Burrell 1994, 2014), but the general perception that raising money is harder for female candidates continues. Questions have been posed about how those women who have undertaken campaigns for national office have financed their runs compared to male candidates. For example, have female candidates been more dependent on small donations? Do they have to work harder to raise the same amount of money as male candidates? How helpful have women’s campaign organizations become in the financing of female candidates’ campaigns? These are all questions contemporary scholars have begun to explore. Crespin and Deitz (2011), for example, asked whether it is possible that male and female candidates take different paths to achieve the same level of financial success. In their research, they investigated the composition of the congressional donor pool to male and female candidates

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The Women of 2018

to address this question. They theorized that the perception has been that women have to rely on many small contributions while men are able to collect large donations. For elections from 1994 through 2006, the Federal Elections Commission provided finance data at four levels of individual contribution categories: total individual contributions, contributions between $200 and $499, between $500 and $750, and $750 or greater; Crespin and Deitz used these data to test the research question they had posed. They examined data for elections from 1998 through 2002. I have extended their analysis through 2006 (Burrell 2014). What both research investigations have found is that overall and within both the Democratic and Republican parties, female candidates raised more money on average across all of these large donor categories, and they acquired a greater average number of contributions in each of the categories than male candidates, dispelling even further conventional wisdom ideas of women being lackluster fundraisers. Advocates and researchers have also turned their attention to women as financial contributors to political campaigns in general and to women candidates more specifically. This research, important as background to the 2018 elections phenomenon, has had two foci: women’s engagement as campaign contributors and women’s groups as campaign funders. The American National Election Study surveys have found that women report being less likely to engage in the political process by contributing money to candidates and party organizations than men, but both sexes have only a very small percentage of givers among the general public (Burrell 2014: 147). Studies have also examined the relationship between sex and financial contributions among the pool of donors who contribute at least $200 to federal candidates, the contribution level that mandates reporting to the Federal Elections Commission and thus available for public scrutiny. Working to get women to open their checkbooks for female candidates in 1992, former Texas governor Ann Richards challenged women at campaign rallies to consider that “for just one good pair of Ferragamo shoes you can write Barbara [Boxer] and Dianne [Feinstein] a check. Then pass up an Ellen Tracy jacket and give some more. Then an Anne Klein pair of pants” (Ayres 1992). Getting women to open their purses and make online donations using their credit cards has been a major goal of women’s PACs and other cheerleaders for female candidates. In 2007, the Women’s Campaign Fund (WCF) importantly initiated a series of publications titled “Vote with Your Purse” playing on Ann Richards’s call-out. Its efforts

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have involved both advocacy and analysis. WCF wanted to find out why women were not giving more, how they could be stimulated to be more active donors, and how they might affect the financial resources of female candidates. Over the course of several election cycles, WCF worked with the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) to analyze data on women as campaign donors of $200 or more. The Center for Responsive Politics and Opensecrets.org have traced the donations to congressional candidates since the 2000 presidential election, which has allowed them to compare men’s and women’s giving in contemporary elections. In the 2006 election the WCF “Vote with Your Purse” study reported that women represented only 27 percent of individual direct money contributions to candidates, party committees, and political action committees (PACs) at the federal election level. They gave just 28 percent of single or combined contributions of $1,000 or more and of the 778 US House races that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) tracked, only twenty-seven candidates raised the majority of their individual funds from women. When women did give, however, they prioritized female candidates relative to male donors. Women gave 30 percent of their dollars to female candidates; men gave female candidates just 17 percent of their dollars. Continuing this line of research, on Women’s Equality Day, August 26, 2011, CRP issued a statement “that women have a long way to go until they see equality as political donors” (Beckel 2011). Things are changing in this domain, however. Most notably, Hillary Clinton running for president in 2016 reported that 60 percent of her donors were women, an unprecedented figure. Across all categories of donors, Clinton was the first presidential candidate to ever have a predominance of female donors (Zhou 2016). In the 2018 midterm election, CRP reported a surge in female donations primarily to the advantage of Democrats, and particularly Democratic female candidates. Men continued to account for the majority of contributions to Democratic and Republican US House candidates, but women accounted for 31 percent, up from 28 percent in 2016 and 27 percent in 2000, the first year of their analyses. Women accounted for 44 percent of the contributions to Democratic women and 34 percent of the contributions to Democratic men, both historic highs according to the CRP. Women accounted for 28 percent of the contributions to Republican women and 23 percent of the contributions to Republican men (Bryner and Weber 2018). The center also reported that the number of women donating to federal candidates was surging in the run up to the 2018 elections, up by 182 percent, when compared with the 2016 cycle (Ackley 2017, 2018).

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Gender Stereotyping in Contemporary Elections The perusal of studies in the women and politics field highlighted so far has focused on the experiences of women as candidates, primarily becoming candidates and acquiring the financial support to undertake a successful campaign. A second significant group of studies about the role of gender in elective office-seeking has centered on questions of voters’ perceptions of male and female candidates as political leaders. As noted above, based on election results in the contemporary era, voters do not appear to noticeably discriminate against female candidates, but they may have distinct perceptions about what female candidates bring to the electoral and policymaking process that researchers conceive of as “gender stereotyping.” A stereotype involves ascribing attributes to a group based on its demographic characteristics, such as race or sex, which may not necessarily be related to actual behavior. Stereotypes allow people to quickly and efficiently, if not accurately, make assumptions about the likely characteristics and behaviors of people. Gender stereotypes in the political realm seem to lead voters to have distinctive views of men and women. Thus, they evaluate them differently as political leaders. But, as with much else in the political world regarding women and political leadership, these stereotypes are lessening. Public attitudes about women’s political leadership skills have shifted toward similarity with perspectives regarding male leaders’ skills. To assess gender stereotypes regarding electoral candidates and political leaders, survey organizations over the years have asked national samples of citizens to compare male and female candidates on a variety of personality traits and policy concerns. Were female candidates thought to be more compassionate and honest than male candidates, for instance? Were they more likely to be concerned with issues such as education and health care? When Louis Harris and Associates polled Americans in 1972 on their attitudes toward women and politics, they found that the public had distinctly different ideas about the political competence of women and men in office. The public tended to judge a woman to be better at handling such issues as education, assisting the poor, and encouraging the arts, while they believed men would be better at directing the military, handling business and labor, and strengthening the economy (Sapiro 1981). Many surveys exploring public attitudes have found that stereotyping of women to their detriment as elective office candidates has waned

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over the decades. The data presented in the Pew Research Center’s 2008 report “Who Is the Better Leader?” is a good example of contemporary attitudes. According to Pew’s nationwide Social and Demographic Trends survey, “Americans believe women have the right stuff to be political leaders. When it comes to honesty, intelligence and a handful of other character traits they value highly in leaders, the public rates women superior to men” (Taylor 2008). In addition to general public opinion surveys about perspectives on male and female elected office-seekers, political scientists have undertaken numerous experiments to assess underlying gender stereotypes through randomly presenting test groups with fictional male and female candidates engaging in similar behaviors and asking them to rate the candidates on different qualities. Political scientist Virginia Sapiro most prominently initiated this line of research with her 1981 article “If US Senator Baker Were a Woman: An Experimental Study of Candidate Images.” Sapiro presented students in two introductory political science classes with a short portion of a speech. They were informed that it was part of a campaign speech a candidate for the US House of Representatives had given. (US Senator Howard Baker had actually entered this speech on the economy into the Congressional Record.) Two forms of the questionnaire were distributed randomly in both classes with one identifying the candidate as John Leeds and the other identifying the candidate as Joan Leeds. After reading the speech, the students were asked to evaluate it and its content, to rate the candidate’s competence in handling a range of issue areas, including a number which were not addressed at all in the text of the speech, to describe any image they may have on the candidate, and to state how likely it was that they would vote for the candidate. The results of her data analysis suggested that gender did provide a clue regarding evaluation of candidates for elected office. Her respondents had a lower expectation for a woman’s success than a man’s. Many different experimental designs have followed Sapiro’s lead, with diverse groups of respondents comparing reactions to male and female candidacies exhibiting either similar leadership characteristics or engaged in similar political actions. In 2013, Deborah Brooks published He Runs, She Runs, the most extensive experimental study undertaken to date to examine stereotyping and double standards among the American public regarding female candidates. Brooks employed an online national representative sample rather than depending on a nonrepresentative sample of respondents, such as college students, that lends greater external validity to her study.

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The goal of her experiment was to assess whether people react differently to the behavior of male and female candidates who are otherwise the same. Did they employ a double standard? In this experiment, half of Brooks’s sample read an article about a male political candidate and half read the same article about a female candidate. The behaviors included in her experiments involved displays of crying and anger, engaging in a gaffe, and projecting toughness. She also sought to determine whether baseline gender stereotypes remained static as candidates shifted from being political neophytes to being experienced politicians. She found what she describes as “a striking refutation of the conventional wisdom about double standards in campaigns” (2013: 4). She reported: [I do not find] any evidence that the public makes less favorable underlying assumptions about female candidates, nor do I find that the public has more challenging rules for the behavior of women on the campaign trail. My findings solve a puzzle that has vexed this field for decades: if stereotypes and double standards disproportionately hurt women candidates as the conventional wisdom posits, then how can we square this with findings that demonstrate that women receive vote shares that are comparable to those of similarly situated men? (2013: 4)

These experimental studies have been conducted with fictional candidates or general perceptions outside of real-world campaigns, limiting somewhat the conclusions we can make about double standards in actual political campaigns. A final piece of contemporary research presented here that has gone beyond experimental studies with fictional candidates to a survey of voters in an actual election is the work of scholar Kathleen Dolan. As she has stated, “Before we can conclude that gender stereotypes are an important influence on evaluating and voting for (or against) women candidates, we need to examine these situations. We need data that allow us to observe the gendered attitudes that people hold, their attitudes and behaviors toward candidates in real elections, and additional information about candidates and electoral situations beyond the sex of the candidates” (2014: 37). Thus, in the 2010 election, Dolan surveyed voters regarding whether they thought eight characteristics better described male or female candidates or whether they did not think there was a difference. The characteristics were intelligence, honesty, decisiveness, being compassionate, can build consensus, can change the way government works, and has political experience. Questions of gender stereotyping were embedded in a national survey of voting behavior in the 2010 election.

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On each of these traits, large majorities saw no difference between male and female candidates. For most of the issues, those respondents who did hold stereotypes, held them in the expected direction: women as more compassionate and men more decisive. Two exceptions were found. Women and men were equally likely to be able to build consensus and women were seen as more intelligent than men (2014: 64). Further, a majority of respondents believed that more women should be in elected office than was currently the case and that more women in office would be positive for our governing system. Abstract gender stereotypes had relatively limited influence on specific candidate evaluations. Instead, what mattered most in people’s evaluation of candidates, women or men, were traditional political considerations such as political party, incumbency, and the amount of money campaigns spent. There was little evidence of “gender vulnerability” in her study.

Gender and Political Communication The major area of research on women’s quests for political leadership that is of substantial relevance to the distinctiveness of the 2018 elections centers on communications during the election season. Communication research from a gender perspective has had two foci: media attention to the campaigns of women and men, and presentation of men’s and women’s campaigns and candidate messaging, called videostyles. Videostyle is the term researchers have coined to describe candidates’ presentation of self via political advertisements, composed of verbal and nonverbal messages and production techniques. Substantial research has been devoted to examining media coverage of women and men running for political offices. Aspects of comparative media coverage of male and female candidates that have been studied include the amount of coverage of their campaigns, issue coverage in terms of “men’s” and “women’s” issues, and images such as compassion and intelligence. As Dianne Bystrom (2019) has summarized this research, early studies examining the newspaper coverage of women candidates running for election in the 1980s found that this medium not only stereotyped female candidates by emphasizing feminine traits and issues, but also accorded them less coverage that often questioned their viability as candidates. However, beginning in the mid- to late 1990s and into the 21st century, women political candidates began to receive more equitable media coverage, both in terms of quantity and quality, when compared with male candidates. (xxxv)

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In addition to research focused on media coverage of their campaigns, scholars have asked whether male and female candidates present themselves differently to the public in their campaign advertising. Turning to candidates’ communication strategies, Bystrom has concluded that “research conducted over the past 35 years on the television ads of female and male political candidates running against each other for governor, the US Congress, and the Democratic nomination for president have shown that women and men are more similar than different in the tone of their messages, the issues mentioned, the image traits emphasized, and the nonverbal content included. . . . [T]hey are both drawn into a communication environment that favors a balance of feminine and masculine styles and strategies” (2019: xii). The findings of three major contemporary studies of campaign communications substantially confirm Bystrom’s conclusions about current videostyles of male and female candidates. Virginia Sapiro and her colleagues addressed the question of whether men and women presented themselves differently when running for office in their television advertising. They examined TV advertising in US House races in the 2000 and 2002 elections “to provide a much-needed comprehensive answer to the question, ‘do gender differences exist?’” (2011: 108). Their data represented nearly the universe of ads run in competitive contests in those two elections. They believed that differences would most likely appear along four dimensions: casting and setting; policy issues; candidate traits; and tone and purpose. The results of their analysis led them to conclude that “straightforward gender differences in the presentation of candidates for national level office in the United States are extremely scarce” (116). Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless (2016) conducted an in-depth study of hundreds of US House races focusing on campaign advertising and social media messaging from the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections. They concluded from their analysis of over 400,000 campaign ads and 50,000 social media messages that men and women run virtually identical campaigns—the issues they talk about to words they use in their communications, or the personal traits they emphasize. Female candidates do not campaign in ways that attempt to take advantage of, or inoculate, themselves from gender stereotypes. Nor do male candidates’ substantive campaign communications differ when their opponent is a woman. Instead, the main divergence in candidate messages stems from party affiliation, with Republicans and Democrats placing slightly more emphasis on different issues. (2016: 34)

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In addition, they found that the media coverage male and female candidates receive reflects the similarities in their campaigns. Their analysis of more than 10,000 local newspaper articles revealed that not only do male and female candidates get the same amount of coverage, but also the substance of that coverage is similar. Women are no more likely than men to receive coverage of their appearance, family or gender roles—in fact, this kind of media attention is exceedingly rare for any candidate. Female candidates are no more likely than men to be described as possessing “feminine” traits or less likely to be described as possessing “masculine” ones. And the issue coverage for male and female candidates does not differ. These patterns . . . emerge in part because men and women run virtually identical campaigns. (8, 61)

The third contemporary study of candidate communication is Kelly L. Winfrey and James M. Schnoebelen’s (2018) research on “Gender and Videostyle in 2016: Advertising in Mixed-Gender Races for the US House.” These two scholars examined the issues, the image characteristics, persuasive strategies, and production techniques in the candidates’ advertising to determine whether female and male candidates used similar or different approaches to appeal to voters in competitive races. They reported that their results across all these domains indicated “stark similarities in how male and female candidates approached their televised advertisement when campaigning for the US House of Representatives in 2016” (287). Further, female candidates were shown to be adapting to gender stereotypes by discussing more conventionally masculine issues such as national security and the economy. These issue presentations did not come at the expense of their paying attention to discussing stereotypical feminine issues such as pay equity. Female candidates, they suggested, were taking a “gender-adaptive approach to their campaigns that [featured] elements of both masculine and feminine traits, issues, and production technique” (288). Male candidates were also found to include presentation of traditionally feminine topics such as a focus on senior citizens’ issues, while still presenting more masculine issues. Female candidates did differ significantly in one nonverbal element of videostyles. They tended to smile more in their ads while men looked “attentive/serious” (290). This review of the wide-ranging research on candidate gender in contemporary elections overwhelmingly presents a picture of female candidates as primarily having overcome traditional perceived disadvantages on the campaign trail compared with male candidates. They seldom appear to suffer from a double bind. Gender disadvantages have been

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mitigated. This book explores the 2018 elections as a harbinger of a new era for women seeking political leadership.

The 1992 Year of the Woman Election In the 1992 presidential election, the number of women elected to the US House of Representatives increased from twenty-nine to forty-seven (10.8 percent of the membership) with twenty-four women being elected for the first time, making that election the historical Year of the Woman in media accounts. Prior to that time, the number of female members had only increased, if it increased at all, by less than five members with each election. The 1992 election emerged as the Year of the Woman in US politics for a variety of reasons. Most prominent was the furor that erupted surrounding the unprecedented sexual harassment charges law professor Anita Hill brought against Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings to become a Supreme Court justice in October 1991. At first the Senate committee holding hearings on the Thomas nomination refused to give Hill a hearing. A contingent of female US House members then dramatically marched to the Capitol Room in the US Senate chambers where Democratic senators were holding their regular Tuesday caucus “to give them our view of what is going on in the country and to let them know that we believed the charges were serious—and in need of investigation” (Boxer 1994: 30). They were not allowed into the room to deliver their message and vented their anger at the all-male establishment.4 Hill finally was given an opportunity to testify, but members of the committee treated her harshly and Clarence Thomas was eventually confirmed as a member of the Supreme Court. The National Women’s Political Caucus followed with a “What If” ad placed in the New York Times on October 25, 1991, featuring a drawing of the Senate Judiciary Committee grilling Justice Thomas under the title “What If? What if 14 women, instead of 14 men, had sat on the Judiciary Committee during the confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas? Sound unfair? Just as unfair as 14 men and no women.” Further, the African American Women in Defense of Ourselves was organized immediately after Hill’s testimony. Among other efforts, they placed an open letter in the New York Times that included the names of 1,603 Black women. The letter was published on November 17, 1991. It denounced what they viewed as the racist and sexist treatment to which Hill had been subjected.

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In addition to the catalyst of the Thomas Supreme Court nomination, several other features of the 1992 election cycle converged to ultimately make it an historic election year for women. First, there was a wave of public sentiment against incumbents emanating primarily from a US House banking scandal involving some longtime representatives who had repeatedly bounced checks at the members’ bank. Second, the decennial reapportionment process created a substantial number of open and winnable seats in the US House of Representatives for newcomers. Fifty-two members retired. Retirements and the creation of new districts based on the census resulted in 91 of the 435 House seats being open in the 1992 general election. Third, issues of education, health care, and unemployment dominated in that election, issues in which women had been perceived as more competent than men. “The issues of the campaign, combined with an electorate interested in political change, resulted in increased votes for women candidates” (Wilcox 1994: 3). This combination of unique opportunities with a large pool of skilled female politicians eager to exploit them set the stage for this unprecedented surge in newly elected female representatives in the US House in the 1992 election. In that election, the political parties were assertive in their efforts to recruit female candidates. Campaign staff members were directed to make special efforts to encourage female candidates although they did not appear to clear the field of primary competition for women. They did not discourage men from running against women or women from running against each other. But Federal Election Commission data on national party support of US House candidates in that election showed that both parties appeared to have contributed more money to nonincumbent female candidates than to male candidates (Biersack and Herrnson 1994). Almost all the women who won new seats in the US House in 1992 and all the women winning seats in the Senate were Democrats. Some critics suggested that the 1992 election should not have been characterized as the “Year of the Woman,” but a more apt description would have been the “Year of the Democratic Woman.” The 1990 election had resulted in twenty-eight women serving as US representatives, nineteen Democrats and nine Republicans. At the end of the 1992 election, fortyseven women were US representatives, thirty-five Democrats and twelve Republicans. The “year” turned out to be a short-lived phenomenon, however, when the 1994 election became the “Year of the Angry White Male.” Of the twenty-one female Democrats who were newly elected to the House in 1992, six lost their reelection bids in 1994.

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Elections subsequent to the 1992 Year of the Woman have produced modest increases at best in women’s membership in the US House, although commentators in some years would suggest that an election might produce another “year of the woman” in terms of increases in their numbers, only to be disappointed at the final outcome. (See Burrell 2014, for an overview of each of the elections following 1992 in terms of women’s candidacies.) Sluggish rates of increase describe the rise in numbers of women being elected to the US House of Representatives since 1992 prior to the 2018 elections. The elections in the years since 1992 through 2016 returned to earlier election outcomes of the status quo of female representatives barely being maintained or just slowly inching upward and even decreasing in the 2010 and 2016 elections. In both of those elections the number of female representatives declined by one. The 2006 elections were exceptional in this time period, however, when twelve women were newly elected as representatives. At the end of the 115th Congress (2017–2018), eighty-four women were US representatives, sixty-one Democrats and twenty-three Republicans, comprising 19.3 percent of the House membership.5 As these numbers show, a growing partisan gap in female representation in contemporary elections has been notable. For most of the twentieth century, Republican and Democratic female representatives progressed in roughly parallel numbers in obtaining membership in Congress. In the 1990s, this equal representation started to change with the number of Democratic women winning seats significantly outpacing the number of Republican women winning seats. Democratic women have come to dramatically outnumber their Republican counterparts as state legislators too, generating a growing partisan imbalance in the female congressional pipeline. In addition, Democratic women are also more likely to be lawyers, educators, and activists, the pool from which candidacies are most likely to be drawn. As we will see in succeeding chapters, the 2018 elections greatly enhanced this partisan difference, leading to it being described as both “a pink wave” and a “blue wave.”

Chapter Overviews The research themes reviewed in this chapter—electoral structures, political ambition, recruitment, campaign financing, stereotyping, political communication, and the first “year of the woman” idea—are all touched upon as I explore the incredible story of women’s candidacies

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in the 2018 elections. Chapter 2 sets the national political focus on gender as being of central importance in the 2018 elections. It presents an overview of the 2017 anti-Trump Women’s March on January 21, 2017, and its aftermath in terms of women considering campaigns for public office; the #MeToo movement that emerged later that year that brought to political prominence widespread sexual harassment and assaults that women have experienced; and media stories that centered on women’s political leadership quests. The 2017 off-year state legislative election in Virginia provided an initial inkling as to what would positively transpire in 2018 for female candidates. In this chapter, I also provide an overview of media attention to the idea of 2018 being a real, new “year of the woman” and reflect on the limiting nature of this frame. Chapter 3 introduces the female challengers running for election to the US House of Representatives with a survey of those candidates’ demographic characteristics, their entrance into different types of races, challenger races and open seat elections, and their various success rates. The success rates of the nonincumbent female candidates are compared with those of male candidates. Chapter 4 centers on the question of why they ran. It explores these candidates’ professed stimuli for running, the extent and the ways in which they were recruited to run, and the nature of those recruitment efforts. Chapter 5 then traces some of the very distinctive media messages of these female US House candidates, some rather shocking and quite daring. Chapter 6 explores the role of campaign financing in the 2018 elections. Chapter 7 profiles the 2018 winners and describes significant moments in their first year in office. Looking beyond the 2018 elections, Chapter 8 offers a sketch of the 2020 elections, reflecting on the ways in which women’s political leadership advanced by building on the historic nature of 2018. The chapter also calls attention to the 100-year history of women’s participation in the formal political life of the nation having won the vote in 1920 after over seventy years of petitioning for that right.

Notes 1. The methodology Mandel used in this study involved journalists following a set of campaigns and interviewing many of the actors engaged in them, as well as the candidates themselves. The journalists wrote reports after the 1976 election based on their coverage. These reports formed the basis for Mandel’s analysis. 2. Freedom House is a US-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom, and human rights.

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3. Visit FairVote.org for a detailed overview of representation systems. The concluding chapter of this book explores “ranked choice” voting as an alternative method to create fairer elections. 4. They were not let in because they were not senators. Only senators were admitted into this room, a Senate tradition. 5. For an historical perspective on the concept of “the Year of the Woman,” see Lynn Thulin’s “A Close Look at the Many Times We’ve Anointed ‘The Year of the Woman’ Before,” Slate, December 26, 2017, https://slate.com/human-interest/2017 /12/a-close-look-at-the-many-times-we-ve-anointed-the-year-of-the-woman -before.html.

2 Gender in the Making of the 2018 Elections “You would think that women are sort of taking over American politics; all of the stories are about women running. . . . The attention is to the surge or the tsunami or the pink wave.” —Kelly Dittmar, Center for American Women and Politics (Golds 2018) “The election was a kick in the pants that I had to step up and be more involved.” —Courtney Peters-Manning, Hopewell, Virginia, Town Planning Board Member

In 2017, national events came together to dramatically inspire women to leave the sidelines and seek public office at the local, state, and national levels. I begin this study of women’s candidacies in the 2018 elections with a review of those events: the Women’s March on January 21, 2017, the #MeToo movement; how they relate to the surge in female candidacies; and the calling out of those activists as “avengers,” “persisters,” and “badasses” within a “pink wave.” The results of the state legislative elections in Virginia and New Jersey that took place in the off year of 2017 are presented as well. Women’s candidacies and their successes in those states presaged the 2018 elections.

The Women’s March On November 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump won the presidency, at least one woman was so distraught that she logged onto the Facebook 27

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group Pantsuit Nation and wrote, “I think we should march.”1 A few hours later, 10,000 women had responded to her idea. Teresa Shook, a sixty-year-old retiree living in Hawaii, had ignited a process that by inauguration day would morph into a major political event: the Women’s March on Washington. The Women’s March on Washington took place on Saturday, January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States. About 500,000 women, men, and children converged on the capital to march, sing, listen, and respond to inspirational speeches. (Some observers put the number of participants much higher.) Harry Belafonte and Gloria Steinem served as honorary co-chairs of the march. Additional marches and rallies took place in all fifty states, in thirty-three countries, and on all seven continents, including Antarctica. In total, over a million people were estimated to have participated in the various marches and rallies around the world. March organizers listed more than 670 “sister events” nationwide and overseas in cities including Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Mexico City, Berlin, and Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories, where the temperature was 6 degrees below zero. Marchers in Cape Town, South Africa, for example, carried banners with slogans such as “Climate change is a women’s issue” and “So over mediocre men running things” (Smith-Spark 2017). The planned march’s goal was to show “strength, power and courage and demonstrate our disapproval of the new president and his values in a peaceful march. ALL women, femme, trans, gender non-conforming and feminist others are invited to march on Washington DC the day following the inauguration of the President-elect. This march is a show of solidarity to demand our safety and health in a time when our country is marginalizing us and making sexual assault an electable and forgivable norm.” The organizers stressed that the march was not so much antiTrump but rather an affirmative message to the new administration that “women’s rights are human rights.” The event was promoted as a “march” or a “rally,” but emphatically not a “protest” (Crockett 2017). According to its statement of principles, the march was to be “a women-led movement bringing together people of all genders, ages, races, cultures, political affiliations and backgrounds.” The heart of the event was a demand for women’s rights, but its guiding vision and principles encompassed a multifaceted list of values. The platform was built on the basic premise, cited previously, that women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights. It called for equal rights for women but also racial and economic equality; antidiscrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and

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transgender Americans; access to affordable reproductive health care, including contraception and abortion; criminal justice reform; an increase in the federal minimum wage; immigration reform; and protections for the environment.2 The march developed into a social media phenomenon. It started with Facebook as noted earlier, spread primarily through that medium and gained structure through it. At the same time, mainstream media gave it scant coverage in the early planning stage. “Taken collectively, the Women’s March on Washington and its many affiliated ‘sister’ marches were perhaps the largest single demonstration of the power of social media to create a mobilization” is how Paul Fahri of the Washington Post described it. It demonstrated that “organizers don’t need media coverage anymore to reach large audiences and turn out large crowds for protests when people are passionate about issues and connect via social media” (Fahri 2017).3 The march initially was called the Million Women’s March. But that name was changed because a predominantly African American Million Women’s March had already taken place in Philadelphia in 1997. Further, the original organizers were all White women. Some participants, however, expressed concern about whether the march would have diverse leadership and take the concerns of women of color into account. Consequently, three prominent experienced activists and organizers who were women of color joined as co-chairs. What would be the consequence of the march? Would “the march translate into anything, or would it just be remembered as a feel-good event for the yoga pants and crunchy granola set”? one commentator mused (Ramaswamy 2017). A second movement joined the Women’s March in the fall of 2017 that also stimulated female candidacies for elected office, the #MeToo movement. Both movements would translate into, among other effects, significant numbers of women deciding to become political leaders and office holders. The #MeToo movement focuses on sexual violence. Civil rights activist Tarana Burke founded the MeToo movement in 2006 as part of her effort to build solidarity among young survivors of harassment. She coined the hashtag #MeToo, which became the signifier of the movement. According to the movement’s website its “main purpose is to help survivors of sexual violence, particularly Black women and girls, and other young women of color from low wealth communities, find pathways to healing. Our vision from the beginning was to address both the dearth in resources for survivors of sexual violence and to build a community of advocates, driven by survivors, who will be at the forefront of creating solutions to interrupt sexual violence in their communities.”4

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This movement and its hashtag became a global phenomenon raising awareness about sexual harassment, abuse, and assault in 2017. A New York Times investigation into Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual harassment and payoffs published on October 5, 2017, initiated what became an international storm regarding sexual attacks (Kanter and Twohey 2017). The #MeToo hashtag became the movement’s rallying cry. The day after the report hit the newsstands, actress Alyssa Milano, unaware at first of the origins of #MeToo, told her Twitter account followers: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” More than 66,000 users replied, and the tweet kicked off an online tidal wave overnight as women flooded social media with their stories of being harassed and abused. Milano later gave credit to Tarana Burke for creating the hashtag. In the weeks and months that followed, the movement gained energy and notoriety as more and more Americans shared their own stories of being harassed or assaulted in the workplace by people—mostly by men—in positions of power, and it went viral internationally. Over time, #MeToo became a broader conversation, not just about workplace harassment and assault, but about coercive and abusive behavior outside of work as well. Among other consequences, it stimulated women’s candidacies for elected office and a number of those candidates were not shy about talking about their experiences of abuse. Inspired by the #MeToo movement, Time magazine named the “Silence Breakers” as its 2017 Person of the Year, honoring not one individual, but all of the women and men involved—and the cause as a whole. Time’s editor in chief, Edward Felsenthal, wrote that Time bestowed the honor “for giving voice to open secrets, for moving whisper networks onto social networks, for pushing us all to stop accepting the unacceptable, the Silence Breakers are the 2017 Person of the Year” (Kim 2017).5

Avengers, Persisters, and Badasses in the 2018 Elections Avengers

A major consequence of these movements was the substantial increase in the number of women running for elected office in 2018. The connection was highlighted in a Time magazine cover story that followed a few weeks after its Person of the Year piece titled, “The Avengers: First They Marched; Now They’re Running.” In commentary that

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accompanied this cover, Charlotte Alter described the “avengers” as a grassroots movement that could change America. “Call it payback, call it a revolution, call it the Pink Wave, inspired by marchers in their magenta hats, and the activism that followed. There is an unprecedented surge of first-time candidates, overwhelmingly Democratic, running for office, big and small, for the U.S. Senate and state legislatures to local school boards” (2018c). In the elections that followed, an unprecedented number of congressional and state office candidates shared their own stories of sexual assault and harassment on the campaign trail and in campaign ads. They made videos supporting the #MeToo movement, visited charities for survivors, and publicly called out the abusers in their midst (Shugerman 2018). One notable example was 2018 gubernatorial candidate and ultimate victor, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who as a state senator in 2013 had gained national attention after revealing herself as a rape survivor in an impassioned state Senate speech. She shared her support for the #MeToo movement in her gubernatorial campaign recalling her earlier experience. In addition, Sol Flores, running in the 2018 Democratic primary for an open seat in Illinois’s third congressional district ran a thirty-second ad called “the door” in which she described the abuse she had experienced as a child. “I didn’t tell anyone that a man living with us would come into my bedroom when I was asleep and lift my nightgown. Well, I filled that chest with the heaviest things I could find, and I put it against that door, to wake me up so I could fight him off.” She described building the chest as part of a school project. These are only two of numerous accounts of sexual harassment experiences that female candidates as avengers aired in campaign ads in the 2018 elections. “Persisters” joined them. The Persisters

On February 7, 2017, the US Senate debated the confirmation of Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama to become Attorney General. Senator Elizabeth Warren rose to speak in opposition to his confirmation, denouncing Senator Sessions’s civil rights record. She first quoted from former Senator Ted Kennedy who had spoken out against Sessions’s nomination to be a federal court judge in 1986. She then proceeded to read from a letter Coretta Scott King had written, also opposing the 1986 judgeship nomination. King wrote critically of Sessions’s “politicallymotivated voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal violations of civil rights laws.” While Senator Warren was reading the

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letter from Mrs. King, presiding Senate Chair Steven Daines of Montana interrupted her. He reminded her of Senate Rule XIX, which prohibits ascribing “to another senator or to other senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator.” Warren asked whether reading King’s letter that had been admitted into the Senate Record in 1986 was a violation of the Senate rule. She proceeded to continue reading the letter. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell then took to the Senate floor to further accuse Senator Warren of running afoul of this senate rule. In what would become an infamous moment, Senator McConnell stated, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted” (Congressional Record 2017). Shut down on the floor of the Senate, Senator Warren later that day sat outside the Senate chambers and read Coretta Scott King’s letter.6 She vividly described the challenge to her speech that day at a town hall meeting on Martha’s Vineyard on July 15, 2017.7 Feminists and supporters of Senator Warren immediately adopted “nevertheless she persisted” as a rallying cry with the notable hashtag #Shepersisted. For Warren’s supporters, it became “a textbook case of mansplaining followed by males silencing a woman” (Park 2017).8 People started to share the quote on social media alongside pictures of strong female role models who refused to back down and be silent but persisted in their challenges. One year later, Newsweek published a special edition: “She Persisted: Moments of Courage, Strength and Rebellion in the Fight for Feminism.” Senator Warren wrote the introduction to that article in which she stated, “Today’s message to our daughters is simple: when we raise our voices and fight for what we believe in, we can make change. We know because we are doing it.” For one congressional candidate, Lindsay Brown, Senator McConnell’s “persister” comment was the factor that pushed her over the edge (after having participated in the Women’s March) to decide to run for Congress with no prior political experience. As she says, “It was about a month later, when after Mitch McConnell had made the remark about Elizabeth Warren being kicked out of the Senate when he said ‘nevertheless she persisted,’ that really resonated with me. A few hours later we were getting ready for bed and I looked over at my husband who was reading something on his phone and I said ‘hey, I think I will run for Congress’ and he said ‘okay.’ And that pretty much cemented the decision” (Traister 2018). The National Women’s History Project each year declares a theme for Women’s History Month. The 2018 theme was “Nevertheless, She Persisted.” Women candidates became known as “persisters” and being a persister emerged as a significant theme in their campaigns in the

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2018 elections. A notable example was the Persister ad Pat Spearman created for her campaign for the Democratic nomination in Nevada’s fourth congressional district. “They threw rocks when she integrated her school, but she persisted. Her superior in the army stalked and harassed her, but she persisted. As a gay woman she felt rejection from loved ones, but she persisted.”9 The Badasses

Who were the “badasses” and how did that descriptor become part of the folklore surrounding women’s candidacies in the 2018 elections? The Oxford Dictionary defines a badass person as one who is tough, uncompromising, or intimidating.10 In the 2018 elections, badasses were a group of candidates with a distinctive background and message. They were a group of female candidates who were military and national security veterans who initially called themselves “the badasses” on the campaign trail as they befriended each other and fundraised together. The badass appellation “creat[ed] a group text where they went to bond, compare strategies, share funny photos and vent” (Schnell 2018a). The group started when [Chrissy] Houlahan and [Elissa] Slotkin— running in races more than 600 miles apart—realized they had overlapping donors. With the help of Serve America, a political action committee dedicated to getting more veterans in elected office, they organized “The Badass Tour.” A series of fundraising events that brought together the military service candidates with the hope that first-time donors uneasy about contributing money to just one person might be more inclined to donate if they saw a group of veterans working together. The women got cash for their campaigns and formed a quick friendship.” (Schnell 2018b)

The winners among them, all Democrats, extended that support to one another once they arrived in Washington “where they hope[d] to push each other through bad days at work and early-morning boot camp workouts” (Schnell 2018b). More generally, the 2018 female candidates proudly showed off their physical strength and toughness in campaign ads and messages. To illustrate, M. J. Hegar wrote on her website “What kind of Democrat is it going to take to win TX-31? An ass-kicking, motorcycle-riding, Texas Democrat. And that’s exactly the kind I am.” She showed off her tattoos hiding scars she got when her air force helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. Sharice Davids, incumbent challenger in Kansas’ third

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district, put on boxing gloves and sparred with a male opponent in her signature ad. In Florida’s twenty-sixth congressional district, challenger Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a certified scuba diver, dived to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean where she held up signs explaining that if voters elected her, she’d protect Florida’s coral reef, the third-largest barrier reef in the world. These women were not the longtime traditional type of female candidates. Women candidates as avengers, persisters, and badasses made the 2018 elections a distinctive descriptive turning point for women seeking elected office. The press came to apply the term badass to the new female members of the US House in 2019 as a group, as Politico’s story “We Call Ourselves the Badasses: Meet the New Women of Congress” illustrates (Arrieta-Kenna 2019). Their group experience in the early days of the 116th Congress is described further in Chapter 7. The term badass also came to not only be applied to the new members in media accounts of the impact of women in the national legislature but a descriptive term for female leaders in Washington in general. CNN’s Dana Bash would edit a series, “Badass Women of Washington.” She introduced that series by saying “that story line is still unfolding, as women from different backgrounds and generations step into positions of power—and, in some cases, hold onto them for years. These are the stories of Badass Women all around Washington” (2019).

The 2017 Virginia Election, a Prelude to 2018 The state of Virginia holds its executive and state legislative office elections in odd numbered years separate from national midterm and presidential election years. Its 2017 election provided a first glimpse of what the effect of the women’s rallies and political voices, so loud and prominent that year, would have on women entering contests for elected office. The number of female candidates for the Virginia state legislature surged in 2017, a 60 percent increase in the number of women standing for the Virginia state legislature compared with 2015. Democrats targeted seventeen districts that Republicans held but that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had won in 2016. Eleven of the seventeen Democratic candidates in those districts were women. Female candidates’ victories in that election were impressive. Governing.com led with the headline, “Election 2017 Was a Historic Night for Women”: “Women claimed big victories on Tuesday in a night that marked many firsts and could signal the start of a sea change for women

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in politics” (Farmer 2017). The Washington Post headlined, “Women Hit a Record High in Virginia Legislature, Can They Break the Boy’s Club?” (Nirappil 2017). Democrats picked up fifteen seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Women won eleven of these races. Caitlin Moscatello in See Jane Run vividly described the Virginia victories as having “real teeth, and those teeth had bite. . . . [P]rogressive female candidates proved they had the power to take down conservative men, sending a clear message for 2018: We are coming for you” (2019: 59). The Virginia state legislature consists of a hundred-member House of Delegates and a Senate with forty members. In the 2016–2017 session, ten of the forty senators and seventeen of the hundred delegates were women. Virginia ranked thirty-eighth among the fifty states in the percent of its state legislators who were women. In 2017, a record number of women, primarily Democrats, were on the ballot for the hundred seats in the House of Delegates. (The State Senate did not have elections.) Democratic female candidates flipped eleven of sixteen Republican-held seats in that body. Women increased their representational presence in the legislature overall to thirty-first among the states, still in the lower half. The percentage of its legislators who were women went from 19.3 percent to 26.4 percent. Among the victors was journalist Danica Roem, who made history as the first transgender person to be elected to a state legislature. Other female winners included the first Asian American woman and the first Latina elected to the Virginia state legislature. Reflecting on the Virginia victories, Center for the American Women and Politics (CAWP) scholar Kelly Dittmar noted, “Sometimes high risk does reap high rewards. Some women who ran as challengers in races previously uncontested by Democrats surprised many with their success. In 2017, Democratic candidates challenged Republicans in 31 Virginia House districts where those Republicans had run unopposed in 2015. They took on high risks, as the precedent in each of these districts indicated slim chances of success. The results were largely as expected, but four of these challengers won. Importantly, they were all women. Their margins of victory ranged from two to 16 points” (2017). Every woman elected as a challenger in the 2017 Virginia House elections retained her seat in the 2019 elections. Further, Democrat Shelly Simond won her primary election in 2017 to oppose Republican delegate David Yancey. She initially won the general election by one vote but after a recount the election ended in a tie. Officials then set up a random drawing to break the tie. Each candidate’s name was written on a piece of paper and each piece of paper was placed in a separate film canister. The canisters were put into a cobalt blue and white bowl a

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local artist had made and stirred around. The canister with Yancey’s name was drawn, giving him the victory that allowed the Republican Party to maintain control of the House of Delegates. Simond again challenged Yancey in 2019, this time winning with 58 percent of the vote, helping to give Democrats control of the House along with governorship and the state senate. New Jersey also elects its state legislators in off years from national elections. In 2017, New Jersey had a record seventy-eight women— forty-seven Democrats and thirty-one Republicans—running for state legislative office, although they did not increase their number of victories. In part this lack of progress was related to the fact that while the political winds were blowing in the direction of Democratic victories across the country, New Jersey was already a blue state regarding its general assembly. Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate, minimizing the number of challenges to Republican incumbents that was a prominent feature of the Virginia elections. New Jersey did elect its first female lieutenant governor, African American Sheila Oliver. Oliver had been a member of the general assembly for fourteen years, serving as Speaker from 2009 through 2017. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phillip Murphy chose her as his running mate.

Media Coverage of Women’s Candidacies In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency and the shock wave it sent to many women who then marched in protest on January 21, 2017, extensive news media coverage followed the story of women taking the next step to change the national political scene by running for elected office in historic numbers, as the previous sections of this chapter have spotlighted. National media chronicled female candidates’ numbers as the election season progressed, tabulating and assessing their wins and losses in the election primaries. Other stories centered on the diversity and backgrounds of these candidates. Commentary also speculated on prospective outcomes, either presenting promising themes or discouraging ones in terms of the eventual outcome. Other stories described the distinctive campaigns of individual candidates such as the New York Times piece “From Annapolis to Congress? These Three Women Know Tough Missions” (Tackett 2018). Far from being less likely to cover the campaigns of female candidates as early research in Chapter 1 cited, news media expended much print and sound chronicling women’s campaigns.

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Stories, too, were written about organizational programs to recruit and train female candidates, while others focused on the challenges facing those women who chose to run and speculating on the extent to which it indeed would be a “year of the woman” surpassing 1992. Through a Google search of articles and commentary about women’s candidacies, I compiled a set of news media articles from Election Day 2016 through the first months of the 116th Congress to explore qualitatively the amount and diversity of media attention on the influx of women candidates in the 2018 midterm election. A media presentation would often lead to other stories and commentary. I chronicled a total of 143 articles. They were used to capture media coverage of the diverse facets of the distinctive “year of the woman” theme in the 2018 elections, including but not limited to an accounting of the number of female candidates and their wins and losses. Media coverage stories included both state and national news articles, main street media, and coverage from “women’s” publications, news program commentaries, and research programs’ publications of political analyses. They included video presentations that captured some of the most distinctive aspects of the women’s candidacies. Prime examples of these videos included the New York Times production of “Fire the Gun or Film the Ultrasound? How Women Running for Office Define Toughness.”11 Politico created the video “Women Take on Taboos in New Campaign Ads,” which highlighted intimate stories of sexual abuse that were shown primarily in internet ads. Politico magazine also photographed and interviewed all of the newly elected female members of the US House of Representatives as a result of the 2018 elections and published a video titled “‘We Call Ourselves the Badasses’: Meet the New Women of Congress,” shortly after the election was over.12 The number of women candidates at the state and national level not surprisingly was the focus of much media attention based on its historical reference to the 1992 Year of the Woman. Illustrations of this attention include a 2016 December Time magazine piece headlined “More Than 4,500 Women Have Signed Up to Run for Office Since the Election” (Gajanan 2016). In a follow-up piece one year later, Time’s headline ran “One Year Ago, Millions of Women Protested in the Streets. Now There Are More Women Running for Office Than Ever Before” (Alter 2018b). National Public Radio (NPR) reported in February 2018 that “More Than Twice As Many Women Are Running for Congress in 2018—Compared with 2016” (Kurtzleben 2018a), and in April it followed up with “A Record 309 Women Are Running for Seats in the House” (Kurtzleben 2018b). A record 461 women would ultimately run.

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The article also noted an increase in the number of male candidates in that election, thus the level of women as a share of all candidates did not markedly increase, we were told. The Brookings Institute spotlighted “The Pink Wave Makes Herstory: Women Candidates in the 2018 Midterm Elections” (Kamarck, Podkul, and Zeppos 2018). It reported “an unprecedented number of women are running for office, a fact that has led journalists to dub the 2018 midterms as the ‘pink wave.’” Women were 23 percent of nonincumbents running for congressional seats in 2018 compared to 16 percent in the previous two election cycles, the article reported in the middle of the campaign season. Nearly 80 percent of those women were Democrats, thus the “pink wave” description, although more apt description might be a “pink and blue” wave. Among all women nonincumbents who had contested primaries to that date, 47.6 percent had either won their race outright or advanced to a runoff. Only 23 percent of male candidates had achieved that goal, the piece reported. News media commentary cited numerous factors that accounted for the record number of female Democratic US House candidates campaigning in 2018. Jeremy Redmon and Tamar Hallerman, for example, in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution piece noted that “some were driven to run by the election of President Donald Trump, who has attacked women based on their looks and had been caught on tape bragging about grabbing them by the genitalia.” The #MeToo movement against sexual abuse additionally inspired some candidates. Other commentary focused on the challenges women seeking elected office faced, such as noting that while women make up about half of the nation’s population, they filled only 20 percent of the seats in Congress. CNN commentators Simon and Lah (2017) noted that “Trump opened the floodgates. Now Democratic women are running for office in record-breaking numbers.” Anger and dismay at his election stimulated women to overcome their lesser sense of political ambition that had been chronicled in much political science research. (See Chapter 1.) In the 2018 elections, personal stories were a common staple of news articles, and indeed media accounts abounded with descriptive instances of women awakening to assume responsibility for change, which became known as the “pink wave” of the 2018 elections. What follows are three personal stories recorded in news articles linked to the Trump presidential victory to illustrate his influence on women’s candidacies. Chapter 4 presents a fuller examination of the stimulation of the Trump election and presidency in the US House candidates’ articulation of why they were running.

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• Gina Perez was a forty-three-year-old mother of two in Ames, Iowa, and an IT professional for the Iowa Department of Transportation, who decided to run for her local school board after the 2016 election. She says she was shocked by Trump’s victory, but “I felt like I had no room to complain if I was not going to work toward fixing it” (Altschuler 2017). She won her race for the Ames Community School District. • Christine Lui Chen, a thirty-six-year-old health care executive in New Jersey and mother of two small children, said she had never considered entering politics, focusing instead on her family, her career, and her community. That all changed in January, thirteen hours after she attended the Women’s March on Washington. She emailed Democratic officials: “Here’s my resume. I want to get involved.” Less than five months later, Chen put her name on the ballot seeking to become a state senator (Noveck 2017). She was unopposed in the Democratic primary but lost to the Republican incumbent. • For some women, the election of Donald Trump—a man who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” and said he thinks working wives are “dangerous”—was the last straw. After the election, Emily Marburger, a twenty-nine-year-old office manager living in Bellevue, Pennsylvania, got involved in political activism. Then she ran for mayor as Elizabeth Strassner reported in Bustle.com (2017). Marburger won the election with nearly 58 percent of the vote. As for her victory, Marburger stated, “I’m almost grateful that [Trump] was elected. He’s teeing up people like me to effect change.”

Long-Standing and Emerging Women’s Empowerment and Campaign Organizations Chapter 1 noted supply-side and demand-side factors that research has shown have accounted for women’s lesser presence as political candidates compared to men’s candidacies. Women’s long-standing seemingly lower levels of political ambition and feelings of being less qualified to run than men, the major supply-side factors, as the anecdotes above suggest, were certainly challenged in the 2018 elections. The companion long-standing demand-side research idea—that women’s lesser presence as candidates for elected office was a function of political leaders not recruiting them—was also challenged in 2018. As CAWP’s

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director Debbie Walsh noted while observing women being trained to run for office in one of the center’s Ready to Run programs, “These women didn’t seem like they needed to be recruited, which was new. They had recruited themselves already” (Ripley 2017). But enhanced recruitment efforts aimed at potential female candidates were also a part of the story of female candidacies in the 2018 elections and were well recorded in news media stories. The emergence of numerous organizations dedicated to the recruitment, training, and support of female candidates has historically been a major factor in overcoming the recruitment gap between men and women. A slow but steady establishment of an infrastructure to promote women candidates has been created. CAWP listed a total of 108 such active programs in 2018. The list included both partisan and nonpartisan organizations at both the state and national level. CAWP’s list included twenty-eight state-level Emerge programs. Started in 2002, these programs have provided leadership training for Democratic women in those states. Educational institutions run other nonpartisan programs such as the Carl Albert Center’s Women’s Leadership Program at the University of Oklahoma and CAWP’s own Ready to Run program. CAWP’s catalog of these programs can be found at its Women’s Political Power Map under Education and Training. News coverage of these organizations was plentiful in the 2018 elections. Claire Landsbaum’s piece in New York Magazine (2017) provides an insightful summary of the presence and significance of these organizations in the 2018 elections. Like-minded organizations [to EMILY’s List] have reported similar spikes in interest. VoteRunLead reported that in the past two months, more than 2,300 women have signed up to take its online course, and the organization’s January 7 seminar registered 1,200 women in less than 48 hours. Since Election Day, EMILY’s List has had more than 4,000 people reach out to say they’re interested in running—1,660 since Inauguration Day. According to a She Should Run spokesperson, in a normal month the organization sees “at best, and with significant effort, anywhere between a few dozen to a few hundred women” signing up. But in the three months since the election, co-founder and CEO Erin Loos Cutraro said 8,100 women have indicated their interest in running for office by registering for She Should Run’s online incubator program, which teaches them how to run. What’s more, Cutraro said things showed no sign of slowing. “We had a staff meeting, and we were going over numbers,” Cutraro said. “Our community manager said, ‘But hold on—we got 100 more last night.’”

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The She Should Run incubator program consists of a set of online courses: Cultivating Leadership, Building Networks, Fostering Communications, and Finding Pathways. Other groups hold workshops on campaigning. National groups aimed at affecting women’s voices and political leadership include VoteRunLead, RepresentWomen, and Madam President. While VoteRunLead focuses, though not exclusively, on training women to run for local office, Madam President, as its name implies, aims at affecting election to the highest office in the United States. Founded in 2014, VoteRunLead, through online and in-person workshops and resources, provides what it believes are tools political hopefuls need to run successful campaigns, delving into topics ranging from “how to get involved” and “what office should I run for,” to “how to create a finance plan” and “finding the power in your voice.” Its curriculum is called “Run as You Are,” because as founder and CEO Erin Vilardi describes it on its website (www.voterunlead.org), “We’re not trying to turn women into political robots. This is about teaching political skills, but keeping your authentic self. We’re also about two-thirds women of color in our trainees, so this is also about a diversity of women in all levels.” RepresentWomen is an additional program founded to advance women’s election to public office. Its program of action differs from that of the numerous organizations focusing on training female candidates and raising money for their campaigns that have been described so far in this work. Founded in 2013, it focuses on “advancing reforms that break down barriers to ensure more women can run, win, serve, and lead.” It conducts “research to track representation and assess best practices; educates PACs, donors, party leaders & elected officials about reforms to advance women’s representation & leadership; advocates at the local, state and federal levels to adopt institutional reforms; and forges strategic collaborative partnerships to build a lasting & successful movement for gender parity.” Its work in affecting change in US electoral systems to achieve gender parity through the adoption of ranked choice voting systems is described at the end of this work. Madam President is a political action committee (PAC) working to elect a woman to serve as president of the United States. It promotes awareness about the number of women who have run for US president since 1870. CAWP maintains a geographical website that lists the myriad of partisan and nonpartisan campaign training organizations for women across the country at the local, state, and national levels that can be found at its Women’s Political Power Map under Education and Training.

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In addition to these formal national organizations, other less formal ones also sprang up in the post-2016 election era. The effort Laurie Buchwald initiated in Radford, Virginia, is one such community endeavor to inspire women’s campaigns for elected office. Roanoke Times reporter Catherine Van Noy chronicled Buchwald’s convening of local meetings through networking, Facebook, and email titled “Elect Women” followed by a locality name and an exclamation point (!), “plus date, time, location and this call to action: ‘Have you considered running for office OR supporting a qualified candidate who is? Join us for conversation and a cup of something yummy at this expanding local business and let’s work to Elect Women!’” At these gatherings Buchwald would present statistics primarily drawn from the works of political scientists Lawless and Fox cited earlier that showed that while women who run perform as well as male candidates, they remain vastly underrepresented in American politics. “The reason: they don’t run,” Buchwald would intone (Van Noy 2017). Her Elect Women! Program has since joined with Virginia’s List, a statewide PAC working to elect progressive women to Virginia’s General Assembly and statewide office. In Ohio, the Matriots organized to find and promote women to run for elected office in the days after its six founders participated in the Women’s March on Washington. Their mission is “to elect more Ohio women to public office who will promote a healthy economy in which women can thrive and prosper.” They formed a political action committee to achieve that goal. By the middle of the 2018 elections the Matriots had raised $1 million to help fund women’s campaigns, both Democrats and Republicans, across Ohio. Twenty-eight women were elected to the Ohio House of Representatives in 2018, the largest number of female lawmakers in that body’s history.

Enhancing Minority Women’s Political Leadership Few training programs for potential female candidates have historically undertaken separate programs for women of color. CAWP is one exception. Its Ready to Run program offers three separate sessions for women of color: Election Latina, Rising Stars for Asian American women, and Run Sister Run for Black women. Other organizations, too, are initiating or expanding their training programs to include special sessions for minority women seeking electoral office. Within the Black community, organized efforts centered on getting out the vote of Black women have been growing in prominence in

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recent years. In 2018, Melanie Campbell, president of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP) and convener of the Black Women’s Roundtable reported that “we are galvanizing Black women’s collective voices and leadership, and working to maximize the power and influence of Black women voters in the 2018 midterm elections. We’ve shown in the past that our voting bloc can shift elections and our presence is often a definitive factor in turnout. We are seizing the moment to create change” (Owens 2018). To create change, NCBCP and the Black Women’s Roundtable launched the Unity ’18 Black Voting & Power Building “Time4APowerShift” that worked to bring together more than sixty national and state-based organizations and networks that Black women primarily lead. An in-depth analysis of this group’s actions in 2018 affecting Black turnout and the empowerment of Black women would be very informative. The Black Women’s Roundtable annually runs two major programs: a public policy forum series, the “Power of Black Women,” and an annual “Power of the Sister” survey. Both of these programs are jointly sponsored with Essence magazine. Created in 2011, Higher Heights is a second contemporary organization devoted to promoting “Black women’s voices to shape and advance progressive policies and politics.” Its mission is to “strengthen Black women’s civic participation in grassroots advocacy campaigns and the electoral process; Higher Heights for America will create the environment in which more Black women, and other candidates who are committed to advance policies that affect Black women, can be elected to public office.” Higher Heights is a multidimensional organization that runs the #BlackWomenVote campaign with an Election Center where women can commit to voting and make a voting plan. In terms of candidate support, Higher Heights’ PAC raised $100,000 in 2018 and spent $93,000. It contributed a total of $65,000 directly to fourteen African American female US House candidates and one US Senate candidate. All five of the African American women who won a seat in Congress had received substantial amounts in direct financial contributions from the Higher Heights PAC. The Latinas Lead Initiative was launched in 2015 at the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislatures (NHCSL). Its goal was to increase the numbers of Latinas in public service and elected office. It aimed to create a national network of Latinas in public service and elected office so that they “don’t feel so isolated.” The network could also help Latinas share ideas on how to push for legislation and gain leadership positions.

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Challenges Facing Women Candidates What was perceived as the challenges to this influx of female candidates according to news reports? While much of the media attention centered on a recounting of the surge of women candidates, their victories and their distinctive campaigns, commentary also included cautionary tales. One caveat noted in media commentary was the perspective that even if record numbers of women were to win their elections in 2018 there would still be a long way to go to reach parity in terms of representation. And indeed, even with the record-breaking number of female candidates for the US House and with thirty-six women being newly elected to that body, women still were less than one-quarter of its membership. As Kyung Lah (2018) asserted in a CNN piece, “The Year of the Woman 2018, if all stars align, would end up with women making up 1 out of 4 members of Congress. Given that women make up more than half the US population, that’s hardly a government of the people.” A second challenge emphasized in news media accounts was that while the positive nature of their campaigns was overwhelmingly on the side of the Democrats, Republican female candidates were not part of that surge. As Rachael Rade (2018) of Politico put it: If this is the “year of the woman,” GOP women on the ballot aren’t feeling it. . . . Republican female candidates seemingly could not benefit by going against President Trump as part of the “pink wave,” for one thing. Like male GOP lawmakers who went against Trump, Republican women who blasted the president risked alienating a base they needed for reelection, as US Representative Martha Roby found. She had to win a run-off after the primary against a Trump-supported opponent. Failing to speak up, however, risked turning off independent-minded women who are skeptical of the president, a key voting bloc.

Only one in three Republicans believed there were too few women in political office compared to eight in ten Democrats who thought so, according to a Pew Research Center poll (Horowitz, Igielnik, and Parker 2018). Further, Democrats have prioritized electing women in a way that the GOP has not. Republicans are much less engaged in identity politics and do not see that electing more women should be a goal. They disavow identity politics and gender-based appeals are not particularly attractive to them. This difference is true at both the elite and general voter levels. Political science researchers Melody Crowder-Meyer and Rosalyn Cooperman (2018) have described a newly defined policy demander group, women’s representation policy demanders (WRPD). A policy

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demander group has a goal regarding some policy issue that leads them to contribute financially to particular campaigns. Women’s representation policy demanders have the primary goal of increasing women’s political representation. Crowder-Meyer and Cooperman’s survey of donors to party campaign committees and women’s political action committees first showed that WRPD concerns significantly motivated Democratic elites’ political activity and financial contributions more than Republicans. Second, gender issues also played a more prominent role in shaping Democratic than Republican donor decisions about which candidates they would support. Third, Democrats more often used gender-related groups than Republicans to find candidates to support. In their survey, donors were asked first how familiar they were with a set of political groups. The groups spanned the ideological spectrum from Tea Party Patriots on the right to EMILY’s List, the National Organization for Women (NOW), and MoveOn.org, and if they were aware of them, they were asked if they actively supported the group. Recent survey findings have also found partisanship differences among the general public regarding perspectives on women candidates. While in keeping with other contemporary survey research, the vast majority of respondents (80 percent) in a 2018 Politico national survey said it did not matter whether a candidate was male or female, but male Republican voters were distinctly less likely to believe that “there are too few women in high political office in the US today” than their female Republican counterparts (24 percent to 44 percent). Democratic men (73 percent agreeing) and women (84 percent agreeing) were vastly different in their perspective. Only 28 percent of male Republicans believed women having to do more to prove themselves than men is a major reason why there are not more women in high political office compared with 64 percent of Republican women, 68 percent of Democratic men, and 83 percent of Democratic women (Caygle 2018). In the 2018 Politico survey, male and female Republican voters were also more likely than the general electorate to say that a man in elected office would do a better job than a woman when it comes to many of the core functions of government, particularly in the executive branch: working with foreign leaders, ordering a military intervention, addressing a terrorist attack, negotiating with Congress, and addressing threats to US national security. Finally, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say that there are benefits to electing women to Congress (Caygle 2018). Trolling, harassment, and threats are a third challenge female candidates in this new era have faced, seemingly to a greater extent than in

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the past, as they have come to aggressively address the status quo and showcase themselves as strong and assertive according to media reports. Politico’s Emma Margolin (2018) writes: It’s hard to know just how bad female politicians have it—harassment targeting female political candidates and politicians is understudied and underreported. But research does suggest that female politicians are more often on the receiving end of sexualized forms of harassment and violence—from physical groping to online rape threats—than men. And, in the past few months, as more women in office have come forward with their own stories of harassment and intimidation, the anecdotal evidence that women deal with inordinate amounts of abuse, potentially squelching their desire to run at all, has become hard to ignore.

Campaign organizations described above have reported revamping their trainings to include sessions on dealing with this challenge, incorporating guidance addressing abusive behavior in their curriculums. VoteRunLead, for one, now “offers a three-pronged communication strategy to deal with any sort of abuse: call it out immediately or report it to police if there are safety concerns, use humor if possible, like tweeting out a joke about a sexist attack, and, lastly, find an opportunity to do something more long form, like writing an op-ed about the incident incorporating guidance that addresses abusive behavior.” Campaign trainers have also noticed that women attending their trainings were bringing up their personal stories of sexual harassment more frequently in 2018. Vanessa Cardenas of EMILY’s List reported that when that happens, “the conversation pivots to how women can be authentic when talking about their personal experiences and why they think they can make a difference. The #MeToo movement has propelled more women to step up and say this is not OK and I can be part of the solution. In that sense, we have seen a positive change” (Margolin 2018). Further, Caitlin Moscatello in See Jane Win (2019) has described a theme that she says comes up repeatedly—“running on their own terms, creating their own scripts, rather than trying to mold themselves into the type of candidate who’d historically been on the ballot” (168). She quotes Glamour editor in chief Cindi Leive—a longtime observer of women candidates—as concluding that “it wasn’t that they were trying to be out of the box, they just wanted to be themselves” (168). This chapter has centered on describing contextual perspectives affecting women’s quests for elected office in the 2018 campaign season. In Chapter 3, I turn to a more specific description of the women candidates to explore their diverse nature and then to a systematic

Gender in the Making of the 2018 Elections

47

examination of their success rates. I also examine who won, who lost, and how that compares with the experience of male candidates.

Notes 1. This discussion of the Women’s March is adapted from Burrell 2018b. 2. “Women2Women Principles,” https://www.womensmarch.com/principles/. 3. Politifact monitored the three major networks—CNN, Fox, and MSNBC— from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., tracking each time the words “women,” “march,” or “Women’s March” were used. Left-leaning MSNBC proved the most dominant coverage, using the terms 114, 128, and 32 times, respectively. CNN followed closely behind, with mentions of “women” and “march” nearing 100 and “Women’s March” said 23 times. But Fox’s coverage clearly lagged, using the term “Women’s March” 12 times on the air, with “women” and “march” said 28 and 32 times each (Hoover 2017). 4. Me Too, https://metoomvmt.org/about/#history. 5. Since 1927, Time has bestowed its Person of the Year title upon an individual or group of people who the magazine’s editors believe have most influenced news and events of the past year, “for good or ill.” 6. A video of Senator Warren reading King’s letter outside the Senate can be viewed on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/senatorelizabethwarren/videos /724337794395383/. 7. A video of her description can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=A95BEmYCYfI. 8. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines mansplaining as what occurs when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he’s talking to does. 9. “Patricia ‘Pat’ Spearman for Congress,” https://www.youtube.com/channel /UCIvz9HH2KheYFjRN1xO0oYA. 10. See https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/badass. 11. New York Times production of “Fire the Gun or Film the Ultrasound? How Women Running for Office Define Toughness,” October 30, 2018, https://www .nytimes.com/video/us/elections/100000006107476/women-campaign-ads-congress .html. 12. This video can be found at https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/photos -new-women-of-congress/.

3 Who Were the Candidates?

“We need more regular people like me to run for Congress.” —Sara Dady (IL16)

“I always thought this was for other people, and I was not qualified. There was this wake-up call of, why not me?” —Chrissy Houlahan (PA6)

A record number of women sought congressional and gubernatorial offices in 2018, but women remained less than one-quarter of the candidates on the primary ballots and less than one-third of the candidates on general election ballots across these levels. (See Dittmar 2019). Who were the women who entered these contests? This chapter examines the campaigns and backgrounds of the nonincumbent women running for a seat in the US House of Representatives and assesses their success rates. I begin with a review of the structure of the 2018 House elections to assess the challenges women faced regarding increasing their representation. Structure refers to the opportunities for nonincumbents to win elections as described in Chapter 1. All 435 US House of Representative seats are up for election every two years. In the 115th Congress (2017– 2018), Republicans had a 235–193 majority in the House with seven vacancies, heading into the 2018 elections. Not every member runs for reelection although the vast majority do. Incumbents are typically advantaged and reelected in the United States electoral system. In the 2016 election, 97 percent of the incumbents seeking reelection had won. In the 2018 elections, 181 Republican men, 17 Republican women, 119 49

50

The Women of 2018

Democratic men, and 54 Democratic women were seeking reelection, 85 percent of the membership. The number of incumbents not seeking reelection in any election year in large part structures the size of the candidate pool in that election and the opportunity structure for nonincumbents. Forty-eight incumbents, sixteen Democrats and thirty-two Republicans, chose not to seek reelection in 2018, creating forty-eight open seats during the primary stage of the election. The number of retirements was the largest since 1992. Additionally, seven House seats were vacant going into the November general election, as noted earlier. The vacant seats involved incumbents who resigned from the House late in the campaign season, too late for a special election to be held to replace them. An additional four seats were open due to court mandated redistricting in Pennsylvania. For purposes of analysis here, these latter two types of districts were added to the open seat column in the general election, creating fifty-nine open seat primary elections. (Four incumbents were also defeated in a primary election in 2018, two from each party, discussed in more detail below.) Twelve of the forty-eight incumbents leaving the US House were female representatives. They were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, six from each party. Six of these women, three Democrats and three Republican representatives who did not seek reelection, sought higher office. All but one was successful. After the election, Arizona governor Douglas Ducey appointed the one unsuccessful candidate, Republican Martha McSally who had lost her US Senate race to Democratic representative Krysten Simena, to the US Senate to replace Jon Kyle. Kyle had been appointed to Senator John McCain’s seat in September 2018 after Senator McCain’s death. He resigned from the appointment in December 2018, creating a second opportunity for the governor to appoint a senator. Senator McSally lost her race to retain the seat in the 2020 election. Thus, while women’s candidacies achieved an unprecedented prominence in the 2018 election process, the difficult task of just replacing the twelve retiring female incumbents and maintaining the status quo loomed large, given incumbent electoral advantage. In only one election since the 1992 Year of the Woman election had as many as twelve women been newly elected to the House. At the same time, the candidacies of women and their diversity, as noted in the first two chapters, were the center of media attention in 2018. “A real pink wave” is how the Brookings Institute described the election (Kamarck, Podkul and Zeppos 2018).

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Political conditions occasionally stimulate a surge in out-party candidacies such as in 2010 when Tea Party candidates who were opposed to the policies of the Obama administration mounted vigorous campaigns. The 2018 election was one in which Democrats who were in the minority in both houses of Congress saw a major opportunity to gain control of at least the House of Representatives in the backlash to the policies of the Trump administration. They ended up picking up fortyone seats, achieving majority status in the US House and returning Representative Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. In particular, Donald Trump’s election was perceived to have stimulated women’s candidacies as part of this opportunity structure. Media accounts abounded with commentary about such stimulation as noted in Chapter 2; potential female candidates attributed their decision to run (or at least to explore throwing their “hat in the ring” at all levels of public office) to their dismay at Trump’s election. The Guardian headlined “Trump Victory Spurs Women to Run for Office Across US: ‘Our Time is Coming,’” illustrating this perspective on the importance of women’s response to Trump’s election in structuring the 2018 elections (Walters 2017). That particular article featured the number of women who were newly considering a run for public office with some taking actions to become candidates. On April 5, 2018, the Associated Press titled a report “Women File to Run for US House Seats in Record Numbers” (Mulvihill and Linke), one of the many media accounts of women’s campaigns “by the numbers” in that year’s elections. In each contemporary election year, CAWP has tracked the number of female contenders in statewide and congressional races. In 2018, they counted 476 women entering contests for a seat in the US House of Representatives. CAWP’s total includes candidates who ran in party conventions to earn a place in a state’s primary and lost their party’s nomination, eliminating them from being on a primary ballot, and several candidates who filed to run but then dropped out before a primary. In addition, one female candidate, April Freeman in Florida, died soon after winning her primary. In my chronicling of the female candidates seeking election to the US House in this book I have excluded these individuals, only including the 461 women who campaigned to the finish in primaries and the general election if they had won their primary. In comparison, the Federal Election Commission listed 1,494 men as primary contenders. The number of women who competed in primary elections for House seats far surpassed the number of female candidates in previous elections. The previous record was 298 in 2012. The number of male candidates also

52

The Women of 2018

surged, but in both parties the percentage jump in the number of women candidates was much larger than the jump for men, although as noted earlier their numbers were much lower than that of male contenders. The number of Democratic women running was up by nearly 127 percent, compared to 51 percent for Democratic men. Likewise, the number of Republican women was up by 28 percent, compared to 12 percent for GOP men in comparison with 2012. At the same time, the number of nonincumbent male candidates in 2018 far outpaced the number of female nonincumbent candidates seeking election to the US House in 2018. A total of 1,190 nonincumbent men and women entered primary contests. Numbers are important, but in assessing the concept of a “wave election,” we must consider the types of contests the female candidates entered and the prospect of ultimate victory. It is not just the number of women running that is significant in assessing an election from a gender perspective, but the degree to which female candidates enter contests, not as long shots, but as serious contenders, which this chapter explores. In the midst of the 2018 elections, CAWP scholars Kelly Dittmar and Debbie Walsh cautioned that it was “unlikely that the notable increase in women’s candidacies will translate into unprecedented gains in women’s representation after Election Day.” They were concerned that women’s candidacies were concentrated among Democrats while women remained a small proportion of Republican candidates nationwide. Reaching gender parity in US politics, they stated, “will require increased representation of women in both blue and red districts.” Further, Dittmar and Walsh argued, the majority of Democratic female candidates were running as challengers to incumbents who, as cited earlier, traditionally have tended to be overwhelmingly advantaged. Thus, they cautioned against joining “the chorus of voices heralding a sea change in the gendered distribution of political power this year.” Instead they proposed a different approach to forecasting women candidates’ success in 2018, one of “under-promise and over-deliver.” If women candidates upend conventional wisdom on Election Day and prove our caution overstated, the post-election narrative will focus on women’s victories against difficult odds. An against-all-odds narrative will help to make the case for women’s candidacies in future cycles, enhancing women’s recruitment and inspiring women’s engagement. Moreover, it will raise the question of how much women could achieve if the odds were more fairly in their favor.

Dittmar and Walsh’s perspective is an interpretive guidepost for reflection as I present the outcome of the election for female candidates.

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First, I examine “promise and performance” through a presentation of women’s presence across types of primaries and between the two major parties, and then second, through an analysis of their primary success rates. These figures are compared with that of male candidates in both parties. Table 3.1 shows the types of primaries Republican and Democratic men and women entered in 2018. As Table 3.1 shows, male candidates dominated in each of the election categories. Their greater presence among incumbents would be expected since they were approximately 80 percent of the House membership. Victories by individuals challenging an incumbent of their own party are typically very small in number. Thus, the predominance of men among this group of candidates is not particularly significant from a gender perspective. Few women in both parties engaged in these typically overwhelmingly losing contests. As noted earlier, in only four cases did a primary opponent defeat an incumbent. However, in three of those cases, women were the victors. Described as a twenty-nine-year-old political newcomer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated ten-term incumbent and Democratic Caucus Chair representative Joseph Crowley in New York’s fourteenth congressional district primary. It was a spectacular and most unexpected upset victory. The New York Times called it “a shocking primary defeat on Tuesday, the most significant loss for a Democratic incumbent in more than a decade, and one that will reverberate across the party and the country” (Goldmacher and Martin 2018). Ocasio-Cortez beat Crowley by nearly 15 percentage points, winning 57 percent of the vote. Her campaign only spent $194,000 while the Crowley campaign spent $3.4 million, primarily money he donated to other campaigns to create support to maintain his leadership position in the House. Crowley had Table 3.1 Party

Republicans Men Women Democrats Men Women

Number of Primary Election Candidates by Status, Party, and Sex, 2018 Incumbents

Incumbent Challengers

183 (9%) 17 (1%)

122 (6%) 14 (1%)

121 (6%) 54 (3%)

75 (4%) 17 (1%)

Opposition Party

218 (11%) 35 (2%)

374 (19%) 183 (9%)

Open Seats 232 (12%) 49 (3%)

173 (9%) 92 (5%)

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The Women of 2018

taken his reelection for granted refusing to participate in debates with Ocasio-Cortez. But progressive groups led an aggressive media campaign on Ocasio-Cortez’s behalf in this overwhelmingly Democratic district. Ocasio-Cortez went on to win the general election with 78 percent of the vote against token Republican opposition and Congressman Crowley who ran on a minor party ticket. Following Ocasio-Cortez’s lead, Boston city councilwoman Democrat Ayanna Pressley defeated incumbent Michael Capuano. Having seen what had happened in the New York fourteenth district, Capuano vigorously campaigned to keep his seat, but Pressley still won with 60 percent of the vote. Pressley was unopposed in the general election. The third primary victory by a female challenger to a male incumbent was achieved under very different circumstances. Katie Arrington, a South Carolina state representative, defeated US Representative Mark Sanford by four points. Support from President Trump was one of the defining issues of the race. Sanford, a Republican, had been critical of Trump’s rhetoric and policies, and Arrington used those comments as part of her campaign strategy in the primary. The president endorsed Arrington just hours before the polls closed on the day of the primary. However, Democrat Joseph Cunningham then defeated Arrington in the general election. Finally, in North Carolina’s ninth congressional district, Republican Robert Pittenger lost to challenger Mark Harris in the primary. Harris narrowly beat his Democratic opponent in the general election. A Republican absentee ballot scandal that followed resulted in the election being canceled and a new one called, one in which eventually the new Republican candidate won. Turning to opposition party primaries, given their out-party status but favorable political environment in the 2018 elections, it is not surprising that many more Democrats, both male and female candidates, than Republicans entered such contests as Table 3.1 shows. Turning to the open seat primaries, Republican candidates were a slight majority, a consequence of more Republican incumbents having held these seats than Democrats, and thus the prospect of victory being greater for that party’s candidates in those districts. Ambitious politicians traditionally flock to these opportunities. Within all groups, the number of male candidates far surpassed the number of female candidates, but female Democratic candidates as reflected by the “pink wave” phenomenon had a much greater presence than female Republicans. They were 33 percent of opposition party candidates and 35 percent of open seat contenders compared with women being 14 percent of Republican opposition party candidates and 17 per-

Who Were the Candidates?

55

cent of such open seat contenders. Focusing on the open seat districts, at least one woman was a primary election candidate in 89 percent of the Democratic contests; a woman ran in 59 percent of the Republican open seat primaries. Table 3.2 presents the primary success rates of the various groups of candidates in opposition party and in open seat primaries. Both Democratic and Republican female candidates had higher success rates than their male counterparts in both opposition party and open seat primaries. In all cases, however, many more male candidates were contending for their party’s nomination, accounting at least in part for their lower individual primary success rates but also their dominance among nominated candidates. But as FiveThirtyEight concluded in the middle of the primary season, “It is good to be a woman in a Democratic primary” (Conroy, Nguyen, and Rakich 2018). This assessment was based on what the authors called Democratic women’s “win rate.” All else being equal, they concluded, “being a woman has been worth an additional 10 percentage points over being a man in the open Democratic primaries.” At the same time, the number of Republican women running in primaries substantially increased over previous years. Including incumbents, 103 Republican women were primary contenders, up from 48 in the previous cycle. Democrats nominated 183 women for the House, surpassing their previous record of 120, set in 2016. Republicans with 52 nominations of women, however, fell short of their 2004 record of 53 by a single nomination. In total in 2018, women constituted 28.7 percent of all major party nominees, 42.9 percent of Democratic nominees, and 13.3 percent of Republican nominees. Women of color were nearly a third of all female nominees for the US House. They were 35.5 percent of Democratic and 28.8 percent of Republican female nominees. Table 3.2

Nonincumbent Primary Election Success Rates by Party and Sex, 2018

Candidate Group

Democratic women Democratic men Republican women Republican men

Opposition Party Wins/ Number of Candidates and Win Rate 96/183 = 52% 102/374 = 27% 22/35 = 62% 115/218 = 53%

Open Seat Wins/ Number of Candidates and Win Rate 31/92 = 34% 31/173 = 18% 13/49 = 27% 50/232 = 22%

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The Women of 2018

Examining overall primary success rates is one important part of analyzing the historical nature of women’s candidacies. Important, too, is where the wins occurred. Some analysts suggested that in 2018 many of the women’s primary wins were in the “wrong places.” (See, for example, Lawless 2018.) If they were mainly winning in districts favorable to the opposition party, their ultimate success in November would be unlikely, at least as reported during the primary season. In order to assess the extent to which women won primaries in the “right or wrong places” and what would appear to be the best scenario for increasing women’s representation in the US House, I applied the Cook Political Report’s competitiveness rating of the 435 House races as of July 31, 2018, to calculate the likelihood of victory of all of the general election female candidates.1 This analysis allowed me then to predict the worst and best likely outcomes of eventual election to the US House for the female primary winners and compare them to the actual final results. The Cook Report rates each of the 435 districts as being either safe, likely, leaning, or a toss-up for each party. First, twenty-six of the general election House races were women vs. women contests. Thus, at the very minimum, 6 percent of the 116th Congress would be female members. Twenty of these races involved incumbents versus challengers and six were open seats without an incumbent. As noted earlier, incumbents are traditionally overwhelmingly advantaged, so a first step in incorporating the likelihood of winning an election into this analysis was to assess how safe the female incumbents were perceived to be. The Cook Political Report rated five of the female Republican and fifty-two of the female Democratic incumbents as safe for reelection. Three Republicans were rated as being in danger of losing their seats—Walters (CA45), Comstock (VA10), and Love (UT4). Barbara Comstock was the most endangered as Virginia’s tenth congressional district, which she represented, was rated as leaning toward the Democratic candidate.2 All three ultimately lost their reelection bids as did Republican Karen Handel in Georgia’s sixth district whose race had been rated as leaning Republican. All but Love lost to another woman. The other eight female Republican incumbents were rated as likely or leaning toward victory, and they did win reelection. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, two female Democratic candidates, were rated as safe to be elected on November 6, having defeated Democratic incumbents in overwhelmingly Democratic districts. Combining the fifty-seven female incumbents in races rated as safe with the six women-only open seat races and the two winning primary incumbent challengers, we could quite confidently assume that at least

Who Were the Candidates?

57

sixty-five women would be US representatives in the 116th Congress, 15 percent of the membership, the lowest end of projections at the midpoint of the 2018 election season. That percentage was far below even maintaining the status quo. If we add in the eight female Republican incumbents rated earlier as likely or leaning toward victory, that number would bring us to seventy-three female members, 16.8 percent of the House. In the next step of this prospective analysis from entrant to winner stage, I examined the ratings of women running in open seat races against a male opponent. A total of fifty-five seats were open as eighteen Democrats and thirty-seven Republicans had chosen not to seek reelection. Seven open seat races were considered safe for female Democratic candidates (CT5, MI13, MN5, NM1, PA4, TX16, and TX29). In two of these races, NM1 and TX16, both parties nominated a woman and have been accounted for earlier in this analysis. Significantly, the female candidates considered safe in six of these seven races were all minority candidates. Adding five seats from this group to the female representative column for the 116th Congress brings us to seventy-eight members, 19.9 percent of the House. (No woman was a Republican open seat candidate rated as “safe” for that party, although Carol Miller in West Virginia’s third congressional district was favored to win.) This figure brings us close to parity with women’s representation in the 115th Congress but does not bring us to a historic “year of the woman” in terms of election outcomes. An additional thirteen female candidates running in open seat races were rated as either likely, leaning, or a toss-up in their races, nine of whom had male opponents. Eight were Democrats and one was a Republican. The best-case scenario from a numbers standpoint would be that all nine would win, bringing us to eighty-seven female members (three more than in the 115th Congress), 20 percent of the House. From these calculations we can begin to see how very difficult a prediction of a surge in female representation in the next Congress would be. A final group of candidates remains to be considered for a full accounting of the probable “best” outcome for increasing female representation in the US House in the 116th Congress. This group consisted of female challengers facing male incumbents. Ninety-five women were candidates in this category. The vast majority were running either in districts rated as safe for the male incumbent or likely or leaning in the incumbent’s direction (eighty-four candidates). Only eleven female challengers running against male incumbents were running in districts rated as leaning in their direction (three women candidates) or rated as toss-ups (eight women candidates). Putting these eleven female

58

The Women of 2018

candidates in the “win” column (which was unlikely to happen given history) gets us to a maximum number of possible female US representatives in the next Congress of ninety-eight representatives, 22.5 percent of the membership. In summary, the potential number of women serving in the US House in the 116th Congress ranged from a low of sixty-six to a high of ninety-eight members through this accounting. But in the end, female candidates did better than the best pre-election scenario, winning 102 seats, 23.4 percent of the House membership. Thus, indeed, they “over-delivered,” to use Dittmar and Walsh’s description. Twenty-eight incumbents lost their bid for reelection in the general election, all Republicans. Democratic women won sixteen of these races while Democratic male candidates won twelve of them. In the open seat races, nineteen Democratic women were victorious compared to thirteen Democratic men. Thirty Republican men won their open seat race as did one Republican woman, Carol Miller in West Virginia’s third district. Thus, a total of thirty-six women were newly elected to the US House in the 2018 elections. Thirty-five of these winners were Democrats. Not only was it a good year to be a Democratic woman in the primaries, it was a very good year for Democratic women in the general election. A total of 102 women won election to the US House in 2018, bringing their percentage of House membership to 23.4 percent; an improvement over previous Congresses but still less than a quarter of the House membership. Congresswoman Louise Slaughter serving her sixteenth term died in May 2018 and first-term Congresswoman Katie Hall resigned as a result of a scandal. (Thus, entering the 2020 campaign for election to the 117th Congress were 100 female representatives.) In the next section I describe the women who sought to win a seat in the 116th Congress.

The Demographics of the Nonincumbent US House Female Contenders The 2018 elections were historic not only in the number of women seeking elective office but also in terms of the diversity of their backgrounds. Media accounts called them “unconventional,” “trailblazers,” and “groundbreakers.” Health Care Blog pondered whether it would be the “year of the female physician.” Sally Kohn in a CNN analysis piece near the end of the 2018 campaign season wrote that beyond the numbers of women running, “What’s also significant is that many of the women running aren’t conventional candidates. These aren’t elite career politicians

Who Were the Candidates?

59

making their run at the next rung “We need people from different of politics. They’re single moms backgrounds. We need people and school teachers and public who are nurses and small busiinterest lawyers who want to make ness owners and store managers. a difference for their communities We need people like that in and their counties” (2018). ABC’s office too. It’s not just supposed Good Morning America anchors to be lawyers and businessmen. described these female candidates That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.” as “trailblazers and groundbreakers. —Jess Phoenix, geologist and . . . From school board to city counDemocratic candidate, CA25 cil, congressional and gubernatorial races, the women running for office this year are also fascinating. They bring with them diverse backgrounds, experiences and professions” (Parks 2018). The show highlighted the story of congressional challenger Abigail Spanberger to illustrate the distinctiveness of the women running for national office in 2018. “In some ways, Abigail Spanberger’s story parallels dozens of other first-time female candidates across the country this year: a successful, smart woman driven to get involved in politics for the first time after President Trump was elected—and eventually inspired to take on her Republican congressman. But as a former spy for the Central Intelligence Agency, her life has been anything but typical” (Parks, Scott, and Berkowitz 2018).3 Beyond news media descriptions, in this section I present a systematic demographic profile of the nonincumbent female candidates seeking a seat in the US House in 2018. Candidate websites and news articles were searched to collect conventional demographic information, such as age, education, marital status, and careers. Not all candidates had websites, and the websites candidates had created varied greatly in terms of how much detail they provided. Additionally, some local newspapers ran demographic profiles that supplemented websites or substituted for the lack of a website in providing demographic information. Ballotpedia.org, a nonprofit and nonpartisan online political encyclopedia that tracks presidential, congressional, and state elections each campaign season, and VoteSmart.org were also sources used to obtain demographic information. Candidate Ages

Table 3.3 presents a breakdown for a variety of candidate demographics that are usually highlighted in election research. First, ages were found for 86 percent (340) of the 391 nonincumbent female candidates.4 Ages

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The Women of 2018

Table 3.3

Nonincumbent Female Candidate Demographic Characteristics, US House of Representatives, 2018

Characteristic

Age 25–29 30–39 40–49 50–59 60–69 70–80 N = 343 Race/ethnicity White Black Hispanic Asian American Native American Middle Eastern Mixed race/ethnicity N = 391 Education High school Some college/AA Bachelor’s degree Registered nurse Master’s degree Doctorate JD MD/DVM DDS N = 372 Elected office experience No Yes N = 391

Number

Percent

11 69 92 103 56 12

3 20 27 30 16 3

264 57 40 20 4 4 2

68 15 10 5 1 1 0.5

9 19 119 2 108 31 65 17 2

2 5 32