Thirteen

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Leaping and Creeping

SOCIAL CHANGE, I HAD LEARNED, was a matter of “leaping and creeping.” At times, when conditions were right, it could take place in a massive wave, as it had during the Year of the Woman, in 1992. But more often, in the absence of a unique phenomenon such as Anita Hill’s testimony, it took place incrementally, in small steps. In the wake of the Gingrich Revolution, we were now entering a “creeping” phase.

At times, “creeping” was a generous way of characterizing what was going on. When the One Hundred Fourth Congress was seated, in January 1995, the Democrats sat there shattered, as Gingrich launched one assault after another on everything we held dear. There would be draconian cuts in programs for low-income housing and child care. The elderly and the disabled could expect the same. A new health-care bill was out of the question. Meanwhile, the Republicans wanted to lower taxes for the rich.

Just a few days into that awful session, I was invited by House minority leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO) to meet in his office with him and Rep. Martin Frost (D-TX), the new chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). Gephardt had been newly installed as party leader, succeeding Tom Foley (D-WA), whose 1994 defeat was unprecedented for an incumbent Speaker of the House in modern times. Gephardt’s first order of business was to rally the troops and to check the party’s support systems.

I entered the minority leader’s suite and took a seat facing Gephardt and Frost, who were sitting on the sofa. I couldn’t tell whether Gephardt was shell-shocked or simply bored, but in either case, he was not engaged. For his part, Frost, a stocky, balding representative from the Dallas–Fort Worth area who now had oversight of the party’s congressional races, diligently took notes on a yellow legal pad. Being in control of Congress was so much a part of the Democrats’ culture that they didn’t know where to start or how to rebuild.

Years earlier, I had learned that the only way to get the attention of the party establishment, the only way to break through the glassy-eyed looks, was to talk numbers. So, I told them that EMILY’s List had raised almost $5 million for House candidates in 1994. This money was not available to male Democrats, I explained, so each of our twenty candidates that year had the advantage of support from both the party establishment and substantial funds from EMILY’s List. If we wanted to take back the House, I argued, it was essential to have more women candidates with the party’s support.

Throughout the meeting, Martin Frost barely uttered a word, but then, as I walked out, he came with me. There was something about him that suggested he had just had a profound epiphany. “Ellen,” he said, “I’ve been crunching some numbers. Are you telling me you raised an average of $200,000 for each House candidate?”

At the time, the average winning House race cost a little more than $500,000. It had finally dawned on him that we had a lot to offer.

“Yes, Martin. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. If you recruit more women, you’re going to have candidates with more financial and political support. So, work with us to help women, and we can take back the House.”

Bingo. He got it!

For roughly a decade, we had battled male incumbents within the party. But finally, they realized that this “stupid girls’ organization with the silly name” was actually raising a lot of money, and that the more women voted, the more it would help not just women Democratic candidates but Democratic men as well. From that point on, we were valuable allies—partners, not some fringe organization.

It also meant that our role was changing from being merely a fund-raising operation to becoming a real political operation, one that would grow and grow. And that in turn meant that the credibility of women candidates would grow, and that the women we endorsed could move up the ladder within the party and play key roles on the national stage.

But first, now that Newt Gingrich had become Speaker, we had to fight back. With his cavalier disregard for women’s interests and his relentless attacks on women’s rights, Gingrich exemplified everything we disliked about right-wing Republicans, all in a profoundly unappealing package of arrogance and bravado.

Our new fund-raising appeal added a message that spoke to the rage and frustration of progressives and called for them to “Boot Newt!,” to take back Congress and protect issues important to women and families. “Every day I read the morning paper and I get so mad, I can’t wait to get in my car and drive to EMILY’s List to get to work,” the appeal began. It turned out to be the most successful opening line I ever wrote.

 

WITH MARY BETH CAHILL leading the way, we went national with the WOMEN VOTE! campaign. Conventional wisdom had it that the reason for the catastrophe in 1994 was that the Democrats had lost the vote of “angry white men.” But, as Mary Beth pointed out, those were the so-called Reagan Democrats, who had already abandoned the party a decade earlier for Ronald Reagan. The conventional wisdom was dead wrong.

The real story, Mary Beth discovered, was that there was an enormous drop-off of sixteen million women voters between 1992 and 1994. A huge portion of those lost voters were women without college degrees, and their absence at the polls was devastating to the Democrats. That meant that getting non-college-educated women to the polls was the key to winning back the House and the Senate, and to getting Bill Clinton reelected. WOMEN VOTE! gave us a clearly defined political strategy for victory. At our tenth anniversary luncheon, on May 1, 1995, President Clinton helped launch WOMEN VOTE! as a national initiative.

For the first time, we were working hand in glove with the party—and we were leading the way. We put together a $10 million multielection get-out-the-vote strategy targeted at women in key states as a counterweight to the grassroots efforts of the Christian right. Polls showed that women were alarmed by a wide range of Republican policies, including budget cuts to student loans, job training, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Working with the party, we began buying and enhancing voter files, overlaying demographic information from drivers’ licenses with files by age, income, education, and other variables. Then we set about targeting these women voters with specific messages tailored directly to their concerns, contacting them by phone and mail to encourage them to vote.

We carefully scoped out which incumbent Republicans might be vulnerable, and we found possible openings in California, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, and Washington State. Then, we recruited new women candidates for those openings, helped them to hire political consultants, trained their staff, and guided them through the election process. We made them feel they weren’t alone in the fight.

In the wake of the Republican landslide, however, doing all of this wasn’t easy. The case of Darlene Hooley, a fabulously warm woman who served on the Clackamas County Board of Commissioners, near Portland, Oregon, was somewhat typical. When Karin Johanson approached Darlene about running for Congress, Darlene said no. A few weeks later, Karin asked her again, but still Hooley said no. Soon, such rejections became the new office joke. No one wanted to run for Congress when the Republicans were in control of it.

 

MEANWHILE, IN CONGRESS, Gingrich drove his agenda so forcefully that many people thought President Clinton seemed almost completely irrelevant. Then, on April 19, 1995, a massive truck bomb was detonated outside the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, a twenty-six-year-old militia sympathizer, and Terry Nichols, killing 149 people. In response, Bill Clinton came alive as a unifying, healing leader. “Here was a president who had been by many people deemed not to be strong, who suddenly was being viewed as both sensitive and strong,” said speechwriter Don Baer. “At that moment, perhaps for the first moment, he inhabited the presidency.”

The calculus of power between the House and the Clinton White House began to change. Throughout the rest of the year, the Republicans continued their assault, but Clinton fought back. The hard-right House voted repeatedly to approve one bill after another to prohibit federal funding for programs providing abortions in federal prisons, for family-planning programs, for city-run facilities in Washington, D.C., and more.

But Clinton was a steadfast defender of our right to choose and vetoed any bill that undermined Medicare, aid to children, or the safety net for the poor. “As long as they insist on plunging ahead with the budget that violates our values . . . I will fight it,” he said. “I am fighting it today. I will fight it tomorrow. I will fight it next week and next month. I will fight it until we get a budget that is fair to all Americans.”

 

BY THE END OF THE SUMMER, there was still no agreed-upon budget, and on September 30, the government ran out of operating funds. After that, it limped along on a temporary budget extension while negotiations continued between Congress and the White House.

Then, about five weeks later, a historic tragedy took place that had the inadvertent consequence of putting Gingrich’s pettiness on display for all to see. On November 4, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, a catastrophe that dealt a devastating blow to efforts to reach a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. President Clinton, who had been a genuinely close friend of Rabin’s, immediately flew to the funeral in Israel, and he invited Newt Gingrich and Senate majority leader Bob Dole (R-KS) to accompany him on Air Force One.

Clinton elected to stay up front in the plane’s presidential suite with former presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush on the trip to Israel, as well as on the return flight. Gingrich was seated in the rear passenger suite with Senator Dole, and, when the plane finally landed at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, was asked to deplane by the rear door.

In Gingrich’s eyes, this was a monumental snub, and on November 15, he told reporters how humiliated he was. “You’ve been on the plane for twenty-five hours and nobody has talked to you and they ask you to get off the plane by the back ramp . . . You just wonder, where is their sense of manners? Where is their sense of courtesy?” Ever the professor of history, Gingrich declared his seating assignment one of the worst put-downs of the century.

To Gingrich, such a historic humiliation called for an equal and appropriate response, so he sent President Clinton an even tougher version of the budget resolution, knowing full well that Clinton would veto it. Later that afternoon, however, the White House released a photograph taken of Gingrich on the flight, talking with the president and Majority Leader Dole. The photo, when juxtaposed with his remarks, was devastating to Gingrich. The New York Daily News marked the occasion with a cover cartoon of Newt as a diaper-clad infant carrying a baby bottle. CRYBABY, read the headline. NEWT’S TANTRUM: HE CLOSED DOWN THE GOVERNMENT BECAUSE CLINTON MADE HIM SIT AT BACK OF PLANE.

 

AND SO BEGAN a historic government shutdown. For six days, eight hundred thousand federal workers were furloughed. The Federal Housing Administration couldn’t process home sales. About six hundred thousand elderly who depended on the Meals on Wheels program were now at risk. National parks were closed. It wasn’t pretty. But Bill Clinton had stood his ground, and in the eyes of most Americans, Newt Gingrich and the Republicans were responsible for shutting down the government.

Gingrich had overplayed his hand so much that before long, Senator Dole, the likely Republican presidential nominee for 1996, sensing that the government shutdown would hurt the Republicans, put together the necessary votes to approve the Clinton budget. Clinton had won, and suddenly the Democrats were back in business.

And so was EMILY’s List. Karin Johanson called Darlene Hooley in Oregon once again, and this time Hooley wanted to run. In Michigan, Debbie Stabenow, a longtime friend of EMILY’s List, had worked her way up the state senate and, after suffering a narrow loss in Michigan’s 1994 gubernatorial primary, emerged as a promising candidate for a congressional seat. She was a real natural and, we felt, a good choice to challenge incumbent representative Dick Chrysler, who was vulnerable, given his close ties to the Gingrich Revolution.

In California, we needed someone to take on Rep. William Baker, a Republican who was much too conservative for his district, outside San Francisco. Judi Kanter suggested EMILY’s List member Ellen Tauscher, a business-savvy investment banker who was one of the first women to become a member of the New York Stock Exchange and who had been a major fund-raiser for Dianne Feinstein’s successful senatorial campaign.

In New York, we recruited Carolyn McCarthy, a former Republican who had launched a gun-control crusade after her husband, Dennis, was killed and her son, Kevin, wounded when a gunman on the Long Island Railroad opened fire on passengers. She stood a good chance against Rep. Daniel Frisa, a Gingrich ally and a friend of the gun lobby, so we helped her hire consultants, taught her how to debate—the whole nine yards.

And in Indiana, we found Julia Carson, a local official who had little experience with modern sophisticated campaigns but had a strong grassroots base and a spectacular track record, having turned a $20 million debt in the local welfare program into a $6 million surplus. We encouraged her to run for Congress when her representative retired, in 1996.

 

IN APRIL 1996, we kicked off our WOMEN VOTE! campaign with a sold-out luncheon featuring Hillary Clinton as our speaker. “Women who never thought of themselves as political before are now finding their voices and understanding the importance of their votes,” she said. Soon afterward, Democratic National Committee chairman Don Fowler joined me in announcing that the WOMEN VOTE! campaign would target Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington, and New Jersey, with seven or eight more states to follow.

By this time, having Bill and Hillary Clinton and the chair of the DNC in our corner, it was fair to say we were no longer outsiders. More closely allied with the party establishment than ever, we began to put our strategies to work.

At the time, no one had paid real attention to women voters as a monolithic bloc. The concept of the “gender gap” was not commonplace, so we set out to define the difference between men and women voters in terms of priorities and to show how that difference was important to the Democrats. To that end, in the spring of 1996, we commissioned a series of eight polls tracking women’s preferences on issues. We released these “women’s monitor” polls at press conferences to drum up interest in the gender gap. Sure enough, the position of women began to be discussed as a determining factor in the next election.

Focusing on non-college-educated women, we found a huge population living on the edge of economic disaster: wives who worked to support their families and came home completely exhausted just in time to cook dinner; women who couldn’t afford to get their cars fixed when they broke, meaning they couldn’t get to their jobs; women who were fed up with voting for politicians who said they were going to help but just ended up partying with lobbyists. No wonder many didn’t even bother to vote!

Our campaign showed these women that voting could actually make a difference for them and their families. We said, if you want your child to be able to go to college, you should know that Mary Smith supports student-loan money, but Bill Jones, the Republican, is against it.

As the 1996 election approached, “gender gap” became the buzzword of the day. EMILY’s List became the go-to place for reporters seeking information about it. Increasingly, data supported the rationale behind our campaign. A study conducted by the Washington Post, Harvard University, and the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that two-thirds of disaffected voters were women—most of whom were against cutting programs for the poor or the elderly, and were deeply concerned about the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor. And, of course, they were precisely the women we were targeting with our WOMEN VOTE! campaign.

 

SOON, WE SAW THAT the patterns of 1994 were reversing themselves. Republican women were demoralized and were considering not voting at all. Meanwhile, Democratic women in union households, minority women, and single women were energized as never before. Ultimately, we saw a 17-point gender gap in congressional matchups between Republicans and Democrats. Similarly, women gave President Clinton a 22-point lead over Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS), the Republican nominee. The data showed what we had been saying all along: the Democrats would win if the women turned out to vote.

When the election returns came in on November 5, 1996, the results were stunning compared to two years earlier. In one of the great comebacks in American political history, Bill Clinton became the first Democrat to win a second term since Franklin Roosevelt, beating Bob Dole by more than eight million popular votes and winning more than 70 percent of the electoral vote. Exit polls showed the merit of our strategy, with women supporting Clinton over Dole by 17 points.

Although we didn’t reclaim the House for the Democrats, we narrowed the GOP’s edge by five seats, and the women we endorsed fared well. Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu became our sixth Democratic woman in the Senate. Jeanne Shaheen became the first woman governor of New Hampshire. And we elected no fewer than nine new women in the House—the second-biggest increase in history—including wins by Carolyn McCarthy, Julia Carson, Debbie Stabenow, Darlene Hooley, and Ellen Tauscher.

 

ON JANUARY 20, 1997, when Clinton took the oath of office for his second term, I was vice chair of the inauguration and sat on the Capitol steps with members of Congress to watch the swearing-in. Within the Democratic Party, WOMEN VOTE! was seen as having played an enormous role in Clinton’s victory. We had won a new level of respect from the Democratic political establishment.

And yet, these relatively enlightened attitudes did not yet prevail in the party throughout the entire country. One place where that was particularly noticeable was Colorado, where we had two strong candidates in Dottie Lamm and Lt. Gov. Gail Schoettler, running for the United States Senate and the governorship, respectively, in the upcoming 1998 election. Both women were the front-runners in the Democratic primary but faced difficult general elections.

To help Dottie Lamm, Ellen Moran, EMILY’s List’s former training director, who went on to run the California WOMEN VOTE! campaign in 1994, went out to Colorado as Lamm’s campaign manager and, by all accounts, was doing a terrific job raising money and getting the campaign in order. But, in the spring of 1998, I started to see stories in the press that both Dottie’s and Gail’s opponents were gaining ground. Before long, I went to Denver for an EMILY’s List event and asked Ellen Moran about it.

“You got me,” she said. “All our analysis and data show us way ahead in the primaries, and I have no idea where the stories are coming from. They just have to be wrong.”

When I looked into it, I discovered that the stories came from members of the state political establishment, including a labor leader, the executive director of the state democratic party, and a political reporter. I could just imagine the scenario: the labor leader probably called the party director and said, “Our guy is gaining ground.” The party director, excited by his inside knowledge, called the reporter and said he heard the guy was really on the move. And the reporter wrote it up. That’s how the conventional wisdom was forged.

But when the voting was over, Ellen Moran’s data was absolutely correct. The results weren’t even close. Dottie won her primary with 58 percent of the vote, and Gail won with 55 percent of the vote. I guess the guys in the small network of “experts” just got carried away by their emotions.

 

OUR COLORADO CANDIDATES weren’t the only women doing battle with the old boys’ network. Tammy Baldwin was a popular member of the Wisconsin State Assembly, who clearly had potential for higher office. One of very few openly gay politicians at the time, Tammy called herself “a proud progressive,” and she had been elected to the state assembly three times by wide margins from the liberal college town of Madison. Rumor had it that Scott Klug, the incumbent Republican representative in her district, was about to retire. Tammy was a natural to run for his seat—and she wanted to make sure she was well prepared.

So, in 1997, Tammy came to Washington, where she met with me and Karin Johanson. Less than 48 hours later, Klug announced he would not seek reelection, thereby cementing Tammy’s decision to run. We assigned Jonathan Parker, one of our political advisers, to assess Tammy as a candidate and to assist her campaign, and we introduced her to her eventual campaign manager. We helped Tammy set up her money, polling, and media operations. Similarly, Tammy sent some of her local staff to Washington to be trained by us. All the pieces of our political program were coming together.

In November 1997, Tammy was one of more than a dozen candidates who came to our Washington media-training sessions, where top media consultants subjected prospective candidates to on-camera interviews that were recorded so that the candidates could be reviewed and evaluated.

Even though we thought we had finally made peace with the old boys’ network, Tammy had one major problem. The national Democratic establishment didn’t believe she had a chance. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), a rising star in the Democratic leadership, was in charge of recruiting congressional candidates for the party, yet he publicly backed a rival of Tammy’s, Dane County executive Rick Phelps, whom he had known for years, in the Democratic primary. Phelps’s staff included Jim Messina, an up-and-coming political consultant who had learned his craft at the EMILY’s List campaign managers’ school and was now working against us.

Karin Johanson, who was now working flat out for Tammy on our behalf, had been Steny Hoyer’s chief of staff. “She was furious at Steny,” said Tammy. “She went ballistic. She said, ‘What the heck are you doing?’ Karin just raked him over the coals.” Meanwhile, EMILY’s List members contributed more than $70,000 to Tammy during the early stages of the primary, not to mention all the other resources we were steering her way. It paid off handsomely, too. In September, Tammy eked by Rick Phelps in the Democratic primary by 1,514 votes.

Nor was Tammy the only beneficiary of our labors. By now, we had trained more than 250 staffers who were willing to work with pro-choice Democratic women candidates, and more than half were already working on candidacies we had endorsed. In addition, our seminars for the candidates themselves ensured that we were building relationships with campaigns and becoming familiar with their needs so that we could help them down the road.

Looking forward to November, Barbara Mikulski, Barbara Boxer, Carol Moseley Braun, and Patty Murray all had serious reelection challenges, the last three having been targeted by the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. All three were now running in a midterm year in which turnout would be much lower and would be vulnerable if women voters stayed home.

 

TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE, President Clinton had confessed to his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. I was furious with him for lying about it to the country and putting all of his allies in a difficult position. For months, special prosecutor Kenneth Starr had been leaking salacious tidbits about the Lewinsky affair to the press, and when he released his final report, on September 11, the public devoured the lurid details. I didn’t feel the affair was sufficiently serious to call for impeachment, but, as president of EMILY’s List, I called on Congress to censure President Clinton. Then, I hoped we could put this tawdry mess behind us and move on.

Angry as I was with the president, I was even more furious at the Republicans, who were attempting to bring him down. In the House, the prospect of impeachment was looming. The scandal had motivated Republicans so strongly that they had amassed nearly twice as much money as the Democrats for the midterms. It had also provided enormous fodder for the Christian right, leading the Christian Coalition to launch ferocious get-out-the-vote efforts and to distribute forty-five million supposedly nonpartisan voting guides.

Unfortunately, EMILY’s List was trapped in the larger political environment and we had no choice but to move forward, do our research, raise money, send out mailings, work with our candidates, and make sure that as many women as possible won.

At Labor Day 1998, the situation seemed dire indeed, but we went into overdrive. Over the next two months, EMILY’s List members came through as never before, contributing an additional $4 million before the election. Two other factors were crucial. For one thing, the Republicans’ refusal to let go of the Lewinsky scandal seemed to have backfired. In addition, by targeting seniors, African Americans, Latinas, professional women, and women without college degrees with massive mailings in twenty-two states, we were able to turn the gender gap into votes for Democrats all over the country.

In the end, Carol Moseley Braun could not overcome the wealth of her Republican opponent, Peter Fitzgerald, who beat her by 3 points. But other than that, it was a terrific year. Barbara Boxer ended up being the first candidate for whom EMILY’s List had raised $1 million. She spent it wisely, pulling away from her Republican challenger at the end. It was no surprise that Barbara Mikulski won easily, but so did Patty Murray, and we picked up another senatorial seat with Blanche Lincoln’s victory in Arkansas. Jeanne Shaheen easily won reelection as governor of New Hampshire. In the House, every single pro-choice Democratic woman was reelected, and we gained seven new seats for women, including Tammy Baldwin’s in Wisconsin. It was the biggest increase of Democratic women in the House in a nonpresidential election year.

As for the House of Representatives, the Republicans ended up having the worst midterm election results in sixty-four years for a party not holding the presidency. Although they narrowly retained the majority, the GOP lost five seats to the Democrats, at a time when it was widely expected that they might pick up thirty. EMILY’s List could take some credit for that. According to our postelection analysis, in the states targeted by WOMEN VOTE!, fully 73 percent of our candidates won.

The results were enormously embarrassing for Gingrich in an election in which everyone expected a Republican sweep. By Friday, just three days after the election, Gingrich announced that he was stepping down as Speaker of the House and resigning from Congress in January. Newt had indeed been booted.

 

OUR NEXT TASK WAS to help the Democrats win back control of the Senate, where the Republicans had a 55–45 majority prior to the 2000 elections. Several of our women candidates were crucial.

One of them was already exceedingly well known. Just after the 1998 election, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) announced he was not going to run for reelection in 2000, and Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) immediately called Hillary Clinton, asking her to run for Moynihan’s open seat.

“I thought it was absurd,” Hillary told me. “I was flattered. And they may have liked me, but they had a very clear political self-interest in why this was good for them.” With Rudy Giuliani as the likely Republican candidate, the Democrats needed a contender who could compete in terms of money and name recognition.

“I just kept saying, ‘No, no, no, I’m not going to do this,’” Hillary later remembered. “But every week there’d be another story they would plant about how I’m thinking about it and they’re talking to me and I’m meeting with them.”

Initially, Hillary told the press, she wasn’t running. But in January 1999, Hillary turned on Meet the Press one Sunday to see Bob Torricelli, then head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, saying, to her astonishment, that he fully expected Hillary to run. Soon, a flood of New York friends who had supported Bill asked to talk to Hillary.

“I couldn’t say no to all of them,” she recalled.

Once they got their feet in the door, they began saying how much money they could raise, and whom they could get to endorse her. But Hillary still wasn’t convinced.

Finally, in March 1999, Hillary came to New York, because HBO was putting together a special on women athletes called Dare to Compete, hosted by tennis great Billie Jean King, which was being shot at the Lab School, a public high school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Sofia Totti, the captain of the girls’ basketball team, introduced Hillary, and as Hillary came up onstage and shook her hand, Totti leaned forward and whispered in Hillary’s ear. “Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton,” she said. “Dare to compete.”

“That was the most telling argument that had been made to me,” Hillary said. “I’d gone around telling all these young women to get out there, fulfill their destinies. And that’s when I started thinking seriously about running for the Senate. I don’t know that I ever would have crossed over without that young woman. She really called my dedication, my identity, and my commitment into question.”

 

AT THE PRESIDENTIAL LEVEL, of course, the 2000 electoral season was dominated by the historic race between Vice President Al Gore and Texas governor George W. Bush. With the GOP party establishment plowing enormous resources into the elections—the National Republican Congressional Committee raised $36 million, and the Republican National Committee put in $100 million for voter turnout—and the Christian right going full tilt for Bush, WOMEN VOTE! was more crucial than ever before. We knew we had to get out the vote if the Democrats were to win, so in seven states we contacted eight million women, about double what we had reached in 1998. The races in which EMILY’s List had candidates were particularly crucial to the Democratic Party’s hopes of retaking the Senate.

When it came to Hillary’s senatorial campaign, we raised plenty of money, but, given the Clintons’ abundant electoral skills and resources, our help was far more crucial to other candidates. One of my favorite races took place in Michigan, where Debbie Stabenow was challenging incumbent Republican senator Spencer Abraham, who had entered the Senate in the Gingrich Revolution of 1994.

Debbie, you may recall, had hosted parties for EMILY’s List at her home in Lansing, Michigan, when she was a state representative, and had worked her way up the ladder to the state senate. In 1994, she had campaigned for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination of Michigan. She lost narrowly but earned an enormous amount of goodwill within the party. In 1996, Debbie was elected to Congress, but after four years she was less than enthralled by the combination of non-stop fund-raising for her biennial campaigns and the lack of power that comes with being in the minority party.

“I made a personal decision that I wanted to be someplace where I could actually get things done,” said Debbie. “Where I could work on policy.” As a result, she decided to run for the United States Senate.

Given that a woman had never unseated an incumbent senator, Debbie’s candidacy was a long shot from the start. In light of the difficulty of that task, Debbie’s first step was to make sure she didn’t have to go through a costly primary clash that would deplete her resources. Her most likely Democratic rival was Jim Blanchard, the former governor of Michigan.

“Blanchard had said if he was going to take on a Republican incumbent, he didn’t want to have a primary [against another Democratic candidate],” said Debbie. “So, we created a strategy to make it very clear that he was going to have a primary.”

At EMILY’s List, we divided up the calls and announced that we were going to do everything we could for Debbie. By the following week, Blanchard was convinced he couldn’t avoid a rough primary battle with Debbie, but he wasn’t quite ready to back out.

“After all those calls, he phoned me and said, ‘I want to meet,’” Debbie told me. “And he came over to my house, and I remember telling him that I really wanted to run, and EMILY’s List would support me and I’d have a really good chance to win. He was quite surprised that I didn’t defer to him.”

And because she didn’t, Blanchard dropped out.

 

BLANCHARD’S WITHDRAWAL MEANT that Debbie could challenge Abraham without the bother of a primary, but she still had another problem: money. This was an era before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowed the Koch brothers and other billionaires to pour virtually unlimited funds into super PACs, but Spencer Abraham nevertheless was able to get enormous help from outside sources. Antitax activist Grover Norquist and his Americans for Tax Reform started placing pro-Abraham ads worth $1 million on the air more than a year before the election. Senate Republicans pressured high-tech companies such as Intel to raise money in support of Abraham’s candidacy. By April 2000, Abraham had raised $6.4 million for his reelection campaign, roughly twice what Debbie had.

Americans for Job Security, a pro-Abraham, Virginia-based business group, placed attack ads in the Michigan Chronicle and the Michigan FrontPage, which had largely black readerships, hoping to drive a wedge between Debbie and her African American supporters. Right to Life of Michigan also went after Debbie. The message was clear: Republicans knew Abraham was vulnerable and were pulling out all the stops to save his seat in what was one of the key battleground states in the country.

At the time, it was unheard of for any political group to spend so much money on TV advertising so long before the election. “First, one group went on the air thanking him for something, and then another group, and another,” Debbie said. “They had somebody on the air from the end of March till Election Day.”

Yet, even with Abraham’s huge cash advantage, Debbie and he were still in a dead heat in June. Knowing that Debbie would be massively outspent, EMILY’s List sent fund-raiser Yael Ouzillou to Lansing to assess her campaign’s finance operation. Our deputy political director kept in touch with the campaign on a regular basis to provide political advice, and another former EMILY’s List staffer joined Stabenow’s staff as research director. Before the election was over, no fewer than twelve thousand of our members contributed $1.4 million to Stabenow.

But the campaign became ugly. Among the first signs was the launching of Libberaldebbie.com, an attack site sponsored by Abraham. Business groups, many funded by pharmaceutical and insurance interests opposed to Debbie’s health-care-reform proposals, spent nearly $10 million attacking her on radio and TV.

As the summer wore on, Abraham’s relentless attacks took their toll. By mid-July, Abraham had taken a 3-point lead, 45–42. By the end of the month, he had an 11-point lead. By September 20, his lead had widened to 44–32. Soon afterward, a poll by the Detroit News showed Debbie trailing by 17 points, with time running out.

Typical for Debbie, when she heard about this disastrous poll, rather than get depressed, she went out and did five more events that day. At the same time, at EMILY’s List, we hadn’t given up on her either. To me, the fact that Spencer Abraham couldn’t get above 50 percent meant that his attack ads were driving down Debbie’s numbers but that voters still didn’t like him. He and his allies had spent millions of dollars praising him to the heavens, but voters weren’t convinced. I knew Debbie was a sensational candidate—warm, personable, telegenic, and an enormously likable campaigner—and I was certain voters would see how fabulous she was if only she had enough money to communicate with them.

Over the summer, Debbie worked tirelessly to raise money, but it was challenging. When she went to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fund-raisers for help, she didn’t get very far. “In the end they didn’t walk away from me,” Debbie said. “But they would say, ‘We think you’re terrific, but first, we’re going to help Harry, and then Fred, and Joe, and when we’re done with those guys, we’ll get to you.’” She was at the bottom of their list.

So, I put Debbie at the top of ours. I grabbed the staff and said, “Look under sofa cushions, if you have to! Do everything you can think of to see how much money we can put together for Debbie Stabenow.”

By the end of the day, Joe Solmonese, our executive director, came back to me and said he thought we could raise another $500,000 for Debbie. We started to work executing his plan. We organized special mailings and phone banks. We went to the Majority Council. We went to all our major donors to fund a special WOMEN VOTE! drive in Michigan. We were as motivated as we’d ever been.

I called Debbie to tell her the good news: EMILY was coming to the rescue. When I finally reached her on her cell phone, Debbie was caught up in the mundane minutiae of daily life, shopping at Nordstrom for a new blouse for a campaign appearance that night.

“I need to talk to you,” I said. Debbie found a stairwell for privacy. “I know the polls,” I continued. “But I have incredible news. The cavalry is on its way! I totally, absolutely believe you can win this. So, I brought the staff together, and I want this to be the top priority for the election, and we are going to raise $500,000 for you before the end of Election Day. And we are going to do a big WOMEN VOTE! campaign for you as well. Don’t give up for one instant. You are fabulous, and we can do this.”

“That’s terrific!” she said. Her one and only televised debate with Abraham was coming up. “Just what I need going into this debate.”

And it was. Abraham entered the debate overconfident. “He totally underestimated me,” said Debbie. “He was obviously not prepared, and we had prepared for this as if it were the Olympics.”

In addition, Debbie had put together a “rapid response” team to counter any inaccuracies coming forth from Abraham’s camp. They called it Michiganfactcheck.com, and the media started using the team’s information in all their news reports.

Suddenly, Abraham’s lead vanished. By October 26, a poll showed Debbie and Abraham in a dead heat, and now she was matching him ad for ad. Then, a November 2 poll, just before the election, showed Debbie actually in the lead for the first time, thanks largely to likely women voters, who favored her by a 14-point margin.

 

OF COURSE, DEBBIE WASN’T our only senatorial candidate that cycle. In Washington State, Maria Cantwell was taking on a Republican incumbent, Slade Gorton. A former congresswoman who was defeated in 1994, Maria briefly gave up politics and went on to make a fortune as a tech executive at Real Networks. Now, she was back in the hunt, locked in a race with Gorton that was going right down to the wire.

Meanwhile, in New York, Hillary’s presumptive Republican opponent, New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, had been expected to give her a run for her money. But in the spring of 2000, Giuliani found himself beset by a host of marital, political, and medical woes. When an extramarital relationship sparked a media circus, Giuliani announced his separation from his wife, and then discovered he needed treatment for prostate cancer. As a result, he withdrew from the race, and Hillary faced a less challenging battle against his replacement, Rep. Rick Lazio.

Another important race for us involved Mel Carnahan, a progressive governor from Missouri, who was running for the Senate against Republican John Ashcroft. Of course, Mel wasn’t eligible for endorsement from EMILY’s List, but he was staunchly pro-choice, and he had called me several times over the years asking for my personal financial support to fight anti-choice measures that the Republicans in Missouri were foisting on him as governor. When he decided to run for the Senate, we shared our polling data on women voters with him, and we were pulling for him in a tough race against Ashcroft.

But then, on October 16, Mel, one of his sons, and one of his advisers were killed when their small plane crashed on the way to a fund-raiser for his Senate campaign. With less than a month to go before the election, it was too late to take Carnahan’s name off the ballot. But a week later, Missouri governor Roger Wilson, a Democrat, announced that he would appoint Carnahan’s widow, Jean Carnahan, to the Senate if her late husband got more votes than Ashcroft. Suddenly, we had the possibility of putting yet another woman in the Senate. We immediately began raising money for Missouri WOMEN VOTE!, ultimately adding $150,000 to bring women to the polls.

 

ELECTION DAY, TUESDAY, November 9, 2000, is widely remembered by most Americans as the night Al Gore and George W. Bush fought to a draw, leaving the fate of the presidency in the hands of Florida, followed by bitterly fought controversies over hanging chads and butterfly ballots, inconclusive recounts, and numerous lawyers from both parties battling over the presidency. For those of us at EMILY’s List, it was a memorable night as well, but the outcome was considerably happier for us than that of Bush v. Gore.

First, Hillary won in a breeze, beating Rick Lazio by 12 points. Then, in Missouri, which had been a tight race, Mel Carnahan was elected posthumously, beating John Ashcroft by 2 points. That meant that his widow, Jean, would take his seat in the Senate, and that we had added at least two women to the Senate. Given that we had also helped elect Jeanne Shaheen as governor of New Hampshire and Ruth Ann Minner as governor of Delaware, not to mention forty-one representatives, it was not a bad year.

But it wasn’t over yet. The eyes of the nation were closely focused on the historic presidential spectacle unfolding in Florida, but we had more than our share of drama in both Michigan and Washington State. When it came to Debbie Stabenow’s race against Spencer Abraham in Michigan, even on Wednesday, the day after the election, ABC pronounced the race too close to call. Not until Thursday was it reported that Debbie won by some 67,000 votes—out of 4 million. It was an incredible victory, the upset of an incumbent who, between him and his special-interest friends, had outspent her roughly three to one.

That meant we had added three senators: Jean Carnahan in Missouri, Hillary Clinton in New York, and Debbie Stabenow in Michigan. But Maria Cantwell’s race in Washington was another cliff-hanger going into overtime. By Wednesday, with more than 1.6 million votes counted, Slade Gorton led by 3,000 votes, and both he and Maria had declared victory. In truth, the outcome was in the hands of half a million absentee voters, whose votes would not be counted for days.

I took considerable comfort in the fact that WOMEN VOTE! had put in lots of work on absentee voting in Washington. Because the secretary of state’s office would post daily county-by-county returns, I would go online every day, determine what votes hadn’t been counted, and crunch the numbers. I couldn’t be certain, but it looked to me as if Maria was going to win by about 2,000 votes. A week later, Gorton was still leading, but a number of counties that leaned Democratic had not yet fully reported.

At the time, the entire country was still on tenterhooks over the Bush-Gore battle. It was unprecedented for the fate of the presidency to hang in the balance, as it did for more than a month after the election. The Cantwell-Gorton race in Washington was not quite as historic, but it was dramatic nonetheless, and the stakes were high: a Cantwell victory would leave the Senate deadlocked at 50–50.

In the context of so many cliff-hangers, it was satisfying to know that EMILY’s List had raised more than $9 million for candidates, with a robust fund-raising presence on the Internet. We had also spent a record $10.1 million on WOMEN VOTE!

Two weeks after the election, Maria moved ahead to take a 1,953-vote lead, a razor-thin margin of 0.08 percent. There was a mandatory recount, but in the end, she and Debbie Stabenow became the first two women to defeat incumbent senators. That meant four new women senators—raising the total from nine women in the Senate to thirteen, and matching our results in the Year of the Woman.

It also meant that the Democrats and Republicans were tied at 50–50 in the Senate. With the Republicans in the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney was the presiding officer of the Senate, meaning that the Republicans remained in control.

But that was only temporary.