The fantasy of restorative justice was particularly resonant in the midst of the cascade of #metoo revelations of sexual abuses by those who’ve had too much power, in too many industries, for too long. “Let’s make a full-blown trend out of replacing predatory men with women who were long overdue to hold their jobs in the first place,” one writer had crowed in Vogue. “It’s really the least the patriarchy can do.”
The idea of replacing the bad men, the ones who’d been removed from power by #metoo, with women—many of them nonwhite women—was not just imaginatively attractive; it was happening, at least in some industries. Alex Wagner stepped in for Mark Halperin on The Circus; Hoda Kotb replaced Matt Lauer on Today, and Kitty Block took over the Humane Society of the United States after former head Wayne Pacelle stepped away after charges of sexual misconduct. One day in June 2018, I turned on the television and saw Christiane Amanpour, the woman hired to host Charlie Rose’s PBS show, interviewing Barbara Underwood, the woman who replaced Eric Schneiderman as New York’s attorney general, about the lawsuit she’d just filed against the Trump Foundation.
Of course, in most fields, altering power ratios is neither swift nor easy. Even when men are pushed from lofty perches, those waiting to take their places, the ones who’ve accrued seniority, expertise, and connections, still tend to be mostly men. Women who’ve been driven out or self-exiled from their chosen professions often cannot simply reenter them—not as partners or managers or even midlevel employees.
This is one of the relative virtues of politics: It can be swiftly responsive to change. You can, in theory, run for local or state or even federal office, even if you’ve never been so much as a student council secretary. If you’re a preschool teacher or a law professor or a sanitation worker, there will be substantial obstacles—yes, weaker networks, fund-raising disadvantages, party machinery, institutional obstruction, and identity bias—to push past. Yes. But you can run. And if you win, whether the office is small or large, you might be able to shake things up. Ocasio-Cortez, brilliant and charging into Congress with a righteously leftist agenda, had until recently worked as a bartender.
The people who control state and local legislatures often determine who in their communities gets to vote easily, who has access to health care or to legal sanctuary; local governing bodies around the country have in recent years passed legislation for paid leave and paid sick days and higher minimum wages. No, not all women candidates want to determine those policies in ways that benefit nonwhite men, and numbers of Republican women running for office in 2018 were up too. But the vast majority of the female candidates storming the polls in 2018 were Democrats.
More broadly, the idea of replacing men with women would be a way to alter one of the most deeply entrenched structural realities of how the nation has been built, who makes its rules, and who enforces them. It would be a seismic shift toward representational democracy.
In the wake of #metoo, and the view it offered of the corroded and corrupted layer of male power, women had already stepped into political space left by men. Tina Smith took Al Franken’s Senate seat; not only was Solicitor General Barbara Underwood named to fill Schneiderman’s job, within a few weeks of his resignation, at least two other women had announced that they would run for his seat in the fall. In Pennsylvania, a woman named Mary Gay Scanlon won the primary to fill the seat of Patrick Meehan, who resigned after harassment allegations,6 and two women ran for the seat vacated by John Conyers in Detroit. Debbie Lesko, a Republican woman, defeated Hiral Tipirneni, the Democratic woman who ran against her, for the seat left open by Trent Franks, a congressman who repeatedly asked a female staffer to be a surrogate mother for his child.
In May 2018, Rachel Crooks, one of the women who’d accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct before the election, claiming that when she’d been a twenty-two-year-old receptionist at Trump Tower, he’d kissed her against her will, won a Democratic House primary. When Trump had denied her claim on Twitter, Crooks had shot back, daring him to find security footage of the day and stating that “It’s liars like you in politics that have prompted me to run for office myself.”7
It felt like an avenue toward something like the unimaginable: reparations for all the power that had been denied to women for so many centuries. “What if women hadn’t been taken out of the pool like this?” asked Erin Vilardi, the head of VoteRunLead, which trains and supports women running for state and local office. “Imagine having had our first woman president run and win in the 1980s! We’re still not allowed to be mad about this. These guys need to resign. They all need to resign. If you are not willing to work for gender equality, you must step aside. We need all those open seats because research shows that women are more likely to win open seats. If you’ve groped or harassed, step aside right now. Pick a young woman as your successor.”
The video game developer Brianna Wu, who’d been a target of the coordinated misogynistic mass attack called “Gamergate” in 2014, told me in 2018 of her “unmitigated anger at the way that women had been treated” in her field, from groping to not being taken seriously by the men who dominated gaming. After becoming a target of harassment and threats during Gamergate, Wu wrote to male peers asking them for help; she said she received none; the FBI closed its investigation into the dozens of threats she had received, provoking in her an “unbelievable fury” that she said was the catalyst for her to run for Congress, challenging a moderate congressman in Massachusetts in the state’s primary.
“It turns out those were angry tears everybody cried on November 8, and nobody knew they were angry tears until later,” said Vilardi, who also noted that until recently, women have had no road map for what to do with their resentments and furies. “Women are not allowed to scream from podiums, not allowed to slam doors in workplaces,” she said, acknowledging that this expressive limit is part of what’s earned women the reputation as more benevolent bosses. “But that’s bullshit,” she went on. “Because if you look at all those studies about how women are better bosses, they’re better at everything except in areas of decisiveness, and that’s because we don’t get to have that split-second, I’m-the-goddamn-boss-that’s-why gut reaction. We have zero role modeling in channeling our anger into decisiveness or ‘That’s just the way he is” stuff people said about Harvey Weinstein. We don’t get any of those passes.”
Brianna Wu told me that her battle, as a candidate, was also in learning to communicate her anger, which she longs to simply lay out for audiences, point by point, but which she refrains from doing. “If you say things like that to men, they shut down; they think you’re being a bitch. Anger terrifies men.” Wu said that she has one particularly visceral memory from her campaign, at a town hall at which an elderly woman asked her about women’s health-care access “because she was angry about it.” As soon as Wu began to answer her question, “the three men sitting beside that woman, the instant I started talking, pulled out their phones on cue and started surfing.” Wu said she recalled standing in the midst of the town hall, “this fury boiling up in me. But because I was in front of a whole crowd, it was so hard to stay professional.”
Despite the efforts to suppress or disguise anger, Amanda Litman, the cofounder of Run for Something, said that she believed that angry candidates make the best candidates, because their passion propels them out the door every day to do the work of knocking on doors and making calls, producing the most crucial result: getting out the vote.
Litman’s theory was that the anger of the women in the Virginia elections had had a reverse coattails effect: the first-time women candidates had done such a stellar, driven job of canvassing and pavement-pounding that they had produced a higher turnout and helped Democrat Ralph Northam defeat Republican Ed Gillespie for governor. “Getting those candidates out there knocking [on] doors, speaking from a place of fury and commitment to change, gets more voters up, drives up turnout,” said Litman.
“When we started,” said Patricia Russo, the head of the Women’s Campaign School at Yale, which had begun training women candidates in 1994, in the wake of the Year of the Woman, “the median age for women attending our school was midforties. Now the median age is around thirty.” That shift reflected new attitudes about when women were “allowed” to enter politics. They didn’t have to wait until their kids were grown anymore, and there was a better chance that they’ll be taken seriously in their thirties or even twenties—being young and single was no longer a deal-killer, nor was being the mother of little children. Also different now, Russo said, is that the majority of those who enroll in the school are women of color.
Other groups had also gotten into the candidate-training-and-support business over the past two decades, and registered exponential growth in the wake of 2016. For Higher Heights—founded in 2011 to harness the power of black women as voters, organizers, and candidates—a slow rise in engagement in the months after Trump’s win became an enormous spike with the fall 2017 elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Alabama, when the role of black women voters as responsible for Democratic wins had been heralded by the political media. “Black women were really acknowledged as political drivers of change, as first-time candidates and as the voters who made the difference,” said cofounder Kimberly Peeler-Allen. Peeler-Allen recalled attending a candidate training in Minneapolis in the fall of 2017, at which she’d been told to expect forty or fifty black women. When she walked in she’d been greeted by seventy. “Nearly sixty percent of the women who were there were women of color,” she recalled. “It was mind-blowing!”
VoteRunLead’s Erin Vilardi said that in a typical year, two-thirds of the organization’s resources were devoted to persuading women to run, with a goal of tapping two thousand nationwide. In 2017, 3,200 women were trained by VoteRunLead and over ten thousand had contacted the group completely unsolicited. EMILY’s List, meanwhile, had nearly tripled the size of its state and local team and doubled its digital staff to handle the forty thousand inquiries they’d received about jumping into the electoral fray post-Trump.
“I think there’s a disgust,” Vilardi said, “when women find themselves running against a guy who hasn’t changed the photo on his website since the 1990s—these men have been in office for so long.” Then there was another kind of disgust, increasingly articulated by at least some of the rookie politicians she’d met: “There’s disgust very much about the abuse that men in power have systematically been engaging in unchecked, and disgust with the people who continue to keep those men in power.”
The anger that was bubbling to the surface over so many injustices—incursions on reproductive autonomy, the shootings of African Americans by police officers, the stranglehold of the NRA over American politics and thus the inability to enact gun control legislation, the gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts that left nonwhite voters with so much less electoral power, the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault, the paucity of women and nonwhite officials in representative government—was propelling women to run. The idea that the election of more women, especially more nonwhite women, was structurally, architecturally corrective, was clear.
But persuading the kinds of organizations and institutions that had long held up the party system in the United States that this was an opportunity for a major overhaul was difficult. Marie Newman, the challenger to antichoice, anti-immigration incumbent Dan Lipinski, had a hard time getting party machinery to support her, even against a politician who often voted against his party. While she garnered early support from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), and Gloria Steinem, it took Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List a long time to start diverting money toward her. Newman’s eventual primary loss to Lipinski was so close that it seemed possible that an earlier willingness to take a chance on her candidacy could have meant a different result.
“This is a moment to take significant risks, and we’re hedging our bets,” Vilardi said to me at one point, in reference to the foot-dragging in Newman’s race, and also to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and state parties, all cogs in a political machine that tended to be slow about directing money toward new kinds of candidates in crowded primaries. “Not throwing every dollar behind the exciting new women candidates, especially women of color,” Vilardi says, “is missing the political moment if I ever did see it.”
The throng of disgusted women, most of them brand-new to politics, did require the investment of time and resources. And many of the mechanisms in place to train women candidates were quickly at capacity, thanks to the rush of women who knew mostly that they were furious, but did not know much beyond that.
Across the nation, on practically every weekend in late 2017 and early 2018, women who hoped to one day lead their communities and perhaps their country were getting crash courses in civic participation. On a Saturday in late October 2017, as EMILY’s List’s president Stephanie Schriock was addressing potential candidates at the Detroit Women’s Convention, the group’s executive director, Emily Cain, was doing the same for a hundred women in Manhattan. “If you wake up in the morning caring about something,” Cain told the potential future leaders of America crowding the wood-paneled room, notepads out, “you are qualified to run for office.” The message echoed one delivered by Higher Heights cofounder Peeler-Allen to the black women she advises, many of whom lack confidence: “Each one of you is beyond prepared to run for public office. You need to channel your inner mediocre white boy and use that to run.”
If that seemed a depressingly low bar for entry, consider that one of the grim gifts of the Trump administration was the recognition of how low the bar could go for political plausibility. As Jennifer Carroll Foy, a public defender who won a Virginia House seat while pregnant with twins, replacing a Republican white man, said in a short documentary about her candidacy, “If he can do it, I know that I can do it.”8
The whole training curriculum of VoteRunLead was overhauled in 2017 and could now be summed up with its call to action: “Run As You Are.” Vilardi mentioned Eve Hurwitz, a Navy reservist and small-business owner running for state senator in Maryland. She’d long colored her hair a vivid shade of purple, but, said Vilardi, “Everybody told her that you can’t run with purple hair, so she lost it, but other people said, ‘How are you not going to run with purple hair? That’s who you are!’ So she dyed it back.” Similarly, Peeler-Allen recalled reassuring a recent candidate who was fretting about whether she had to code-switch—alter her speaking style and mannerisms—to speak before different audiences. “Be genuine in what you’re saying,” Peeler-Allen said she advised. “As long as people feel you have their best interests at heart, it won’t matter whether you twang or drawl or drop a consonant here or there.”
Which is not to say that the political waters would suddenly part, allowing women to walk serenely into office. “You can know you’re the best person for the job, and come out of a tearjerker of a training session, having just been inspired by the first Somali refugee to gain elected office,” Vilardi said. “But the world is still gonna come at you and tell you that Jim Smith, Jr. has been waiting for ten years and is next in line for that seat you want to run for.”
For all the obstacles first-time female candidates face, Vilardi noticed a refreshingly new mind-set post 2016. “The ‘Am I qualified?’ stuff we used to hear, when women would talk themselves out of running for office—what is the time management going to be, wondering how they’ll talk to their husband or partner or boss about this, worrying that they can’t make this work with their job, or that legislatures pay crap—now all of that is being negotiated in a positive way.” Instead of talking themselves out of it, they’re talking themselves into it. “It’s like lightbulbs are going off everywhere,” Vilardi said. “Prior to the 2016 election, two-thirds of VoteRunLead women would tell us they wanted a five-year plan. Now sixty percent want to run by 2020.”
Part of it was a feeling of urgency in response to what had recently been exposed, after years of the myth that it was in abeyance: sexism. When Tresa Undem conducted a poll in December 2016 asking if the Trump campaign and election had made voters “think more about sexism in our society,” 40 percent of respondents said yes. In November 2017, when she asked whether the news about sexual harassment and assault made people think more about societal sexism, 73 percent said that it did. In December 2016, 52 percent of those surveyed by Undem said that the country would be better off with more women in office; in November 2017, 69 percent gave that answer. And in 2016, 65 percent of people Undem had polled had felt that men held more positions of power in society than women; in 2017, that number had risen to 87 percent.9 “As pollsters, we don’t see shifts in attitudes this big,” Undem said, also noting that women were using the word “misogyny,” a word she’d rarely, if ever, heard in previous years.
The sight of so many women rushing to occupy elected office is almost sure to draw out antagonists. All reassurances to the contrary, this is a zero-sum game: If women gain greater political power, white men lose some of theirs. After a 2018 Indiana primary propelled multiple women to wins, a law professor named Kenneth Dau-Schmidt wrote to his local paper, describing how “disturbed” he was by the results. “The fact that all women candidates won, even against accomplished male incumbents,” he wrote, “was troubling.” It was clear to Dau-Schmidt that “hundreds of Democratic women are voting just for female candidates based on their gender.” It had apparently never occurred to him that the history of electoral politics in America was one of voters pulling levers for candidates based on their gender, but he was certainly not alone in his irritation, and his response felt particularly resonant as we lived through the potent and damaging backlash to the election of Barack Obama and the symbolic threat of Hillary Clinton, the real and presumptive victories that had landed us with the Tea Party and eventually the Trump presidency.
Andrea Steele of Emerge America, which trains Democratic women candidates in twenty-four states, worked on Carol Moseley Braun’s campaign in 1992 and remembered the drop-off in women candidates that happened after 1992. “We thought everything was going to change,” she said, recalling the deep disappointment when it didn’t. “The difference between then and now is we have infrastructure. EMILY’s List is stronger, Emerge is growing its support structure, there are state organizations helping to fund candidates. And a big part of what we’ve seen over the years is that when women get into politics, they start bringing other women in.”