ANALYSIS

WASHINGTON— The final bell rings at 2:35 at Little Rock’s Stephens Elementary, which means Gwen Combs, who teaches the gifted kids, can be out running for Congress by 5.

Combs didn’t even spend a lot of time talking about politics before 2016, much less thinking about being a politician. But she hadn’t organized a political event, either, before her outrage over Donald Trump’s victory led her to lead the Women’s March for Arkansas on the day after the president’s inauguration.

After that, she started one of the progressive activist groups that have proliferated across the U.S. in the wake of the wildly successful day of marches. Then she went to Washington and lobbied her senators. Then, seven months removed from a life devoid of political ambition, she filed papers to challenge the Republican incumbent in the 2nd District.

“It may be bold to step forward to an office with such significance right from the start,” Combs, 43, said this week, “but bold is what we need right now.”

When it comes to seeking office, Democratic women have never been bolder.

Tens of thousands of them marched again on Saturday, marking the one-year anniversary of the inauguration with another vivid national display of the liberal energy that has Republicans deeply concerned about the 2018 midterms.

This time, there is no question about whether their fire will be fleeting.

Women who attended last year’s marches turned themselves into leaders of the anti-Trump “resistance” movement that helped thwart Trump and the Republican Congress on health care.

Unwilling to merely make noise from the sidelines, some of them began signing up to replace the people they were inundating with phone calls.

As of Jan. 1, 313 women planned to run as Democrats for the House of Representatives — a 146 per cent increase from the 127 who had signed on by the same week in the 2016 election cycle, according to data provided by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

There have been similar surges at other levels of office. The previous record for female candidates for state governor is 34. This year, at least 49 Democratic women alone have signed up or said they are thinking about it.

“It comes down to winning elections,” said Rita Bosworth, who quit her job as a public defender to run Sister District, an organization she founded to support Democratic candidates in Republican states. “We can march and we can sign petitions, but without that electoral power, we continue to lose.”

The numbers are likely to rise further. Women are swamping candidate-training sessions that once struggled to draw crowds. EMILY’s List, which works to elect pro-choice Democratic women, says it has received inquiries about running for office from 26,000 people, roughly 26 times the number at the same time in the 2016 cycle.

Female candidates said they were inspired by Hillary Clinton’s defeat to a man they saw a raging sexist.

“I would say that the starting point, the igniting factor, is the misogyny that arose throughout the campaign season leading up to the 2016 election,” said Combs, an Air Force veteran. “It really hit women in a way that we haven’t been confronted with so publicly, and gosh, so demeaningly.”

Gina Ortiz Jones, a former Air Force intelligence officer, worked for the U.S. Trade Representative under Barack Obama, then served as a crossing guard at last year’s Washington march. Unhappy working under Trump, she quit her job in June to move back to Texas and run against vulnerable Republican Rep. Will Hurd.

Jones, 36, whose website prominently notes that she is a lesbian and the daughter of a single mother from the Philippines, has raised more than $300,000 to date.

Having “watched a highly qualified woman, a lifelong public servant, just be disparaged and insulted by a person with not even half the character,” and then defeated, “we are done assuming that anyone is going to do for us that which we can do for ourselves,” Jones said.

With liberals of both genders furious at Trump, and with Republicans viewed as imperiled, there has also been a surge in Democratic men running — 750 had signed on this time as of Jan. 1, a 129 per cent jump from 327 the same week last cycle. Women now represent a mere 23 per cent of all likely House candidates, Democratic and Republican. That is up substantially from 19 per cent in the 2016 cycle, but far from enough to ensure more women will actually win.

And many of the Democratic women are challenging Republican incumbents, noted Rutgers University-Camden political science professor Kelly Dittmar. House incumbents win re-election bids more than 85 per cent of the time.

“Those,” Dittmar said, “are going to be tough races.” But many women have been uninterested in the idea of paying dues by running for lower offices. With the help of the political networks that emerged from the marches — part of what Dittmar calls “encouragement infrastructure” — they have talked each other into making bigger leaps than they had previously contemplated.

Sarah Riggs Amico, executive chairperson of 4,000-empoyee car-hauling company Jack Cooper, had never marched for anything before she participated in the Atlanta women’s march last year. Inspired to action, she joined a group of executives concerned about the state of the U.S. democracy.

She soon set up a conference call with a fellow executive to discuss the issue of recruiting female candidates.

“Five minutes into the call,” said Amico, 38, “she said, ‘Why aren’t you running?’ . . . I said, ‘No, because I’m not crazy and that appears to be a prerequisite right now.’ She said, ‘No, I’m serious.’ ” Amico, who had moved on from a girlhood dream of becoming president or senator, eventually relented. And she decided to run for Georgia’s second-highest elected office, lieutenant-governor.

“Enough is enough,” she said. “I can do better. I know because I’ve done it.”

The female candidates will have the backing of an impressive femaledominated grassroots infrastructure. Membership of groups that have sprung up in 2017 to challenge Trump and Republicans tends to be more than two-thirds female, early research suggests. About 75 per cent of Sister District’s 25,000 volunteers are women, Bosworth said.

The first-timers are realistic about their odds. Moore said she is “cautiously” optimistic. Regardless, though, she already sees her candidacy as a success.

Just as Clinton has inspired people like her to run, she knows women whose candidacies were inspired by her own.