Midterm successes spark more women to seek office
Democrats lead candidate recruiting to build on diversity, ‘Trump effect’
CEDAR PARK — Even on a rainy Thursday night in the busy weeks before Christmas, nearly two dozen women crowded into a country club meeting room here, fired up about the possibility of running for office.
Democratic recruiters report that about 100 women attended similar “Candidate 101” classes across Texas last week. The party is searching far and wide for potential candidates as Democratic leaders look to capitalize on momentum from the November midterm election, when women claimed a greater share of political power in Congress than ever before.
The 102 women elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in November represent 23 percent of House members. Women will hold 38 of the 181 avail-
able seats when the Texas Legislature convenes in January — about 20 percent.
“I think there’s more work to be done for increasing diversity so everybody has a seat at the table,” said Pooja Sethi, who is Indian and who worked as a fundraiser for several Austin-area Democratic candidates. She wants to see more South Asians in the Texas Legislature. “The future is bright.”
Slightly more than 1 in 10 women attending introductory campaigning classes already know what office they want to target, such as city council or the local school board, a post on the State Board of Education, a Texas House seat or the U.S. Congress, said Kimberly Caldwell, program director of Annie’s List, which recruits, trains and endorses female Democratic candidates. Roughly half the attendees told Annie’s List organizers they are exploring their options, and roughly a third of the women said they want to learn so they can help someone else.
Last week, 39 women joined a Candidate 101 training in Arlington. Another 43 met in Houston, as did 21 women in Cedar Park, a suburb of Austin.
“It’s really designed to be a small first step. It’s really just getting yourself into the pipeline,” said Caldwell.
‘What do I do?’
That’s what some 220 women did by attending training meetings in Houston, Dallas, Tarrant County and San Antonio after the women’s marches of January 2017, held to protest Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016.
“There was this desperate sense of, ‘What do I do? What do I do? I’m not OK with what happened,” recalled Caldwell.
Republican women have had a tougher time making inroads in political office. Of the 38 women who won Texas state legislative races, just nine were Republicans.
“The Trump effect is more of a factor than Hillary Clinton,” said Nancy Bocskor, director of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at Texas Woman’s University and a former Republican fundraiser. “Those women just didn’t whine about, ‘Oh my gosh the world is falling apart.’ It was, ‘I am running for office.’ And they learned how to run for office and a lot of them ran good campaigns.”
Some of the struggle for Republican women is they are not as aggressively recruited as Democratic women, said Bocskor. In part, that’s because Republicans eschew identity politics in favor of looking for candidates with broadbased party views, she said.
“We need to change, but does anyone want to embrace change?” Bocskor said.
Kim Olson, a Democrat and retired Air Force colonel, said she awoke after Trump’s election “mad as hell” and determined to run for office — she just didn’t know which one.
After learning Democrats were having a tough time finding candidates to run for Texas agriculture commissioner, the beekeeper and farmer decided that was the office she wanted, she told the women gathered at the “Candidate 101” course in Cedar Park.
‘Mad as hell’
With no name recognition but a strong personality, she earned 3.8 million votes — more than any other woman who has run statewide in Texas, including former Gov. Ann Richards and former U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson and failed gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis. Olson, who raised close to $450,000 — largely in donations of less than $200 — fell 5 percentage points short of defeating Republican Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.
Olson said she wants to use the political capital she has built to find a female candidate to run against U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, whose seat is up for re-election in 2020.
Noting that 2020 will mark the 100-year anniversary of women’s winning the right to vote, she said, “Some woman is going to run. If Beto (O’Rourke) doesn’t do it, let’s find the right woman.”
Olson hinted she would be willing to run herself if no suitable candidate emerges, but stressed she wants to help “take these kids from JV to varsity.”
“I’m going to be unapologetic — it’s got to be all about women,” she said. “This is what the long game looks like.”
Briana Burns, who attended the Annie’s List training last week, felt a pang of guilt after the 2016 election. “I wasn’t going to feel that way again,” she said. Now she wants to be on the ballot in 2024.
She quit her job as a special education teacher to work as a field coordinator on Democrat Mike Siegel’s Congressional campaign in Austin in the midterms. He lost in the 10th Congressional District by 4 percentage points. Most of his volunteers were women, she said.
“We won’t have a Beto on the ticket. It’s the women who are building the infrastructure we’re going to use in 2020,” she said.