More women stepping up to run for office
When Gretchen Whitmer became the Democratic leader of the Michigan state Senate in 2010, she found that there were more men named John (five) in the 38-member body than women (four).
Whitmer, 46, recalled that fact at a two-day San Francisco conference and candidate training session hosted this weekend by Emily’s List — the 32year-old organization that supports Democratic, abortionrights female candidates across the country. But Whitmer and
the other 100 female candidates in town for the training see signs that those gender disparities could slowly be changing.
In the entire 2015-16 election cycle, 920 women contacted Emily’s List to express interest in running for office. Since President Trump was inaugurated in January, nearly 19,000 have reached out to the organization, which distributed $90 million to candidates in the last election cycle.
Emily’s List has expanded its staff by 20 percent and will be supporting congressional candidates in more midterm races than ever, including several nationally watched battles in California. Not all of those women will be running for office next year, said Stephanie Schriock, the organization’s president. But she hopes to help build a farm team of future female office holders for a Democratic Party that has lost more than 1,000 state and local seats over the past decade.
“For literally 32 years, we’ve mostly had to go out and recruit candidates,” Schriock said. “Literally sit at their kitchen table and encourage — some might say beg — women to run for office. So when we saw saw all these women signing up, we felt that we had to respond. So we started with candidate training.”
And some are learning how to weave their personal stories into their campaigns.
One of the women stepping up is Whitmer, who is running for Michigan governor next year. As she campaigns, she can explain firsthand by speaking authentically how the paucity of female officeholders can affect legislation.
In 2013, the GOP-dominated Michigan Legislature considered a bill that would have required women to buy additional insurance coverage if they chose to have an abortion — before they would need one —including in cases where a woman was a victim of rape or incest. There was little public input.
Whitmer stood before the Senate and told her colleagues about how she had been raped 20 years earlier. It was a story she hadn’t even told her father. But she couldn’t hold back, as it was germane to legislation that could reshape women’s lives in her state.
“Thank God it didn’t result in a pregnancy,” Whitmer said on the Senate floor. “Because I can’t imagine going through what I went through and then having to consider what to do about an unwanted pregnancy from an attacker.”
“As a legislator, a lawyer, a woman and the mother of two girls, I think the fact that rape insurance is even being discussed by this body is repulsive, let alone the way it has been orchestrated and now shoved through the Legislature,” she said. Despite her impassioned plea, the measure passed.
She hopes that with more women running for office, that type of legislation will be more rare.
“They’re doing this because they’re kind of like me — fed up with the environment where our voices aren’t heard, they’re not respected and where barriers to our ability to seek medical care are being discussed and erected every single day,” Whitmer said.
Whitmer’s legacy of frankly sharing experiences that are rarely told publicly is living on in women like Katie Hill, a Democrat. The 30-year-old nonprofit leader is a first-time candidate who is challenging incumbent Rep. Steve Knight, R-Lancaster, for a Los Angeles County congressional seat Democrats think they have a chance at flipping.
This month, Hill released a three-minute-long online video in which she spoke frankly about how she had an unplanned pregnancy when she was 19 years old. She posted the video to her Facebook page on Oct. 6, three days after the GOP-controlled House passed a measure that would make it a criminal act to abort a fetus 20 weeks or older, unless the pregnancy involved rape or incest or put the mother’s life was at risk. Knight voted for the measure.
In the video, Hill looks directly into the camera and frankly recalled the choices she faced.
“It’s not something I ever thought would happen to me,” she said in the video. “And if it did happen I thought I knew what I would do in that situation. I’d always considered myself pro-choice . . . but what I didn’t know was what it would actually feel like to be faced with that kind of choice.”
As she was trying to make her decision, she had a miscarriage. Afterward, the choice reinforced to her “that it’s a decision that only a woman in that situation can make,” she says in the video. “Her family can’t make it for her. Her partner can’t make it for her. And the government most certainly can’t make it for her.”
Hill strongly believed that she wanted to directly share her story with voters, “because we have to connect it to the human element.”
Still, Hill said she has heard questions on the trail along the lines of, “You seem sweet, but will you be able to stand up to Steve Knight?” that she doubts male candidates ever hear. Back in Michigan, Whitmer heard a stranger one: One voter asked, “Are you going to run as a woman?”
“As you can imagine, I had to pause for a moment,” Whitmer said. She responded that she is not only running as a mom, but a former prosecutor and the former Democratic leader of the state Senate.
“I’ve learned to see the question behind the question: Are you only going to talk about women’s health issues?”