For female candidates, threats, harassment come every day

Four days before the 2016 congressional primary in her Northern California district, Erin Schrode woke up to tens of thousands of messages. They were everywhere: in her email, on her cellphone, on her Facebook and her Twitter and her Instagram.

“All would laugh with glee as they gang raped her and then bashed her bagel eating brains in,” one said.

“It’d be amusing to see her take twenty or so for 8 or 10 hours,” another said, again suggesting gang rape.

It has been two years since Schrode, now 27, lost her Democratic primary and moved on. But the abuse — a toxic sludge of online trolling steeped in misogyny and antiSemitism that also included photoshopped images of her face stretched into a Nazi lampshade and references to “preheating the ovens” — never stopped.

The 2018 election cycle has brought a surge of female candidates. A record number of women ran or are running for the Senate, the House and governorships, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Many more are running for state legislatures and local offices. And in the process, they are finding that harassment and threats, already common for women, can be amplified in political races — especially if the candidate is a member of a minority group.

Last year, sexist and antiSemitic abuse helped drive Kim Weaver, D-Iowa, out of her race against Rep. Steve King.

Someone crept onto her property overnight and put up a “for sale” sign. The neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer published an article (no longer available) titled, as Weaver recalled it, “Meet the Whore Who’s Running Against Steve King,” increasing what was already an onslaught of threats.

When she withdrew from the race, King suggested she made up the threats. “I wanted #KimWeaver IN the race — not out,” he tweeted. “Democrats drove her out of the race — not R’s. Death threats likely didn’t happen but a fabrication.”