FORGET THE PANTSUIT
‘Badass’ women flex literal muscle in races to win political strength
Katie Hill has heard the words “you’re intimidating” and “you’re really intense” so many times in her life, the 31-year-old has lost count. As a teenager, she found herself perplexed by those accusations, often thinking, “What am I supposed to do with that?”
The answer, it turns out, is run for office. Tuesday, California voters in the 25th District, located just north of Los Angeles, will have a chance to send Hill, a first-time candidate who has spent most of her adult life working in nonprofit organizations that aid the homeless, to Congress.
“This can be hard,” Hill says in her campaign ad, which shows her dressed in athletic wear as she free-climbs a nearly vertical mountain. “Not as hard as running for Congress when corporations are backing the other guy. ... It won’t be easy, but I’m up for the challenge.”
Women across the country are running in record numbers this year, many in furious response to President Donald Trump. It’s not just the number of women running that make 2018 different – it’s how they’re running. After decades of being
“I’m not ever gonna be afraid to show off my strength. That’s my personality, and I want people to know that’s who I am.”
Debbie Mucarsel-Powell Democratic congressional candidate in Miami
told to look, sound and act a certain way, female candidates across the USA buck the traditional concept of electability, proudly showing off their physical strength in campaign ads that feature them boxing, mountain climbing, scuba diving and more.
“The thing that’s so great about these ads is they’re not talking about their strength, they’re just showing themselves in very strong positions and situations. So the subliminal message is, ‘She’s a badass woman!’ ” said Patricia Russo, executive director of the Women’s Campaign School, a nonpartisan, issue-neutral training ground for women interested in politics, at Yale University in Connecticut. “What people see are candidates who are strong, confident and self-assured. Communicating that is half the battle when running for office.”
For Hill, who announced her candidacy on International Women’s Day, it wasn’t about explicitly showing off physical strength in her bid to unseat Republican incumbent Steve Knight.
“What I knew is that if I was going to run, I was going to run as me,” said Hill, who started rock climbing in 2006 and used a drone to film her ad. “I think this is largely a generational thing. So many young women are running who were born after a lot of gains had been made in the workplace, so young women, we can be a little more authentic.”
The 2018 election is being hailed as “The Year of the Woman, Part II,” a reference to 1992, when women ran in record numbers after a Supreme Court fight that saw Justice Clarence Thomas confirmed to the court despite allegations of sexual harassment.
But 1992, which resulted in four female senators heading to D.C., has nothing on 2018. A combined 260 women are on the ballot Tuesday in U.S. House and Senate races, and 16 are up for governorships. Almost 3,800 women are running for state legislative seats.
This election cycle, they look different.
In Ohio’s 14th Congressional District, in the northeast corner of the state, Democrat Betsy Rader hops on a bike in an ad and talks about when she was hit by a car as a child, which led to back problems, a spinal fusion and what insurance companies could now consider a pre-existing condition. She uses the story as a jumping-off point to promise to fight for constituents’ health care if she beats Republican incumbent David Joyce, who has held the seat since 2012.
Democrat Sharice Davids is a former mixed martial arts fighter running against Republican incumbent Kevin Yoder in the 3rd District in eastern Kansas. In an ad in which she discusses fighting for progress – mentioning her Native American heritage and that she was raised by a single mom – Davids pulls on boxing gloves and spars with a male opponent.
For decades, female candidates were told to appeal to voters by being ladylike, while simultaneously proving they were “tough enough” for the job. It’s a difficult line to straddle, said Rebecca Traister, an author who has written on women and politics through a feminist lens. If the political leadership model is historically that of a white man, then people who don’t fit in that box better persuade voters that they’re like a white man, Traister said. Enter female candidates in pantsuits.
After 2016, when a candidate many people considered unelectable ascended to the presidency against Hillary Clinton, the pantsuit queen who also tried to showcase a warm, grandmotherly side, women started ignoring politics’ archaic rules.
“This is emblematic of a greater lesson: Conforming to the system isn’t going to save you from its punishments or its biases,” Traister said. “Satisfying a system that doesn’t make room for you or respect you doesn’t spare you from its abuses.
“There’s been this revelation of, ‘Oh wait, I can conform to all these old ideas of what leadership is supposed to look like, and I can still lose to an unprepared ding-dong … so why am I trying to compete on that field? I’m just going to compete the way I am,’ ” Traister said.
At EMILY’s List, an organization that recruits and endorses Democratic women candidates who support abortion rights, President Stephanie Schriock recalled her days as a campaign manager, when she advised a male candidate to cover up his tattoos, worried that they’d turn off voters. This fall, when she saw Democratic congressional candidate MJ Hegar’s ad in which she explains how she uses tattoos to cover the scars she acquired when her Air Force helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, Schriock “really felt like something had changed – and I was proud, because we’ve had lots of moments like that in this cycle.”
Hegar, who is running in northern Austin, Texas, makes no effort to hide her toughness. On her website, she wrote, “What kind of Democrat is it going to take to win TX-31? An ass-kicking, motorcycle-riding, Texas Democrat. And that’s exactly the kind I am.”
It’s not just Democrats eschewing political stereotypes.
In Arizona, U.S. Senate candidate Martha McSally boasts in a campaign ad about her 26 years in the Air Force and her honor in being the first female fighter pilot, and she proudly recalls when she “told Washington Republicans to grow a pair of ovaries” and get the health care vote done.
McSally, who represents Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District, is in a tight race with Democratic nominee Krysten Sinema, who represents the state’s 9th Congressional District.
Trump, who endorsed her campaign, said of McSally, “She’s the real deal, she’s tough.”
Ads that show off subtle or overt physical strength resonate because “voters are looking for someone who’s gonna fight for them,” Schriock said.
That’s exactly what Debbie Mucarsel-Powell wanted to communicate in Florida. A Democratic congressional candidate in Miami, Mucarsel-Powell has been a longtime advocate of protecting Florida’s coral reef. She’s been a certified scuba diver for 21 years.
In her campaign to unseat Republican incumbent Carlos Curbelo, Mucarsel-Powell filmed an ad in which she scuba dives to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and holds up signs explaining that if voters elect her, she’ll protect Florida’s coral reef, the third-largest barrier reef in the world.
Mucarsel-Powell insisted on shooting despite a looming storm and flashes of lightning. The ad, she said, was all her idea, and she was dogged in her determination to finish it.
“I’m not ever gonna be afraid to show off my strength,” she said. “That’s my personality, and I want people to know that’s who I am.”
During her childhood in Ecuador – Mucarsel-Powell immigrated to the USA with her mother when she was 14 – all the little boys wanted to play sports with her, she said, because “they liked that I was tough.” Why change that?
Traister called it “surprising, longawaited and exhilarating to see women presenting themselves as nuanced, complicated, full human beings.”
“We’re operating in a world where what’s rapidly expanding is the model of who can lead us,” Traister said. “And that’s a really important process that’s taken a really long time in our country.”