This year is gearing up to easily eclipse 1992 as the “Year of the Woman” in American government with 526 female challengers and incumbents — most of them Democrats — setting their sights on the November midterm elections.
As of last week, 395 total women were candidates for the House of Representatives, 72 of them seeking reelection, according to the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. Among them are 317 Democrats. There are also 38 female challengers to U.S. Senate seats in 2018 and 12 incumbent women are running again. And in governorship races, 48 Democratic women and 31 female Republicans are up for office.
The organization Emily’s List, which backs Democratic female candidates who support pro-choice legislation, reported that it saw a huge uptick in information requests from women after the 2016 Presidential election. Over the span of a month after Nov. 8, 2016, Emily’s List was contacted by 1,000 women seeking advice about running for office, the organization told NBC — that’s compared to 920 inquiries Emily’s List fielded from women in the entire 2015-2016 campaign year.
Its president, Stephanie Shriock, said that the election of Donald Trump, and the Women’s March and #MeToo movement that came after it, has lit a proverbial fire under women to run for office and oppose what they see as Republican-fueled agendas against women’s rights.
“Our real motivation now is what this Republican Party is doing to us,” Shriock told NBC, referring to issues like taxes, education, health care and reproductive rights. “Women are saying ‘Yes, I want my voice heard. I need to do this for my family, for my community, for my state.'”
Anti-Trump sentiments in polling data are further evidence that Democratic women are running for office to do something proactive against legislation they view as counterproductive to the women’s movement.
A January NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll revealed that Trump’s approval rating among women was a bleak 33% and a total of 56% said that they “strongly disapprove” of his performance as President. Women in the poll also favored a Democrat-run Congress by 12 points.
“We’re going through a pendulum swing,” former Defense official Elissa Slotkin — who’s now running as a Democrat for a Congressional seat in Michigan — told NBC. “And women feel like they need to do more to defend rights that they thought were understood.”
The women Democrats running for office this year are from a varied array of backgrounds and experiences, like former State Department advisor Lauren Baer, who could be the first woman in a same-sex marriage elected to Congress, Vietnam War refugee-turned pediatrician Mai-Khanh Tran, pediatrician Kim Schrier, first-generation Americans Aruna Miller and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, 28-year-old state legislator Abby Finkenauer — who would be the youngest women ever elected to Congress — former Navy helicopter pilot Mikie Sherrill and retired Marine Corps fighter pilot Amy MCGrath.
“We need a diversity of perspectives to get good policies, a diversity of professions, life experiences, race and geography,” Shriock said. “We’ve been waiting for this moment. We’ve encouraged teachers and nurses and scientists and businesswomen. We sometimes have to remind women that you don’t need a law degree to run for office.”
