Susan Chira

Democrats are debating how much voting issues can swing an election, whether identity politics are energizing or polarizing, and if it is better to double down on politically engaged women, people of color and left-leaning voters or tack to the center. All of those played out in a fight that catapulted Abrams to national attention. The open question is what lesson to draw: that her strategy was more successful than any recent Democrat who ran statewide, or that it still was not enough to tug Georgia — and perhaps the country — into the blue column.

For Abrams, the answer is unequivocal: Her campaign turned out record numbers of black, Latino and Asian voters, and she also won a larger share of the white vote than President Barack Obama or scions of Georgia political royalty like Jason Carter and Michelle Nunn. She actively courted voters and highlighted issues central to an emerging demographic majority that proved elusive for Democrats in 2016.

“We recognized that we could center communities of color, marginalized communities, and talk about their needs without alienating the white community,” she said in a recent extended interview. “That’s been a false narrative that’s been part of politics, especially in the South, for a very long time.”

This, she argues, is a playbook Democrats should follow for 2020, whether or not she runs for president — a choice she is actively considering.

“I need women of color, particularly black women, to understand that our achievements should not be diminished,” she said, particularly that she came so close in a red state. She added, “Now I’m not saying I would be the best candidate, but I’m not going to dismiss it out of hand the way others do.”

The warning signs, though, remain. Abrams struggled to win votes in rural areas, which will be key in some battleground states for Democrats. And the debate continues over whether she ran to the left of some Georgians she needed to persuade, and whether emphasizing turnout of new and infrequent voters will compensate for the loss of non-college-educated white voters.

In the bitter days after a defeat she did not expect, Abrams was uncharacteristically flattened.

“I’m angry, I’m sad and for about eight days I was despondent,” she said. In the end, she concluded, “I believe in turning anger into action.”

So she has filled her days with activity — speeches; helping to found two organizations; revising her nonfiction book, originally titled “Minority Leader,” for paperback release — “and then I’ve got this little decision about what I’m going to do with the rest of my life that’s also hanging over me like the sword of Damocles.” She said she will run for office again, and will decide whether for senator, governor or president by late March or early April.

Until then, she has been crisscrossing Georgia — and making strategic national appearances — on a combination thank-you and mobilization tour, offering her experience as Exhibit A of a cause Democrats are pressing with renewed fervor: voting rights.

“The fight I see today is a fight for our democracy,” she said at one of those stops, the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus’ annual Heritage Dinner. “It’s not a partisan fight. It’s a hard fight, the fight to defend the right to vote in Georgia. Voter suppression is real.”

She has stumped for Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group she founded that is suing Georgia officials over voting irregularities it argues distorted the election results. The state legislators she addressed had just concluded a heated debate over a bill aimed at redressing voting issues that many in the room believed did not go far enough.

She is spurred by her conviction that she lost because her opponent, Brian Kemp, who oversaw elections as secretary of state, took actions that are now being challenged in lawsuits: purging voting rolls, disqualifying voters whose names varied across state databases and closing polling places.

“A candidate could always be better, but I don’t believe there’s a flaw in our process that someone can point to and say this is why this happened,” she said. “The results were purely and fully attributable to voter suppression.”

Hillary Clinton echoed that charge over the weekend at the commemoration of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, describing a litany of tactics to suppress registration and voting that left candidates “deprived of votes they otherwise would have gotten.” She added, “Stacey Abrams should be governor, leading that state right now.”

It is a sweeping conclusion that even many voting rights advocates say remains extremely difficult to prove. Sara Henderson, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, who worked for Abrams in the state Legislature and admires her, said: “None of our groups has hard data on exactly what happened. We have no way of knowing, no paper trail.”

The charges infuriate Republicans. “It’s the most incendiary, divisive line of political rhetoric imaginable,” said Brian Robinson, a political consultant who worked in the administration of Georgia’s previous governor, Nathan Deal. “When you say voter suppression, that brings to mind racial connotations of historical acts of abuse by the state. That’s not what is happening here. They’re talking about technical issues.”

Abrams is also championing a key Democratic priority for 2020 and beyond — pressing for the fullest census count, a key determinant of political power, congressional seats and redistricting. She is working with others to create an organization, Fair Count, that will promote hard-to-count groups like people of color and the poor. In Georgia, she said, that includes 2 million people.

Turning out these new and infrequent voters as well as policing voting rights and allying with white liberals, focusing on issues like health care, jobs and education that speak to both groups, is the playbook, she said, that can turn Georgia blue.

Her campaign was a preview of the ongoing debate about identity politics — how explicitly candidates can embrace race and gender without alienating white male voters. Abrams, who wrote an extended defense of identity politics for Foreign Affairs, said that while she believes it essential to fight for groups that have been excluded and marginalized, the issues she emphasized appealed to white voters as well. In a white rural community, she said, she focused on the perils of closing rural hospitals, which meant job losses and health risks. Before black audiences, she emphasized high rates of black maternal mortality.

“Georgia can be won,” she said, particularly with the added resources of a presidential campaign. There is the inconvenient fact, however, that she lost.

Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, said Abrams’ focus on turnout was far more effective than previous Democratic candidates’ assumptions that minorities would support them while they courted what she called “the elusive moderate or centrist voter.” But she said Abrams did not get the level of support she needed in rural parts of the state, despite intensive efforts to reach out, particularly to rural black voters.

Robinson, the Republican consultant, said he believed that Georgia was in play for Democrats and that they were investing more money than Republicans trying to win it. But he said the party’s leftward turn would undo them.

“Democrats are doing everything they can to assure that those Republicans who just started voting Democratic lose faith,” he said. “Their embrace of socialism, they’re leaving Middle America and going too far.”

Abrams scoffs at that line of attack. She thinks people are hungry for bold proposals, but also willing to be led through incremental steps to achieve them.

“We have to give the public credit for being able to hear about big ideas without expecting those big ideas to come to fruition immediately,” she said.

Abrams’ track record as the minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives suggested a willingness to compromise and work across the aisle that drew attacks from her left during the primary. During the general election, Kemp, now the governor, called her radical.

“That’s not her,” Gillespie said. “People believed it because she was a black woman. Because she dared to say we’re going to try to increase minority turnout, all of a sudden that was a radical idea.”

In a season in which six women, one of them black, are already running for president, Abrams said she had already seen echoes of what she faced in her campaign. Some people she considered friends did not back her because they did not believe that a black woman could win. Others counted up every black politician who supported her opponents in the primary. And still others picked over her hairstyle, weight and personal life as a single, childless woman.

“We’ve already seen questions about how Elizabeth Warren reaches for a beer, about Kamala’s racial heritage and how close to 100 percent is it,” she said, referring to the Massachusetts senator and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. “We have already seen recaps of questions asked of women’s behavior in leadership that are not asked of men.”

She added, “Some of the critiques of me were based on race and gender, some were based purely on race and some were based purely on gender — I got to experience the entire landscape of concern.”

As Abrams keeps to a frenetic schedule, there is one task she has not been able to check off: finishing a trilogy in her series of romance novels. (She has written eight featuring adventurous black women under the pen name Selena Montgomery.) “My mother has mentioned more than once I haven’t gotten it done,” she said. “I’m working on it, man. It’s a different mindset.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/politics/stacey-abrams-georgia-democrats.html" id="b2b5160b-8ce0-38df-a2ec-59dee8f1048f">The New York Times</a>.

Abrams, After Narrow Loss, Has Some Decisions to Make

ATLANTA — Pick a strategy Democrats are considering before 2020, and Stacey Abrams’ narrow loss in the Georgia governor’s race serves either as a blueprint or a warning sign.

As Abrams keeps to a frenetic schedule, there is one task she has not been able to check off: finishing a trilogy in her series of romance novels. (She has written eight featuring adventurous black women under the pen name Selena Montgomery.) “My mother has mentioned more than once I haven’t gone it done,” she said. “I’m working on it, man. It’s a different mindset.”

In gatherings of friends, in book clubs and discussions across the city, women said they were struck by seeing their own life experiences reflected in the possibilities and constraints faced by Abrams, whose narrow loss in the Georgia governor’s race they were still mourning, and Obama, who just published the best-selling memoir “Becoming.”

They related to how Abrams and Obama defied people who questioned if they were good enough to succeed. How Obama won over the white Democratic establishment — but only after enduring attacks and caricatures that sometimes left her shaken. How Abrams did not tone down her words to please anyone, and how Obama felt she had to.

In a city that showcases African-American achievement and influence, reading Obama’s memoir was a bittersweet reminder for these women of a time when a black president and first lady seemed a culmination of a long struggle for power. It comes as Democratic women here are wrestling with outrage over widespread allegations of voter suppression in the governor’s race, fear that Abrams’ loss may disillusion black voters they coaxed to the polls, and hope that the next time victory could be within reach.

“I think America can take Michelle Obama,” said Kia Smith, who gathered with three other young professional friends at a Starbucks for what became a searing exchange about the promise and burden of being black women. “The story makes us feel good. And she’s on the daytime shows, she dances with Ellen, she goes on ‘Jimmy Kimmel,’ she’s fun, she’s not a threat.

“But someone like Stacey Abrams, who is smart, who is bipartisan, but who is unapologetic about fairness and justice — that’s a threat. And that also lets me know that we’re not really ready for the political power of black women.”

Across town, in a neighborhood where yards are still planted with defiant Stacey Abrams signs, the Pearls literary club convened an extra session this month to discuss “Becoming." They zeroed in on the theme of striving against denigration and self-doubt. The room of older women, with Ph.D.s and law degrees among them, traded stories of being told, like Michelle Obama, that they did not belong.

Just as Obama’s guidance counselor dismissed her chances of getting into Princeton, a Wellesley College dean informed Ruby Thomas, now a judge, that she shouldn’t be there.

“She called me into her office and explained to me why I wasn’t qualified to be there,” Thomas remembered. “I tell that story to young girls, who need to know that people are going to judge you, but they are going to misjudge you.”

That, in turn, reminded the women of a time when Abrams was invited to the governor’s mansion as one of many high school valedictorians, only to be stopped by a guard who didn’t believe she was a guest.

They relished what Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, a professor of English at Spelman College, called Obama’s “sassiness” in the book — an outspokenness that the first lady held in check after early criticism of her as angry or abrasive.

“Do you think her honesty increased because of the things said by the person who now occupies the White House?” Harper asked the room of women, who deliberately avoided mentioning President Donald Trump by name. When one referred to the “gentleman in the White House,” the otherwise decorous group hooted.

Smith and her friends, some of whom were also reading “Becoming” in their book clubs, welcomed an unleashed Obama as well. But they said they struggled, as she did, with the stigma of caricature.

“There are these extra steps that we as black women have to go through to make sure we’re not appearing angry, aggressive, mean, nasty, insubordinate,” said Alexis Watt, who works as a communications and social media consultant. “We have this stereotype that black women are angry, but we have every right to be angry.”

Both generations of women who spoke in interviews said they were fighting despair at the contrast between the Trump White House and the Obama White House.

A guest at the Pearls gathering brought her 6-year-old, born the year President Barack Obama was re-elected. Her name: Renaissance.

At Starbucks, Jasmine Mitchell said to her friends, “We felt as though we were winning all around. We got complacent. We were so naive.”

So the Abrams run raised hopes that a black woman they embraced might win — with their help. From the historic Sweet Auburn market not far from Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, in beauty parlors and black-owned restaurants, every black woman who spoke to me had somehow tried to turn out votes, by canvassing, texting, rousting their voting-age children or cajoling their employees and co-workers.

Along with years of efforts to register voters and an extensive field operation by political professionals and grassroots groups, they boosted black voter turnout in Georgia higher than even the turnout for the 2016 presidential election and helped Abrams come within 55,000 votes of victory — the closest governor’s race since 1966. Lucy McBath, a black Democrat who ran on gun control after her son was killed, flipped the very House seat in the Atlanta suburbs that Jon Ossoff, hailed as a 30-year-old political wunderkind, had spent millions to pursue in a failed bid in a special election last year.

Now they are trying to figure out how to regroup.

“It’s like when you take a test and you study for it a long time and you have that feeling — ‘I’m going to pass’ — and then, after the numbers came out, it was a terrible feeling to see you didn’t pass the test,” said Charmika Spencer, owner of the Jakotes beauty salon. “How do we move forward?”

Deborah VanTrece, a prominent Atlanta chef, hashed over that very question at her restaurant, Twisted Soul Cookhouse &amp; Pours.

“It feels like we slipped through there one time and they sealed those cracks to make sure it never happens again,” she said, referring to Barack Obama’s victory.

Several of the women expressed fear the attention to black women’s political clout could fade, their accomplishments could be undone, and their efforts to organize and mobilize voters could prove too exhausting in a system that feels rigged against them.

“While I would love to clean up this mess, and I feel like I know exactly what to do, I’m like, ‘You learn how to clean it up yourself,'” said LaShondra Butler, a friend of Watt’s, referring both to black men and society at large. “They so often look to black women to be the nanny of every situation.”

Nonetheless, the conversations soon turned to resilience and the need to start early on the work of persuading voters for the 2020 elections. “I have this perspective where you fail forward — even when you lose, you build political power and momentum,” said Smith, whose job at a nonprofit includes digital organizing.

To Sheila Butler, a waitress for 22 years at the Busy Bee, an Atlanta soul food institution, the answer is simple, even though the former first lady ruled out political ambitions in her book: “I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey. I want them to run for president.”

The women at the Pearls book club wound down their contemplation of Obama and Abrams by offering optimism tempered with realism.

“We soon learned, we were back to where we started — almost,” said Ernestine Pickens-Glass, a retired professor of English at Clark Atlanta University, who hosted the book club. “But I don’t think African-Americans are ever going to accept the way things used to be.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/29/us/politics/michelle-obama-stacey-abrams-politics.html" id="63f5d708-1e0f-3c0a-af7b-0201fe26c024">The New York Times</a>.

ATLANTA — Sit down with groups of black women in Atlanta as this tumultuous political year draws to a close, and two names dominate the conversation: Michelle Obama and Stacey Abrams, and what they revealed in 2018 about how power is gained and thwarted.

Building Political Power, Using Michelle Obama and Stacey Abrams as Models

These women were championed by an array of strange bedfellows:feminists like Eleanor Smeal, celebrities like Lily Tomlin and stalwarts of a conservative administration like Laura Bush and Dick Cheney.

In the early days of the invasion, the world heard vivid stories of the changes the war had brought. Women could walk freely outside their houses and put on makeup; girls could go to school. It was a narrative that helped buoy public support for the fight in Afghanistan and deflect criticism about American empire.

In November 2001, as U.S. troops were fighting to drive al-Qaida out of the country and topple the Taliban government, Bush was given the megaphone of the president’s weekly radio address. “Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid education to women,” she said. “Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish.”

Nearly two decades later, Afghan women are all but invisible to a U.S. public thoroughly weary of the war. The future of Afghan women was not on the U.S. agenda for its peace talks with the Taliban — they have been limited to core security issues of terrorism and U.S. military presence. And there is agreement among many Democratic presidential candidates about leaving Afghanistan. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar joined male presidential hopefuls in voting against a Senate rebuke of President Donald Trump’s plans for swift withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria.

In 2004, Nasrine Gross, an Afghan women’s rights activist, was among those fighting to include a clause on women’s equality in Afghanistan’s Constitution. Today she wonders whether all the support she thought Afghan women had from the United States was just a fig leaf, a way to make military intervention more palatable to the American public via photographs of girls going to school.

“How angry I am, how anguished I am,” Gross said last month. She predicted an expansion of Taliban control and a return to past atrocities like stonings and whippings. “Where are these American women?”

It may seem that U.S. priorities have changed and that past concerns for all the girls who couldn’t go to school simply dissipated as the war dragged on. But it’s also worth noting that years of well-publicized Taliban repression of women in Afghanistan did not prompt the U.S. invasion; Sept. 11 did.

Afghan women were never at the heart of U.S. strategic interests, said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University who worked on Afghan issues in the Obama administration. Military goals came first.

“You do things for people in order to get a permissive environment to help your military operation,” he said.

Still, many in the administration did support the idea of expanding rights for women, and the United States, along with European governments and nongovernmental organizations, allocated substantial aid toward that end.

The aid has made a real difference. In the 17 years since the invasion, education for girls has spread; today they make up about 40 percent of the country’s elementary school students and about 35 percent of its middle and high school students, according tothe Feminist Majority Foundation, a Virginia-based organization led by Smeal that has been an advocate for Afghan women for more than two decades. Women now make up nearly a third of civil servants, according to the foundation, and have been encouraged to become police officers and judges. And a network of women’s shelters has been established across the country.

Yet very conservative attitudes prevail in many areas outside Kabul, the capital, and women who enter men’s worlds such as law enforcement have often been attacked or threatened.

In the peace talks, the United States wants a Taliban promise not to shelter terrorist groups like al-Qaida in exchange for a military withdrawal. It is leaving other issues such as women’s rights to separate talks, not yet even agreed to, between the Taliban and the Afghan government, which pledges to preserve women’s progress.

Signals from the Taliban have been discouraging. In interviews, diplomats speak about a group that seems emboldened. Mariam Safi, director of the Organization for Policy Research and Development Studies in Kabul, said she was told that during talks in Moscow with Afghans who are not part of the government, the Taliban said women could go to school and hold political office but not become judges or president. They regard the constitution, with its commitment to women’s equality, as illegitimate and imposed by the United States.

Afghan women are speaking up, at home and abroad. They are insisting they be at the negotiating table during future talks; more than 700 gathered recently to urge that the peace they desire not come at their expense.

“The talks are behind closed doors — it’s not transparent,” said Sima Samar, chairwoman of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. “We’ve heard nothing about the discussion of women. The Taliban keep saying we will give women rights based in Shariah. Women here are very, very worried, and I think we are all united in saying we are not going back.”

Both Smeal and Bush have continued to speak out about Afghan women over the years, but Smeal said the absence of women’s rights from the talks’ agenda has infused a new sense of urgency. “Now we’re all waking up to the problem,” she said.

Smeal said she was talking to members of Congress, bringing up the issue at the United Nations and trying to reignite bipartisan alarm, including signing a letter objecting to the withdrawal plans along with a scholar from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., the only woman on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was among several Democrats who wrote a letter urging that the Trump administration ensure that women’s rights are protected during withdrawal negotiations.

But neither the public nor the Trump administration seems to be listening — at least not so far.

Safi and Rubin pointed out that Afghan women have been victims of 40 years of war — killed during Taliban attacks and U.S. and Afghan troops’ night raids or bombings.

Rubin believes a political settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban is the only answer because the Taliban are not going away; he argues for a gradual withdrawal to ensure the Taliban live up to their commitments. “Don’t think the U.S. is going to protect you from your own fellow Afghans forever,” he said. “The best fight for women’s rights is not to wage wars that cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s not like war is good for women.”

Afghan women do, indeed, long for peace. But the Taliban’s track record leaves them wary, and they fear that the United States, like other great powers, sided with them only when convenient and is all too ready to abandon them when it is not.

“Women were pawns in the game in 2001,” Safi said. “And now they are again.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="6732d07b-9406-4386-8b75-5f463cdee177" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/sunday-review/women-afghanistan-taliban.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Sunday Review) ; (News Analysis): It was once a prominent and bipartisan cause: the liberation of Afghan women from the tyranny of the Taliban.

'Women here are very, very worried'

For decades in American politics, successful female candidates often belonged to political dynasties, following in the footsteps of a husband or father and relying on their famous last names to reassure voters. That has shifted in recent years: Few if any of the women who won new House seats in November came from powerful political families, and none of the six female presidential candidates do, either.

With Hillary Clinton saying last week that she would not run for president, Clinton became both a trailblazing figure and a transitional one. She rose to prominence as the wife of Bill Clinton, as he led Arkansas and then the nation. Her work as first lady helped her become a senator from New York. Over time, because of her own accomplishments, she advanced: presidential candidate, secretary of state, the first woman to be nominated by a major party for the White House.

With Hillary Clinton not planning to be the seventh woman running in 2020, an endlessly debated question of 2016 — did some voters resist a woman or this woman? — can be tested with women who do not have her political baggage or what turned out to be her establishment stigma.

These women, such as Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris, had significant careers in public service in their home states before reaching Washington, and they are now running for president with messages that aim to appeal broadly across ideological and gender lines. Another 2020 candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, had an admired career as a law professor before her consumer protection policy interests drew her into government. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s grandmother was an influential figure in politics in Albany, New York, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s father entered elected office around the same time she did, but their family histories in public service are not a factor in the 2020 race. Most of the women who ran for House, Senate and governor in 2018 had also worked their way up professional or political ladders without a male relation going first.

Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., who succeeded her husband in Congress in 2015, says she believes that she and Clinton are emblematic of changing times for women in politics. “I do think I’m that transition,” she said. “Some people would like to say she got it because she had the last name,” referring to her seat in Congress. “But I have my own strong qualifications, and I want people to judge me on what I do.”

Her husband, John Dingell, who died last month, represented her district for 59 years before she ran for office in 2014; his father had served before him. But Debbie Dingell said she worked to establish her own record of accomplishments. She rose at General Motors before she met her husband, kept her career after they married, and headed commissions on a range of issues in Michigan. She was offered entree into Democratic politics in 2000 initially by the president of the United Automobile Workers union, whom she knew from General Motors. When she ran, she said she asked her husband, to his dismay, not to appear at her events.

Dingell said she was the first woman to succeed her husband in Congress while he was still alive. The Center for American Women and Politics counts 47 widows elected or appointed to Congress in their husband’s place. Among them was Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican, who ran for president in 1964, long after her husband’s career was forgotten, said Ellen Fitzpatrick, author of “The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency.”

Female leaders with famous last names — as well as male leaders who have come from family dynasties too — have been members of both political parties over the years; Sen. Lisa Murkowski and former Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum both had fathers who were prominent Republicans.

Jean Carnahan, who had been the first lady of Missouri, was appointed to fill the Senate seat held by her husband, Mel, a Democrat, when he died just before the election in 2000. She recalled what it was like to be an active political partner behind the scenes.

“During my husband’s 20-some campaigns, I did the things he least enjoyed doing and that I preferred: writing speeches, designing campaign material, coming up with themes, designing the database, writing letters, scheduling, fundraising,” she said. As a result, she felt prepared to assume his seat. Although she lost re-election, her daughter (and her son) later entered politics on their own.

Lynn Yeakel, who lost narrowly to Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania when she ran in 1992, said growing up as the child of an 11-term congressman, Porter Hardy Jr., allowed her to envision running for office herself. Like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose father was a Maryland congressman, Yeakel said, “that’s the era when those of us who were exposed to political lives with our fathers were not daunted.”

Nonetheless, as a candidate, she said: “I was defined in terms of the men in my life on more than one occasion. That was so infuriating.” She had to dissociate herself from her father’s vote against civil rights legislation during her own campaign.

Male leaders may have provided women with national exposure and political networks, but as Hillary Clinton found, their conduct and record could also be liabilities. She was criticized not only for her husband’s treatment of women, but also for her embrace of aggressive counterattacks against women who accused Bill Clinton.

Before she married, she was already known from her student days at Wellesley College and her work on the staff of the special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee that recommended impeaching President Richard M. Nixon. She subordinated her career for many years to her husband’s.

“You never know with Hillary Clinton, had she not met Bill Clinton, she might well have been a political woman in her own right and maybe life would have been simpler for her,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics.

Bill Shaheen, a powerful figure in New Hampshire Democratic circles and husband of Jeanne Shaheen, the former governor of New Hampshire and now one of its senators, said that American women no longer needed men to pave the way for them. “Jeanne and I made a pact 50 years ago when we got married: I would make the money, and she would make a difference,” he said. “That didn’t happen so much then. It’s happening now all the time.”

Hillary Clinton’s candidacy changed the dynamic for women who followed her in other ways, too. She meticulously checked all the boxes for what used to be required credentials for the presidency. No major female presidential candidate today has a résumé as expansive as Clinton’s, but they are nonetheless seen as credible.

Because so many women are running in 2020, with their range of political experience, ideology and race, the coming election may be a truer test of gender attitudes. “There’s now an awful lot of diversity among these women, you’re not stuck with just one, you get to choose,” Walsh said. “Let’s see where that goes.”

Women running in 2020 may also be better armed than Clinton was against a candidate who broke all political conventions by attacking women in aggressive, sexist terms. “Now they have a bit of a road map,” Walsh said. “Even things like that horrible last debate, where he was hulking around her, she says in her book, ‘I made the decision not to respond to him and in retrospect maybe I should have turned around and said, back off buddy.’ I think the women running now learned some of that.”

Dingell, however, sounded a note of caution. “I think there are still challenges for women,” she said, including access to money and networks and even some degree of residual backlash. “It’s just we’re in changing times. People are feeling threatened."

Terry Shumaker, who worked on both Clintons’ New Hampshire campaigns, said Clinton’s popular vote victory was more of a landmark in shifting attitudes than is often recognized.

“I’ve always believed that when we vote for president, it’s a different vote than any other vote we cast,” he said. “It’s a more visceral, gut kind of thing — we want mommy or daddy, somebody bigger than life who will keep us safe. She made it possible for people to envision a woman being president.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="10532c2d-ec08-41bf-aeb2-fc287eb6c914" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/us/politics/female-candidates-2020-election.html">The New York Times</a>.

As Hillary Clinton Steps Away, a Political Era for Women Wanes

With Hillary Clinton saying last week that she would not run for president, Clinton became both a trailblazing figure and a transitional one.

As Hillary Clinton steps away, a political era for women wanes

<h1>ATLANTA — Pick a strategy Democrats are considering before 2020, and Stacey Abrams’ narrow loss in the Georgia governor’s race serves either as a blueprint or a warning sign.</h1>

This article originally appeared in <a id="bb1d2b15-99d8-429c-816b-955b122aea76" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/politics/stacey-abrams-georgia-democrats.html">The New York Times</a>.

Democrats are debating how much voting issues can swing an election, whether identity politics are energizing or polarizing, and if it is better to double down on politically engaged women, people of color and left-leaning voters or tack to the center.

Abrams, after narrow loss, has some decisions to make

<h1>She warned of a dystopian post-ERA future of women forced to enlist in the military, same-sex marriage, unisex toilets everywhere and homemakers driven into the workplace by husbands free to abandon them.</h1>

The ERA, which had been sailing to ratification, failed. Yet same-sex marriage is now the law. Women in the military see combat, although women are not required to register for the draft. Six women — so far — are running for president. A record-shattering number of women have claimed seats in Congress. And the percentage of prime-working-age women participating in the labor force has soared from 51 percent in 1972, when Congress passed the ERA, to more than 75 percent last year.

So what protections did American women earn without a constitutional amendment? Did the country get everywhere the people pushing for the amendment wanted it to go? These questions, once theoretical, are newly relevant with a push to revive the Equal Rights Amendment. It was left for dead in 1982, when three states failed to ratify it by a congressionally imposed deadline, leaving it short of the necessary two-thirds of the states needed for ratification. But in the past two years, Nevada and Illinois have ratified the amendment. In Virginia, campaigners are pushing the state to ratify the amendment before the legislative session ends on Feb. 23, though ratification is a long shot.

Schlafly may not have been able to prevent social changes that transformed the lives of American women, but she did drive a wedge between conservatives and liberals that remains today. “She was one of the early architects of class conflict as expressed through culture wars, as a way to stop the progress of the equality ideals of the professional management elite,” said Joan C. Williams, a feminist legal scholar skeptical about the usefulness of the Equal Rights Amendment. “One of the ironic messages of the ERA is not to underestimate the power of ‘bathroom anxiety’ in pushing the country to the right.”

Some of the very arguments Schlafly deployed decades ago resurfaced in the recent state legislature debates. In Nevada, Illinois and Virginia, conservative women denounced the amendment. Women already have equal rights, and an amendment would take away remaining privileges, they argued. It would make it illegal to separate the sexes in bathrooms, college dormitories or school sports, they claimed. Women would lose programs like food subsidies aimed at mothers and female-only scholarships.

What the ERA would change and what it would not is both bitterly contested and hypothetical. During the 1970s and 80s, a determined corps of lawyers led by Ruth Bader Ginsburg persuaded the Supreme Court to extend the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to cover many forms of sex discrimination. After the ERA stalled, legislators passed a bevy of new laws. Together, these had the effect of opening new doors for women.

But advocates point to gaps in existing laws and Supreme Court decisions that have limited enforcement, particularly in the areas of violence against women, sexual harassment and equal pay.

Ginsburg, speaking at the Aspen Institute in 2017, said that while women had come “almost as far” under the 14th Amendment as they would have under the ERA, she still believed an amendment had practical and symbolic value. “I would like to be able to take out my pocket Constitution and say that the equal citizenship stature of men and women is a fundamental tenet of our society like free speech,” she said.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, whose legal theories laid the basis for sexual harassment being defined as a form of sex discrimination, has championed the revival of the amendment as a weapon against what she sees as the continuing subordination of women through sexual violence and economic inequality. “You go after sexuality and economics, you’ve gone to the heart of misogyny,” she said.

The Violence Against Women Act, passed in 1994, originally allowed women to sue their attackers in federal court. This was an important provision because of wide variations in the way states prosecuted rape and sexual violence cases, said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, law school. The Supreme Court struck down that part of the law in 2000. Many laws against discrimination, including the Civil Rights Act, are based on Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce, but the court ruled that did not apply in cases of sexual violence. This would change with an equal rights amendment, he said.

Attempts to remedy the persistent pay gap between men and women have also fallen short because of rulings saying that gaps must be the result of intentional discrimination in order to violate the law and that many differences in pay are the result of factors “other than sex,” advocates say. If a woman doing the same work as a man is hired at a lower salary because her previous salary was lower, courts have ruled that is not pay discrimination, said Jessica Neuwirth, a co-founder of the ERA Coalition. She believes an equal rights amendment would strengthen Congress’ ability to remedy unequal pay.

The ERA was a touchstone of cultural anxiety when it first ran aground. If the move to renew it gained real traction, would it affect today’s most bitterly fought culture wars?

That, like so many things, depends on the conservative-liberal balance of the Supreme Court. Laws that restrict reproductive freedom obviously have a disparate impact on women, Chemerinsky said, but the court would have to decide whether such laws amount to discrimination on the basis of sex.

And our understanding of gender has changed in ways unimagined either by the suffragists who first drafted an equal rights amendment when women won the vote a century ago or the backers of the ERA a half-century later. A real push for this amendment now might affect the treatment of trans people and who is legally seen as a man or a woman.

Williams, the legal scholar, believes the conservative tenor of the current court means justices would choose the narrowest interpretations of an equal rights amendment. Transformative change would be out of reach. Neuwirth argues just the opposite.

“It’s almost more important in times like these to have very explicit constitutional language,” she said. “If the law says no discrimination on the basis of sex, then no matter what your legal ideology as a judge, the more concrete the language is, the better off people are going to be.”

Do American women still need an equal rights amendment

When Phyllis Schlafly crusaded against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s as a threat to all-American motherhood, she handed out freshly baked bread and apple pie to state legislators.

Do American women still need an equal rights amendment?

<h1>Klobuchar pointedly chose Wisconsin — the state that Clinton did not visit during the general election campaign in 2016 and lost to Trump by less than 1 percentage point. </h1>

The Wisconsin defeat, along with narrow losses in Michigan and Pennsylvania, clinched the election for Trump and inflicted a devastating wound that still haunts Democrats in Wisconsin and beyond.

In an already crowded Democratic primary field, Klobuchar was eager to highlight what her campaign hopes can set her apart: her Midwestern base and her electoral dominance in many rural, red counties in Minnesota populated by the kind of voters who have largely deserted the Democratic Party. She campaigned in Iowa later in the day.

“We’re going to look at each other and look at the challenges we face in this country,” she told an enthusiastic crowd jammed into the Shift Cyclery and Coffee Bar. “The challenge that we see in both Minnesota and Wisconsin is about the rural-urban divide. What I’ve decided to do in our state is to go to places that maybe we didn’t focus on enough in the last few years. That includes our rural areas.”

When she announced her candidacy Sunday in a Minnesota blizzard, she drove home the point: “We’re starting in Wisconsin because, as you remember, there wasn’t a lot of campaigning in Wisconsin in 2016,” she said. “With me, that changes.” She added: “I’m going to be here a lot.” It was widely seen as a dig at Clinton.

She worked quickly to establish her Wisconsin bona fides and to list her engagement with rural issues in the Senate and as a presidential candidate.

“I am so pleased to be in Wisconsin, the state where my mother was born,” she said to cheers. Her great-grandparents were cheesemakers, she said, and she visited the state every year of her childhood. She pledged to expand broadband access and demonstrated her knowledge of rural arcana like the margin protection program, which is billed as a safety net for dairy farmers.

She also name-checked the local high school colors and the local controversy about the college mascot at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire.

Klobuchar’s focus on the Midwest notwithstanding, Democrats are debating whether the best path to the presidency lies through the three key Midwestern and Northern states Clinton lost, or through a combination of newly competitive Sun Belt states including Arizona, Georgia and perhaps Texas.

In her Eau Claire talk, she soon pivoted to national issues, emphasizing that she had co-sponsored bills with Republicans on several of her priorities. She ticked off her major issues: climate change, lowering health care premiums and the cost of prescription drugs, immigration as the bedrock of American values, passing privacy laws to rein in technology companies, and the importance of protecting voting rights.

“What has President Trump done? He’s gone backward, instead of the Wisconsin state motto which is” — she paused and the crowd chimed in — “Forward.” She pledged to rejoin the international climate treaty on her first day as president. She denounced Trump’s national emergency declaration and emphasized her belief that immigrants are America.

Her grandfather, she said, was stopped at Ellis Island — there was apparently a quota on immigrants from Switzerland — and instead entered the United States from Canada. On the eve of World War II, he was fearful he would be deported and successfully applied to become a citizen.

“I wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have a sane immigration policy in this country,” Klobuchar said.

Her message of bipartisanship resonated for several voters who came to hear her speak. “I think she is able to work across the aisle in a way that’s been proven,” said Eileen Immerman, 63, a nurse in Eau Claire and a political independent.

Although Klobuchar made no reference to being a woman in her talk, several voters said her gender was also a draw.

“I just want to vote for a woman,” said Inga Orth, 37, a dairy farmer who said she knew little about Klobuchar but was eager to learn more. “I’m just so sick of men — middle-age men. I think it’s crazy that men are having opinions about abortions: It shouldn’t be men who decide on these things.” She said her top priorities were climate change and women’s rights.

That sentiment was not confined to women. “I’m ready for a woman in the top spot,” said Eric Holey, a potter in Eau Claire who was delighted that candidates were visiting Wisconsin, since he said he still believes Clinton’s failure to visit once she won the nomination contributed to the Democrats’ loss of the state. He will be evaluating candidates in part based on their support for education and health care for all.

Indeed, as Klobuchar made her way through the crowd, posing for selfies, shaking hands and tickling babies’ stomachs, Jackie Christner, a 74-year-old retired teacher who needs insulin shots, pressed her on whether she supported Medicare for all. Klobuchar said she wanted to work step by step, and supported expanding Medicaid or Medicare. “To me, that means universal health care,” Christner said. “But I’m not totally satisfied. How might she do that? I like to know more.”

Several voters interviewed shrugged off reports that Klobuchar had high staff turnover because she was an exceptionally demanding employer. “I think they say that about every woman — it’s so irritating,” Orth said. “I’m so sick of hearing that women are demanding. Come on.”

Klobuchar’s strong showing in rural Minnesota may offer promising signs in Wisconsin, traditionally divided between the liberal centers of Milwaukee and Madison and the more conservative north. Her potential Midwestern competitors could include Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who has not yet announced for president, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, who has.

Wisconsin Democrats are nonetheless relishing the attention, emboldened by last year’s statewide Democratic victories, most notably reclaiming the governor’s office from a staunch conservative, Scott Walker, after eight years, and easily re-electing Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

“Wisconsin is a place of optimism and energy for Democrats,” said Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster based in Madison. “We know we’re a big deal. We may decide this.”

But he does not think Klobuchar can coast on regional loyalty. “We’re not going to exclude people because they don’t come from the Midwest,” he said. “It’s a way that she gets into living rooms a little bit quicker than other people do, on a basis that’s a little bit more familiar.”

Ultimately, though, he said — and voters in Eau Claire confirmed — Wisconsin voters are looking for someone who can present a vision for the country’s future, with particular attention to health care, the opioid crisis, climate change’s effect on agriculture, plans to halt the region’s declining manufacturing base, trade, and the civil rights of women, gays and lesbians.

Nor does he discount Republican strength, having watched the state veer Republican and Democrat over the years. He expects Trump to court Wisconsin heavily. In a race with so much up in the air, he can predict one thing with certainty: no snubs for his state in this cycle.

Klobuchar Casts Herself as Heartland Democrat in First Campaign Swing

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. — Amy Klobuchar cast herself as the candidate from the heartland Saturday in the first campaign trip of her presidential run, visiting a state Hillary Clinton narrowly lost in 2016 and emphasizing her deep Midwestern roots, her knowledge of rural America and her record of bipartisanship while drawing sharp contrasts to President Donald Trump on issues from climate change to immigration.

Klobuchar casts herself as heartland democrat in first campaign swing

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