Women defied conventional wisdom to win in droves in Tuesday’s elections

Election Day 2017 was a women’s march through the voting booths.

Sheila Oliver won New Jersey’s lieutenant governorship on Tuesday night, becoming the first black woman ever elected to the post in the state . Women won a record-high number of seats, 28, in Virginia’s House of Delegates — nine of them Democratic challengers who unseated incumbents. Charlotte, North Carolina, voted in its first black woman mayor, Vi Lyles. A runoff will decide the mayoral race in Atlanta — but either way, a woman will win.

The 2017 elections are widely seen as a bellwether for the 2018 midterms, and the gains among women make next year’s election even more intriguing. So could 2018 be another “Year of the Woman” — a term that arose in 1992, when an unprecedented wave of women ran for federal office and were elected to the US House and Senate?

Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, says it’s too early to tell. What is obvious, she says, is the wave of interest among women, especially Democratic women, in running for office.

“Women on the Democratic side who are angry, upset, concerned, worried are stepping up and running for office,” she said. “We saw it in Virginia, particularly with the real increase in the number of women filing for all kinds of seats to unseat Republican incumbents — that was what they wanted to do.”

My conversation with Walsh is below, edited for length and clarity.

What are your big takeaways from the results on Tuesday night?

What was interesting about Tuesday night, particularly in Virginia, was women really defied conventional wisdom. Just because you have a lot of women running — while that’s a good thing — if they’re running in really, really tough races that are very, very hard to win, I don’t want women to get discouraged because they might not make it.

But they defied conventional wisdom. On the Democratic side, women who ran as challengers, about 30 percent of them won their election, which is so different from what one would expect. It has been the case that incumbents win about 90 percent of the time or more. So to see a certain percentage win rate among those challenging incumbents is just totally defying all the conventional wisdom that we have about how politics work, and how elections work.

What, if anything, might that mean for 2018?

It bodes well as we look to 2018. We have a record number of women right now who are saying, at least early on, “Yes, I’m interested in running for office,” over twice as many as we had two years ago at this time in the election cycle. An enormous number of those women, if they actually file, are running as challengers. All these candidates are overwhelmingly Democrat.

So that’s the thing that we are watching for and trying to see. Will this ability to unseat incumbents hold? Will this translate beyond Virginia? Virginia is not a state like Kentucky or Mississippi or Alabama — it’s a kind of purple-verging-on-blue state.

The other thing that stood out wasn’t just the number of women — there were a lot of firsts for minorities, including trans, African-American, Latina, and Asian-American women.

Absolutely. What was noticeable here was it wasn’t just that women were running, but a diverse group of women were running. And younger women were running.

Some mayoral victories for women stood out to me, particularly in Charlotte and Seattle. What do you make of more women leading cities?

They’re still underrepresented. But what’s noticeable is women running for these chief executive positions. This coming cycle, there’s 36 gubernatorial seats up, and we have a really big number of women who are running or saying they want to run for governor. A lot of them are running for open seats. That’s something to watch as we look to 2018 — whether we’re going to see the real growth in the number of women as chief executives of the state.

We now have six women who are governors of states. The most we’ve ever had serving at one time was nine. But governorships, much like the US Senate, are the places where people who are in those seats think about running for president of the United States — and are in a position to do that.

Our pool of women in those positions have been painfully small, which really limits those opportunities if you think about that — as we’ve come to know it — “highest, hardest” glass ceiling. So seeing women go for those chief executive slots and, we hope, winning some of them come 2018 is important not just because of the power they have as governors. They’re positioned for the future.

How much do you attribute this wave of women candidates — and victories — to the election of Trump? Is this an outgrowth of protests like the Women’s March, or are other factors at play?

Almost without hesitation, I can say to you the cause of this is what happened in 2016. That was the trigger for this wave of activism and engagement in the political process. Women across this country woke up after the election last year, and rather than pulling the cover over their heads and retreating, they were angry and afraid. They were worried about their lives, their families, their kids, what was going to happen. I think they were really aware that gains made for women and the issues that matter so much to women could be seriously in jeopardy. It had the effect of making people, women and men, really understand in stark ways that elections have real consequences.

I think women have felt that [after] the election of Donald Trump, they cannot afford to sit on the sidelines [or think] that they don’t have to be involved. All that really came home in a very clear way for women across this country — you saw it in the march in Washington, as well as marches in all 50 states.

How have women gone from protests, so to speak, to actually running for office?

We’ve been seeing it in the level of interest in programs to train women to run for office. Women are not waiting to be recruited by the political parties to run, which is what we’ve seen in the past. They’re just jumping up and saying, “I want in.” There’s an expression in politics that I really love, and I think it’s such a clear example of what’s happening right now, which is: “If you’re not at the table, you’re probably on the menu.” I think women were really afraid that things we care about were going to be talked about and discussed and voted on. They wanted to make sure they had weight.

Jen Kirby

I wonder if this type of enthusiasm has an expiration date. Is there a risk that too many candidates are running against something — such as Trump or his policies — and once that foil’s gone, it becomes more difficult to run “for” something?

When you watched some of those campaigns in Virginia and you hear some of those women talking about why they ran — they were running for things. Their engagement came because they were probably quite shocked that a man like Donald Trump could get elected and bring with him all the rhetoric and, frankly, the sexism and the misogyny. But I think they’re running for things. They’re running for issues around health care, and environmental issues and access issues and civil rights issues.

What you are describing was part of my concern when I saw so many women running as challengers. If women are running in so many of these tough races, uphill battles, and if they don’t win, will be they so discouraged [that they] disengage from politics? Now, what happened on Tuesday, I think, will start the ball rolling again for 2018. Women will see women fighting an uphill battle.

The next challenge, of course, for these women is governing. But they got elected in races that nobody would have expected, so in that way, so far, there isn’t a reason to be discouraged from engaging in the process. There’s a real reinforcement. If you were organizing on the left, or trying to organize to get more progressive women to run for office, Donald Trump is the gift that keeps on giving.

How do you bottle up and keep that sentiment, though, for 2018 and the years to come?

It is not going to happen overnight, and 2018 might be a good year. I’ve been proven wrong by conventional wisdom, but it’s still going to be tough because of gerrymandering. There are an awful lot of seats that are solidly Republican, which is where a lot of these women want to run, to unseat these Republicans. They’re going to have a tough time. I don’t know if it’s going to be quite like Virginia, in the state legislative race. I don’t know that it will be a “Year of the Woman.”

We’ll have to see, but I think it’s important to not get discouraged if in one election cycle the world doesn’t turn around. It is a marathon; it’s not a sprint. It’s a long slog, but women have to stay engaged.

Speaking of the “Year of the Woman.” Are we in for another one in 2018? What similarities do you see, if any, between now and 1992?

I’m always cautious about the concept of the “Year of the Woman.” In 1992, we doubled the number of women in the House and managed to get women to 10 percent of the members of Congress. I don’t want to oversell those years — I always think what happens is it makes it feel like the problem’s been fixed. We’re not going to get to political parity in one year. That I am sure of.

There is a lot of happening in this moment that helps. I think the attention right now that we are hearing about sexual harassment [...] kind of echoes what we heard back in 1992 with the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearing. But there was also something that happened in 1992 that is very different — at least different as of now, for what we’re looking at in 2018. It was, in 1992, the election after redistricting that created a lot of open seats. And we had a lot of retirements and we had a scandal in Congress that led to a lot of people stepping down from their seats. It was the year of the open seat and the Year of the Woman.

What allowed women to take advantage of those open seats?

For a decade and a half, or two decades, we had women running for office, serving in state legislatures, in county offices around the country, and when these opportunities came, they were prepared. They were positioned to seize those opportunities and run for those open seats. It was the intersection of preparedness and opportunity. We have yet to see whether the women who are running this time, or have been running, seize opportunities of open seats, and how well-positioned they are to run for them.

It sounds as if 2017, with women winning local elections, could start creating similar positions and help build that party infrastructure to move women up the ranks.

It’s important that people see people who look like them doing this. So whether it’s women, women of color, trans folks, it’s just important to see that it’s possible. I don’t want hundreds and hundreds of women in what are really hopeless races. You want them to run reasonably. But Tuesday showed there are clearly opportunities where people are just fed up and they want to see something new, and women are still perceived as new and fresh and [as] outsiders.

In 2017, women are still outsiders to the political process, and they’re taking advantage of this moment. It is a shot of adrenaline for the party, as well as for that candidate, as well as for other women.

What about Republican women? This wave has been focused on the Democrats, but it seems both parties would benefit from having more women and more diverse candidate pools overall.

We have to wait and see, because right now the numbers for Republican women are dismal. They make up a far smaller portion of Republican elected officials. We’re seeing that in the candidate numbers. We have to see if this inspires Republican women. Right now the energy is clearly on the left and on the Democratic side.

I think Republican women might be discouraged by what they’re seeing within their own party, trying to figure out how to navigate through that. Moderate Republican women have a very hard time making it through the primaries. They may, in fact, be the best candidate for the Republican Party and in a general election, [but] in the Republican primaries you get the most conservative voters and they have a hard time making it through. So Republican women have a real challenge, and there isn’t the kind of infrastructure that there is on the Democratic side for women who want to run. There’s nothing comparable to EMILY’s List on the Republican side; there are PACS for women candidates, but none of them have that kind of power.

Do you think there will be a backlash to these gains?

If there’s going to be backlash, there’s going to be backlash. But we can’t let the fear of backlash keep us from moving forward toward progress. What are you going to do, not have that progress? Not have those moments when we really show that we’re really better?