Trump’s Win Driving More Women to Run For Office
There are early indications that women are considering running for office in order to combat Trump’s misogynistic, sexist remarks that many heard while he was on the campaign trail.
NPR shared the story of Karen Noble, who never thought about running for office until the day after Election Day.
NPR considers her political philosophy to be “distinctly un-Trumpian.” Noble explains, “I want to be someone who can bring forward anybody’s and everybody’s good ideas. They don’t need to be my own.”
Noble ended up contact the New Mexico branch of Emerge to get the training she needed to run for school bord.
And she’s not the only one. “We saw an immediate uptick in interest in our work,” said Andrea Dew Steele, the president and founder of Emerge America. “And it has persisted through today. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” Applications for the group’s training sessions increased 87 percent after Election Day, Steele said.
EMILY’s List has also received a lot of traction from women interested in running. Since Election Day, more than 4,000 women have reached out to EMILY’s List to say they want to run for office, including 1,660 since Jan. 20 alone. That’s four times the number who reached out in the previous 22 months combined.
The group told USA TODAY that this will “begin the ‘most aggressive’ recruiting campaign in its 32-year history.”
“Some of it is absolutely a reaction to President Trump and his policies,” said Jean Sinzdak, of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “For others, it is Hillary Clinton’s loss,” because the fact that we don’t have a female president “sort of woke them up to the idea that maybe we haven’t made as much progress as we thought.”
