Authors: Marianne Schnall
MS
: Aside from the whole pipeline issue, what I’m starting to hear, having spoken to so many different people, is that there are perhaps psychological issues with envisioning a woman president. Do you think we are ready? Is our consciousness ready to imagine a woman in that position?
SS
: More and more every day. I would still say it’s a process, and it’s one of the things that as EMILY’s List looks at the next four years, really the next three years, is what do we need to do to have that national conversation? To kind of deal with those issues head on. We’re still in a country where twenty-four states have never elected a woman to their governorship, so there are a lot of folks who have never seen a woman in a political executive position. And so our view of this is that it’s better and better all the time. The fact that there are twenty women in the United States Senate now helps. They are seeing more women on television in leadership roles. So now in the next few years, we need to have a national conversation about the importance of women’s executive leadership, I would say across the board. I think Sheryl Sandberg has already started that conversation in her book, and Marissa Mayer has started that conversation in action, so we need to have those conversations. And I think with that, folks are just going to get their minds in a better place about how great this could actually be to have a woman in the White House. I would like to see lots of women in the White House.
MS
: Some people have been saying that they think the first woman who’s going to make it there, which is interesting in terms of the recent passing of Margaret Thatcher, might be a more conservative woman, that a Democratic liberal woman as president might be almost too much to hope
for for our first woman president. What do you think about that point? Do you agree with that?
SS
: Not today, and this is why: the Republican Party has taken such a turn to the right that their policies are not supported by the mass majority of women voters in this country. And so we’ve got a couple of problems. One, the policies that they are pushing are actually anti-woman in so many different directions—on healthcare, on education, on economic opportunity. This is the party that still will not even talk about equal pay, which is one of the major issues in our polling of independent women voters. So if you’re in a party that is not even willing to take on issues that women are most focused on, it’s going to be really hard to come to a primary as a woman in that party and then make a case nationally to get this done. We just don’t see it. We haven’t seen a huge number of Republican women coming through the pipeline, and as the primaries have gotten more and more conservative, it is even harder for those Republican women to get through their primary. This might have been the case twenty years ago, and I’ve heard that argument before, but now with this Republican Party, not today.
MS
: We have twenty women now in the Senate; these are history-making numbers, but then again . . .
SS
: We still have eighty men.
MS
: Right [
laughs]
. So it’s really far from parity. You want to celebrate it, but at the same time . . .
SS
: I know! That’s exactly how I feel every day! Like yay! And aw . . .
MS
: What do you make of that? I think we tend to go around feeling like there’s more equality than there is. Why don’t we have better numbers than these in this day and age? What’s holding women back from making it there?
SS
: The truth of the matter is, a lot of it has to do with incumbency. We’re in a political environment in the United States where incumbency is the most powerful of things. I tell our women candidates the best way to get elected is to get elected once before [
laughs]
. You’re in a much better place once you get in, and it’s hard to get in there, unless we’re looking at open seats or swing districts, where you’ve got a shot. And the problem right now is we’re very divided as a nation, and so we don’t have a lot of opportunities to get into open seats. There is a structural challenge, not just for women, but for people of color, because the current makeup of how this is set up is in fact geared toward incumbents and, of course, who are the incumbents for the last 250 years? That is part of the problem.
There is another piece of the problem, which is we need more women to step up and run for office, and that is, again, getting better, but not as quickly as we would like. This is what we always say at EMILY’s List
: If it’s a systematic problem or if it’s a “women aren’t taking the jump” problem, we don’t really care. Our job is to just make sure that women are taking every opportunity they can take. And our job is to keep training women to step up and get involved in politics. So every cycle, EMILY’s List has more and more women running for office. And that’s the good news. Do I wish it were faster? Absolutely. But when EMILY’s List started, no Democratic woman had won a seat in the U.S. Senate in her own right and that was only twenty-eight years ago. So it may not be as fast as we like, but we’re at least on the right path.
MS
: It’s funny because you’re saying that it doesn’t really matter. I’m still very curious about the why. What are the factors that are impeding women wanting to run? Especially in the wake of Sheryl Sandberg’s proposition that women may have psychological obstacles of their own, not seeing themselves as leaders, or the fact that it may look like such an onerous process to run, and certainly challenging once you’re there. The only reason I’m interested in why we don’t have more women running, is because how can we fix it? What do you think are the best ways to create change?
SS
: One of the things that we’ve seen is in states where young women are seeing a lot of women leaders, we see more activity. California is a really good example. California has a lot of great women in their delegation at the federal level. And so we continue to see a lot of great women stepping up in the legislature. Seeing women take on those roles, and going, “Oh, right! Women do do that; I could do that too!” Just simple role model behavior is something that we have seen in a lot of states, which is good, though we’ve got to break through some glass ceilings in a lot of states, so it’s the other challenging part of that. So I think that’s part of how we fix it. I think all of us need to think about pushing our “sisters,” as I like to say, into taking these opportunities and that we’ll have their backs in the process—that they’re not going to do it on their own. Because no one does this on their own, in any of these jobs. Neither do the men. Everybody needs a network of support, and in politics you need a network of support that includes a financial network that’s going to help you fundraise. So we have to stand with those folks who are willing to put their name on the ballot and back them up. And part of what we’ve been building and continue to expand is this network that’s like, “Okay, I’m going to ask you to run, but then we’re going to back you up and help you do it and give you the support you need, because we know this is a new thing and this maybe isn’t something that you thought about.” So there’s that piece of it.
And then I think, finally, it’s about laying out a cultural discussion about how important it is for women to be involved and that we need everybody’s voices in a representative democracy—and the best kind of democracy is where the government looks like the nation, in order to get the policies we need. And we are so far from that right now that we need to actually have the discussion on why. Last year, EMILY’s List put together what we call The Impact Project to lay out what it has exactly meant to have women in Congress. Like, has it mattered? Does it really matter? And we plotted out all of the votes that all of the women had taken in comparison to the men, and one of the things we found that was really, really interesting was that our Democratic women were more progressive on their voting on
all
areas—not just women’s rights or women’s health, across the board—than their male counterparts. And that the Republican women were also more progressive than their male counterparts, at least until the last six years. Now those lines have merged. That’s why I think this Republican Party is really taking a turn in the wrong direction.
MS
: I am a progressive Democratic woman, so my instinct has not necessarily been to go out and be very vocally supportive of Republican women candidates, yet obviously the truth is because of the way our government works, we need to have women’s voices in positions of influence across the board. I think it was Celinda Lake who said to me that we need just as many women in the Republican Party, and even in the Tea Party. How do you deal with that at EMILY’s List, this issue of the need to support all women in politics, even though we may not agree with all of their positions?
SS
: Well, we talk about this all the time. So we obviously only support pro-choice, Democratic women at EMILY’s List, but we are the sole organization at this level that does this kind of work. And I cannot tell you how
many times we are looking for Republican counterparts to have conversations with on panels, because there are none anymore. They do not exist. There isn’t an organization focused on getting women to the Republican Party process. And it’s a huge problem. It is a really big problem. And so our success comes in winning campaigns. This isn’t just about getting a lot of women running, you actually have to win races. That’s our role in the whole process is to win these races. If there’s no one out there on the Republican side doing the same, you get the numbers you have right now. We’ve got twenty Republican House members who are women and we have fifty-nine Democratic women. And that wasn’t by accident, that’s because there’s an organization on the Democratic side pushing, pushing, pushing. And a lot of the pushing comes through primaries. You’re not going to be surprised that they often don’t clear the primaries.
MS
: Now regarding the whole pipeline issue, I’ve heard different points on whether women win when women run—especially for governorships, which are considered such an important part of the pipeline. Why do we not have more women governors?
SS
: Well, one reason, quite frankly, is that 2010 was such a bad year for Democrats—a bunch of our women lost, just like a bunch of the guys lost. Everybody lost. We had a whole group of women running for governor in 2010 who just didn’t make it over the line because Democrats weren’t making it over the line that year. I mean, goodness, Governor Strickland of Ohio lost his seat that year, so that was a big piece of it. But it is still a place where we want to lay out a conversation about women’s executive leadership. In fact, to lay out this plan for 2016, we are rolling out a campaign called the “Madam President” campaign, which is designed to really organize and engage a conversation around the country about women’s executive leadership, particularly focused on winning the White
House in 2016. But part of that is getting much more involved in some mayors’ races in 2013. We’ve got great women running in New York City and L.A. I don’t know if they’ll both win, but you know what, neither of those cities has ever elected a woman, so how do we start breaking through those final glass ceilings and show how good women are as executives in politics? Next year is a whole bunch of governors’ races. In the next two years, we’ve got thirty-eight governors’ races up and we’re hoping to see women running in six, seven, eight, or nine of those, if we do our job right. So that’s a part of that puzzle, too, because we want to show American voters that there are really great women stepping up and running what would be big corporations, called states [
laughs]
, all over the country. So that is actually part of what we’re doing with this Madam President campaign.
MS
: Other than the obvious candidate, Hillary Clinton, are there other women right now that you think would make for good candidates for president for 2016?
SS
: We do. We absolutely do. We will fully admit that Hillary Clinton stands in a place by herself, not just with women, but with Democrats. She is in a class of her own right now. But beyond that we do feel like we have a very deep bench, a bench that I would say includes folks like Secretary Napolitano and Secretary Sibelius—two of our former, very good governors of red states, who were chosen by the president to come into the Cabinet. We’ve got a couple of senators that I would put on the list, Kirsten Gillibrand from New York, Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota, Jean Shaheen, the first woman who served both as governor and United States Senator, Chris Gregoire out in Washington state, who just finished up her two terms as governor—all these women should be thinking about it.
MS
: Because the one thing that I’ve been hearing, when I ask people if they think that they’ll have a woman president in their lifetime, a lot of people are saying “Well, sure, if Hillary runs, yes, but if she doesn’t, probably not.” Do you share a more optimistic attitude?
SS
: Oh, this is happening. So if this is not ’16, it is happening in ’20, or ’24, or ’28; but it’s coming. It’s coming soon. It is our time. As Tom Brokaw said, it is going to be the “century of women,” so we’ll lean into that [
laughs
].
MS
: What advice or words of encouragement would you have for a woman who is considering running for political office and/or doesn’t even know whether it’s something that she should do?
SS
: The first thing we say, because we recruit all the time—we’re in fact in our recruitment phase right now at EMILY’s List—and the first thing we say is, “Do it. Run.” Trying to make that push. For someone who’s thinking about it, this is what I would say. One, the network that you are building is incredibly important, because no matter what, you’re going to have to raise a lot of money. That’s daunting to a lot of women and, quite frankly, men who are thinking about the same thing. Everybody that you know is going to be asked to support you at some point, and so thinking about building that network is really, really important. And then also really getting to know your community, where you’re getting started. A lot of women are coming up through school activities with the kids, or coming through as the business side, or coming through as attorneys who are very involved in the community. It’s really, really important. Again, whether, you’re a woman or a man, those are important, important connections. And make sure you have a support group around you that will help you through those rough moments. These campaigns, they are tough business,
but they’re not impossible. And the good, I swear, outweighs the bad. You meet the most amazing people on the campaign trail, you get support from people that you didn’t even imagine. And when you get there, I know you watch television and it feels like they get nothing done, but the truth is you really do make so much difference for so many people, every day—whether you’re in Congress, you’re in the Senate, you’re in the state house, or you’re in the city council—every day you make a difference for somebody, and that’s a pretty important piece of what our democracy is about. It’s well worth it to take it on.