Two nights. 20 candidates. Six hopefuls who happen to be women. After months of anticipation, the Democratic debates are finally here—and are expected to be like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Taking place on June 26 and 27, from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. EST, each night will feature 10 candidates selected at random to avoid putting all the top-tier Democrats on the same night.
First up? Tonight, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has pulled ahead in the polls in recent weeks, squares off against New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Congressman Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.), former Congressman Beto O’Rourke, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), Governor Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), and former Congressman John Delaney. Then comes some of the heavier hitters. On Thursday, former Vice President Joe Biden, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, John Hickenlooper, former governor of Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), and Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) will all face off.
While the topics of the debate haven’t been announced, NBC has shared who will be asking the questions. There will be five moderators for the two nights, including Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, NBC Nightly News host Lester Holt, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow and Noticias Telemundo host José Diaz-Balart.
The debates will be available to watch on NBC, MSNBC, and Telemundo and free to stream on NBCNews.com, MSNBC.com, the NBC News app, and all Telemundo digital platforms. But before you get your popcorn (and much-needed glass of wine) out to watch the debates, here’s everything you need to know about the female candidates’ strategies for the big night.
Senator Kamala Harris (D–Calif.)
When She’ll Appear: The California senator will take the stage during the second night of the debates.
What She’ll Talk About: Harris recently proposed a massive tax cut for middle-class families, known as Livable Incomes for Families Today. It’s the most robust piece of policy on her platform and would provide refundable tax credits to families, and allow them to receive their benefits on a monthly basis. Harris will definitely try to touch on it, as well as her support of “Medicare for All.”
How They’ll Attack Her: Harris hasn’t been able to shake her “tough on crime” past in her campaign so far. While serving as the first female attorney general of California, she supported some criminal justice stances that some consider conservative. For example, she enforced an anti-truancy program and fought to release fewer incarcerated people. She’s already had to defend her record since announcing her run, so if anybody criticizes Harris, this is most likely how they’ll go for the jugular.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.)
When She’ll Appear: Warren will take part in the first night of the debates. According to The Hill, many think Warren got the “short end of the stick” being assigned to the first night, as this prevents her from debating Biden and Sanders, her closest opponents in the polls who will both appear during night two.
What She’ll Talk About: “Warren Has a Plan for That” has become the tagline of her campaign, and that’s exactly what she’ll hit on—her policies. Some of her proposals include a new tax on Americans with a net worth of $50 million or more, and would also tax billionaires an additional 1 percent. The economy is Warren’s passion point, and she’s also likely to discuss her proposed Accountable Capitalism Act, which would redistribute trillions from American corporations’ to the middle class.
Heading into the 2013 race for mayor of New York, there was quite a bit going in Chris Quinn’s favor: Millions of dollars in campaign cash. A powerful, high-profile job as speaker of the City Council. Celebrity supporters. Competitive poll numbers. Union endorsements.
Chris—full name Christine—was also the only woman on that year’s debate stage with four male rivals for the Democratic nomination. So she and her team made a choice: “There was a conscious decision: I needed to not lean into the woman stuff; I needed to try to be less who I was. Less aggressive. Less loud. Less in people’s face,” Quinn recalls. Over the course of the campaign, the strategy backfired. “People said I was ‘inauthentic,’” she says. “By then I was! [I was] walking around trying to be some different version of the actual me.”
What was it all for? “To make me more likable,” she says.
That was five years after Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination for president to Barack Obama, who once witheringly called her “likable enough.” In 2016, when Clinton did become the Democratic nominee, foes demonized her as a conniving, “crooked” harpy. She ultimately lost to Republican Donald Trump.
Now Trump is facing a growing lineup of Democratic challengers who want to oust him from the White House in 2020. Among the first to leap in was Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren—and among the first stories about her candidacy to cause a stir? A Politico piece questioning, you guessed it, her likability.
Warren instantly started raising money off the kerfuffle. News items both amplified and challenged the idea of women candidates’ having to be likable. Clinton herself borderline mocked the whole episode.
Other Democratic women are already jumping into the 2020 race for president and already the “likability” question isn’t going to go away. But how likability become such a thing? How will 2020 candidates navigate it? And what will it take to move past it?
Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, says it was Ronald Reagan who showed pollsters and prognosticators how powerful a factor likability can be in politics. “He was seen as likable, even though he was more conservative than the country,” he says. “Since then, analysts have paid a lot of attention to likability.”
Reagan, a Republican, won the 1980 election in a landslide; then President Jimmy Carter carried only six states. Once in office Reagan used his likability to powerful effect. “His folksy manner helped him sell ‘trickle-down economics’ to the middle class, even though the bulk of the economic benefits went to the well-to-do,” West says. “If Reagan were less likable, he would not have been as successful with his tax-cut plan. The same argument applies to Reagan’s boosting military spending when the rest of the budget was being held the same or cut.”
Pinning down when being liked or likable became a thing for women in public life isn’t easy. Some accounts point to the lawmakers who praised the femininity and gentleness of Jeanette Rankin, first woman elected to Congress in 1917; University of Pennsylvania professor of political science Dawn Teele tells Glamour that “likability issues are as old as the suffrage movement.”
Celinda Lake, a noted Democratic pollster, says likability—for women leaders at least—dates back much farther. How far? “Cleopatra,” she says. She’s sort of kidding—and sort of not. For all the new science of measuring people’s views of their leaders, and for all the strides women have made in American public life (see the 2018 midterm elections), men and women are still judged by different standards in politics (and elsewhere). “This is deeply about gender roles, and how we see gender roles, and how we process gender,” Lake says.
The first time the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which works to study and advance women’s representation in politics, studied likability was in 2010; their report found that being viewed favorably was the single most important predictor for whether a female candidate could win. What made a women “likable” varied a lot: Party affiliation mattered (people found female candidates in their own party more likable)—but so did being seen as “honest and ethical,” “a problem solver,” and even just “looking like a governor.”
All candidates have to be likable to some extent. But the Foundation’s research (and other studies) show that women have to be seen as qualified and likable. Men have to be seen as qualified—it’s often assumed they have the chops just because they’re men—and likability is a bonus. (Another thing: Even though people recognize that women are judged more for their appearance, they would still recommend a female candidate have a wardrobe, makeup, and appearance that’s “impeccable.”)
Women’s record-breaking successes in midterm Congressional races may help begin to change these attitudes, but legislative roles are generally seen as more collaborative, while top executive roles are seen as requiring more authoritative behavior. Since the Foundation started looking at voters’ attitudes about women candidates more than 20 years ago, “much has changed for the better,” says founder Barbara Lee, but still, “we’ve consistently found that voters are more comfortable seeing women serve as members of a legislature than they are electing them to executive offices like governor or president—positions where they will have sole decision-making authority.”
Whether we, um, like it or not, the emotional connections voters have with candidates is a factor in every race, especially a presidential one. So pollsters and consultants run a myriad of tests to try to reveal deep, almost ancient biases that voters may not want to admit they have or don’t even realize are there.
One experiment Lake describes includes two versions of a negative political ad, one recorded by a male “candidate” and the other by a female. Both ads used identical words and were played at the same decibel level. The verdict, Lake says: The woman came off to listeners as “louder, more negative, and less likable.”
Silence can speak volumes as well: “One of the things we do in our focus groups [is] test women with the sound off and see if people think the women are angry, happy, nice, not nice,” Lake says. “And people come to immediate conclusions, like, ‘She’s yelling at me, she’s not yelling at me,’ that kind of thing. Women get punished for aggressive gestures.” Another thing they often hear about female candidates: “She should smile more.” Says Lake, “People don’t say men should smile more.”
The importance of how differently candidates can come off in real life versus on TV explains in part why presidential hopefuls flock to Iowa and New Hampshire. Successes in those early-voting states can generate momentum (and free press coverage). Because women can be judged more harshly than men in the kind of screen testing Lake describes, those early person-to-person interactions can help shape public perception. So it’s not surprising to see women jumping in the race early and getting boots on the ground. (Early action can also drive fundraising, which is vital since, if the midterms are any guide, this presidential campaign could be among the most expensive in history.)
Former Vermont governor Madeleine Kunin has experienced the difference between televised and real-life reactions: “When people met me in person, when I was governor, they said, ‘Oh, you’re much nicer than you appear to be on television,’” she recalls.
PHOTO: Terry Ashe
Madeleine Kunin served three terms as governor of Vermont. She was the first woman to hold the job.
After three terms as Vermont’s first female governor, and its first Jewish one, Kunin chose not to run again. During her tenure, “I had to make some decisions, obviously, and some of them were difficult. And my popularity waned,” she says. “I think I could have gotten reelected, but the interesting thing is, now the longer I’m away from public office, the more popular I am. Everybody likes me.”
Kunin, who recently published her fourth book, Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties, says in politics it’s almost impossible for women to thread the needle. “You’re sort of damned if you’re too feminine and nice—then you’re considered weak and not capable of being commander-in-chief,” she says. “If you’re tough enough to be commander-in-chief, you’re not likable. You lose some of your femininity. So women have to walk a very fine line to be both, and usually they don’t wear well over time.”
That also what Alice Eagly, a psychology professor and expert in the field of politics and gender at Northwestern University, has also found. Men, she says, are expected to be more “agentic,” or more competitive and assertive, while women is expected to be more “communal”—kind, warm, friendly. “When a woman or man violates these preferences, she or he can be penalized in terms of evaluation by the public,” Eagly says. “Women are disliked when they are cold and unfriendly, and men are disrespected when they are weak and fearful.”
Although these ideas are certainly not new or exclusively American, Eagly points out the U.S. is way down on the international list when it comes to the number of women in the federal legislature. And countries including Liberia, Pakistan, Israel, Germany, Sri Lanka, Ireland, South Korea, and Brazil have elected a female head of state.
Eagly says there are some signs of change, such as a drop in the percentage of Americans who say they’d rather have a male boss and a rise in the percentage who think it would be good to have more women in public office. Still, she says, “beliefs about men’s greater agency have not changed much.”
Lake says she’s also seeing early signs of a shift—that more people are judging likability on whether a candidate can get the job done. Voters, she says, are sizing up a candidate and wondering, “You can sit down next to me and have a beer, but can you sit down with Putin and tell him to back off?”
Another thing that could change how important likability is for women candidates? Younger voters. “We don’t know if likability is going to be the same for millennials as it was for Baby Boomer women,” Lake says. With a new wave of younger (and more diverse) women getting into politics, there will be more data to crunch.
Pollster and strategist Jefrey Pollock, president of New York City’s Global Strategy Group, says the best bet to the end of the “likability” question is seeing a woman get elected to president. But as for right now, he says, it’s vital to consider that “58% of women are paying more attention to politics since Trump’s election.” The midterms, Pollock says, showed that “women are running and winning,” but there were other signs of engagement and power as well, such as showing up at the polls and putting up money for their preferred candidates. “Women made up a larger percentage of contributors to campaigns this year than any before,” he says.
“As we are already in 2020 mode, I’m seeing it already—major blowback from articles that feel sexist or ask questions of women that are different than questions asked of men,” continues Pollock, whose client list has included Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who just confirmed her plan to run for the Oval Office. “The more the backlash is felt, the more we will get away from this and see that women can be tough, likable, warm, focused, determined, and caring—all at the same time, and no one will blink an eye.”
Five years after her attempt to become the first female, not to mention lesbian, mayor of New York, Chris Quinn is now president and CEO of Win, an organization which shelters and helps homeless women. She’s kept a hand in public life, appearing on news shows as a pundit and grabbing the occasional headline, including the time she threw that shade at Cynthia Nixon’s run for governor.
Quinn, like Clinton, acknowledges a couple of things about her own political career: One is that as a candidate she wasn’t perfect, nor was her campaign strategy. The other is that yes, being a woman made some degree of difference in how she was perceived and portrayed.
“I don’t want to blame my lack of success in the mayor’s race all on sexism. I just want to be clear on that. There [were] problems with the campaign, and I could have run a better campaign,” Quinn says. “But let’s also be clear: People picked apart the sound of my voice as a turnoff to voters. There was endless commentary about my weight—which like many American women’s, goes up and down—the color of my dress during a debate, you know, on and on. And it’s all just cover for, ‘Can this woman be the mayor?’”
She considers it progress that America is now using those kind of “code words” to question a woman’s ability to lead instead of just directly calling them too weak, emotional, or even “hysterical” to hold public office at all. Even better: “Now we’re actually talking about how B.S. the code words really are,” she says.
It has to be out there in the open, Quinn believes. “Look, we tell ourselves America has evolved and we’re not a sexist society, but that is simply a lie. And we need to recognize the lie and address the lie if we’re ever going to get to a place where we are no longer a sexist society,” she says.
Women candidates who get asked about sexism in elections (including in how the press covers them), Quinn notes, often answer by deliberately not answering: “They [say they] want to talk about the issues. Well, sexism is an issue, A,” she says, and “B, the voters are not stupid. They know when a woman is being treated badly; they know when sexism is occurring.”
So there’s no easy fix, but it may at least help if women candidates acknowledge that long-standing ideas about gender affect how people view them, if they call sexism out when they see it, and that they run their races as their true selves.
“Only recently around Liz Warren have people been challenging what ‘unlikable’ means,” Quinn says. “I didn’t challenge it in the mayor’s race. Hillary didn’t challenge it, really, in her race. So at least [now], women and others are standing up and saying, ‘No. Unlikable equals sexist.’ That hasn’t happened in races before.”
Celeste Katz is senior politics reporter for Glamour. Send tips and questions to Celeste_Katz@condenast.com.
Four hundred women are packed into New York’s SoHo branch of The Wing—the women’s community and co-working space launched by Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan in 2016—and they’re hanging on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s every word. Bowls of popcorn balance on their laps, iPhones raised to snap photos of the Democratic socialist darling in one of New York City’s most instagrammable environments. Though members are used to high-profile women coming in to speak, Ocasio-Cortez’s visit couldn’t have come at a more crucial time: Weeks before one of the most contentious midterm election cycles in history comes to an end, and days after Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in after denying sexual assault allegations brought forth by California professor Christine Blasey Ford.
The audience is fired up and The Wing’s core ethos—a safe space for women—feels particularly palpable.
It’s easy for the casual observer to write off the women-focused coworking and social club as a place where all-access members pay up to $250 a month (or upwards of $2,700 a year) to bask in flawlessly designed loft-like spaces that includes retro phone booths cheekily named after scrappy female fictional characters; a place where Glossier and Chanel products line the bathroom; a place to snack on ancient grain bowls and pressed juices from equally Instagrammable local cafes.
But in the span of two years, The Wing has quietly leveraged its brand of glamorous feminism to become an increasingly influential hub for 6,000 millennial women…and politicians trying to reach them.
“The Wing isn’t just a functional space, it’s a real symbol of what’s happening in our country,” Ocasio-Cortez told Glamour before her event earlier this month. The company represents “one of the most potent forces that we’ve seen emerge in politics this year,” she said, adding that she’s appeared before its members twice.
At all five locations—three in New York, one in D.C., and one in California—members can register to vote, get tips on calling elected officials to protest family separation, and interface with female candidates and politicians who drop by. The same way celebrities and professionals like Christiane Amanpour, Fran Drescher, Katie Couric, Tina Fey, and Aly Raisman drop by, so do powerful women in government including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, Sen.Tammy Duckworth, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
PHOTO: SARA WIGHT/The Wing
Wing women, photographed here in midterm election merchandise, encourage members to register to vote.
From its inception, The Wing has been primed for this level of connection—Gelman is a former press representative who worked on the 2013 campaign of the New York City comptroller Scott Stringer, while the company’s senior director of civic engagement, Giovanna Lockhart Gray, and its senior director of communications, Zara Rahim, both have political campaign work under their belts. Gray says the goal is to make politics more accessible to members while simultaneously impressing the importance of women’s participation. “We’re meeting people where they are—literally,” she said.
Though the language they use might not include “suffrage” and there’s now avocado toast on the menu, The Wing is the latest in a long history of women-focused organizations meeting to get stuff done—just perfectly optimized for the 21st century. According to Alexis Coe, a historian and host of The Wing’s forthcoming podcast “No Man’s Land,” there were over 5,000 women’s clubs in America by 1906.
“Women’s social clubs promised greater political participation by women. And it terrified politicians,” Coe says, referencing a quote from former president Grover Cleveland, who once said the object and intent of these clubs “are not only harmful, but harmful in a way that directly menaces the integrity of our homes.” It “reeks of fear,” Coe adds.
Women’s club’s have been political in nature since their inception, not only in pushing toward social goals like suffrage, but by structuring themselves the same way a government would. “In major cities throughout the nation, larger women’s clubs were increasingly organized with ‘departments’ like Education, Social Economics and Industrial Conditions,” Coe says. And they were born of necessity—many of the issues important to women were not of interest (or completely opposed) by male municipal leaders in the towns where these clubs formed, Coe says.
In short, women aren’t new to this. And they don’t just know how to galvanize—they’re pros at organizing, too.
“Activism, and especially political mobilization, is the most important thing we can do as women,” said Oluremi Olufemi, 26, an all-access Wing member who was in the audience for Ocasio-Cortez and has come to hear Clinton and Gillibrand speak. But even she acknowledged that busy schedules makes it difficult to get out there. “Honestly, I work a lot, so there aren’t a lot of times where I can go to my community board meetings [and] interface with politicians on a day-to-day basis,” Olufemi said.
A visit to the Wing connects politicians to women who tweet, donate and vote—or know people who vote in their home district. For candidates, Wing members are “very influential, well-educated audience” to want to get in front of, said Gray.
In response to the 2016 presidential election, there’s a particular enthusiasm for supporting fresh faces to buck against the status quo and incumbents, making the Wing a welcoming environment for newbie candidates like Alessandra Biaggi, 32, The Wing’s first member to have run successfully for office. (Biaggi, a progressive, beat 58-year-old New York State Senator Jeff Klein in the Democratic primary for the 34th state Senate district in an upset this September.)
As an insurgent candidate, Biaggi could not count on establishment support. She called Wing members her “secret weapons” as she went up against a man who spent an astounding $2 million on his campaign. “One of the things that my opponent didn’t have was the support of these women—especially when they all learned that he was one of the reasons why women’s health was not advanced in New York,” she said. (Klein was also accused of sexual misconduct in January of this year.)
PHOTO: The Wing
Valerie Jarrett, former top aide to President Barack Obama, speaks to Wing SoHo members at a midterm election event.
“[The Wing] goes against the narrative of women don’t help other women,” Biaggi said. “The Wing is a place where women are helping other women.” While Biaggi says she hasn’t added up exact numbers of donations from Wing members, she said the donations and volunteer support from the organization were “tangible enough to feel the impact.” And that matters, considering that women struggle with raising as much money as male candidates, according to this New York Times report.
“Women candidates start at a deficit,” said Stephanie Shriock, president of EMILY’S List, a political action committee that assists pro-choice Democratic women candidates. “The first people you go to when you fundraise are your friends. For women, those are often women—and let’s face it, females make less than men in this country and women of color make substantially less.”
Therefore, women who run for office have “a pool of potential supporters who just have less money,” she continued. “And that makes it challenging.”
This is significant because smaller contributions are making “huge, huge differences” this election cycle and those donations are “coming from women giving $25, $35, maybe $50 to these candidates,” Shriock explained. “[It’s] just adding up because of the power of the numbers.”
“By introducing their members to women candidates who care deeply about the issues that impact them, The Wing has helped foster new networks and inspire political engagement.”
Something else The Wing has over your typical campaign rally audience? Social media savviness.
Gray cited Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams as an example of a candidate who “wanted to get in front of this audience, not because we could influence an election in Georgia but she knew that this audience would tweet about her,” she said.
PHOTO: SARA WIGHT
Wing members listen in on a voter registration training.
“I’m excited to have had the opportunity to speak with women from Georgia and across the country at The Wing and engage in conversation about ways we can build community and connect women to opportunity,” Abrams told Glamour in a provided statement. “By introducing their members to women candidates who care deeply about the issues that impact them, The Wing has helped foster new networks and inspire political engagement.” (Abrams’ spokesperson did not respond to emails asking if her campaign had received a donation bump after appearing at The Wing.)
The Wing’s physical spaces also naturally solve a problem faced by grassroots organizers and political parties of how to keep people engaged: Wing members are always there, sitting on a velvet couch, refreshing Twitter and sipping a chai latte. The community exists, it’s just waiting to be activated.
“I think you’re going see a lot of the candidates want to come through The Wing because they know that this is a really valuable audience that they want on their side,” Gray said.
This is especially true given the fact that voter turnout for midterm elections can be alarmingly low—in 2014, one of the worst years on record, only 43 percent of eligible women voters cast their ballots (compared to the 63 percent of eligible women voters who came out for the 2016 presidential election). The Wing, and the candidates that come through, are well aware that the roots they set now can determine political engagement for the future, whether we’re facing an election or not.
“[O]ur mission, which is the social economic and civic advancement of women, does not just go away because there’s not an election” said Rahim. “2019 is not an off year. We are going to have to keep working at this, considering all of the issues that are important to many of our members — whether that’s immigration, reproductive rights, paid family leave. These things don’t just happen in midterm and presidential years.”
Jessica Wakeman is a writer in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Glamour, Rolling Stone, Bitch, Bust, and other publications.
Campaigns are like marathons: Both are races, with a distant finish line on the horizon. Both are slogs, the kind that can drive someone blind with delirium and push her harder than she believed possible. Both are a process and a practice and an ordeal. So to complete one, whether it lasts 26.2 miles or 18 months, much of the same advice applies: Hit the trail. Drink a lot of water. And if at all possible, run with a friend.
This November, a record number of women will run for office—not just for the House of Representatives or the Senate, but for school boards and in gubernatorial races, too. Not all will win, but if even some fraction of them succeeds, legislative bodies will look (and likely vote) differently than they do now. In a midterm preview, Reuterstook Michigan as an example: In 2016, just 23 percent of lawmakers across the state were women. In 2018, women are on the ballot in 63 percent of state senate seats and 71 percent of state house seats. If trends hold, Reuters anticipates that women could make up to 40 percent of the state legislature, an all-time record.
The promise of a female-led political movement has incentivized a not unprecedented, but noticeable collaborative spirit between women candidates. Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, who is poised to become the first Muslim woman ever in the House of Representatives if she wins in November (which is all but certain considering she has no Republican opponent) has stumped for Ilhan Omar, the Somali-American who could share that title with her if she wins in Minnesota. Deb Haaland, who’s running for a House seat in New Mexico and is Native American, has gone on the road with Sharice Davids, also a Native woman, who is up for a seat in Kansas.
Amanda Litman, the co-founder and executive director of Run for Something, an organization that aims to recruit and support progressive candidates, has come to see relationships like these as a measure of campaign preparedness. When the PAC endorses candidates, Litman connects them over Slack—an internal messaging platform—to others in similar races, people who understand the particularities and peculiarities of electoral politics.
“I once saw a tweet that was like, ‘Behind every strong woman is a really powerful group text,’ and I think that’s true,” Litman tells Glamour. “When a woman decides to run for office, a lot of people will tell her no. It makes it that much more important to have a friend in her corner who just looks at her and tells her, ‘I know this race. Yes.’”
Ahead of the midterm elections, Glamour spoke to 13 women about female friendship in politics. What follows are excerpts from our conversations.
Mikie Sherrill, Amy McGrath, and Elaine Luria
Sherrill, McGrath, and Luria—all graduates from the Naval Academy and now Democratic candidates for the U.S. House—are three in a wave of female veterans candidates on the ballot. In separate phone interviews over the summer, each quoted the Academy’s mission: to develop leaders for “the highest responsibilities of command, citizenship and government.”
Six of the women veterans on the ballot in November keep up via text thread, including Navy Academy alumnae Mikie Sherrill, Amy McGrath, and Elaine Luria.
Sherrill (NJ-11): I entered the race in May 2017, and I did not know that other women that went to the Naval Academy were running. When Amy announced, someone sent me a link to her video. Like, “Look! Another woman like you!” It just blew me away. We got in touch shortly thereafter.
Luria (VA-2): Amy and I were in the same class at the [Naval] Academy. Mikie was three years ahead of us. I didn’t know Mikie at the time, but now we realize that we have lots of friends in common because it’s not that big of a school and also, there were only about 100 women per class back then. Everyone knew who all the other women were. The first class of women started in 1976 and graduated in 1980, and there were 55 women. I graduated in 1997, as did Amy, and there were 115 of us in our class. (There were about 1,200 men.) We crossed paths a lot, but we didn’t know each other even as well then as we do now.
Amy decided to run last summer well before I had made the decision to do this, but in between, we had our 20th reunion at the Naval Academy. I was so proud of her—that she’d launched her campaign, and it was gaining a lot of traction. We had a little get-together with some other classmates, and she told us all about the race, the challenges, the path ahead that she saw. It was really encouraging.
I wrote to Amy before I made the announcement publicly. “I’m gonna do it!” She’s got young kids. I have a daughter who is nine, and we’re both in similar situations where our husbands have also served. That’s what we talked about the most. How are you doing this? How do you balance this?
McGrath (KY-6): I remember that. Elaine was still deciding, and I did not want to push her in either direction because it’s not a simple decision. I just wanted to be there for Elaine to tell her, “If you want to do this, I’m with you.”
We’re both in hard races, so we don’t have time to talk all the time, but I love that she’s out there. And Mikie was in this even before I was. It’s awesome to have a support network of female veterans. And it’s not just us. It’s Chrissy Houlahan. It’s Abigail Spanberger. Once, a bunch of us were passing through D.C. for an event, and we just sat down over a glass of wine. The release of tension—we can talk about the issues, what it’s like to be a veteran in politics, what it’s like to be a woman. We talk about all the people who come up to us and tell us, “I can’t vote for you because you’re the mother of small children.” It happens!
Recently, an ad came out against me that said, “Amy McGrath is a feminist!” This was what was used to attack me. When that aired, we all texted back and forth, like, “Is that the best he can do?”
Sherrill: If one of us wins a primary or gets an endorsement, there’s that text. But sometimes it’s phone calls about how to communicate with voters or how to reach people in our districts. We’re women—we know how to build consensus, work in coalition.
McGrath: Recently, an ad came out against me that said, “Amy McGrath is a feminist!” This was what was used to attack me. When that aired, we all texted back and forth, like, “Is that the best he can do?” It’s that kind of camaraderie, which we’re used to because women who’ve served do have to have a thick skin.
When I was a kid, I had this dream: I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I learned I couldn’t do that because there was a federal law prohibiting women from those roles. I got lucky in 1997. We had a new administration, with President Bill Clinton in his second term and a new Congress. Doors were now open for women in combat. Mikie, Elaine, and I arrived at the Naval Academy at a time when we could exit from there with all the doors open to us. When we started before we had those opportunities, there were men who believed that we had taken a seat from a man. We weren’t going to be able to serve like a man could serve, so we were sort of robbing the taxpayers of that investment. I think we look at this and go, “Nope. You got your investment out of us. We served, and we’re here. Now we’re running.”
Rep. Debbie Dingell and Rep. Barbara Comstock
Both Rep. Dingell (D-MI) and Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) were elected to the House of Representatives in 2015.
“You can tell we’re really good friends,” Rep. Dingell explains, a moment before she has to leave Rep. Comstock on the line and go vote on a bill. “Because I just let her talk for me!”
PHOTO: NBC NewsWire
Rep. Debbie Dingell (L) and Rep. Barbara Comstock (R) in a joint appearance on Meet the Press in November 2017.
Rep. Comstock: Gosh, we met so long ago when I was still staff on the Hill and Debbie worked and her husband, of course, was a member. We really got to know each other well because both of us liked to have these bipartisan women’s lunches with people that we all knew in Washington. A late friend of ours used to say, “Washington isn’t Democrats vs. Republicans. It’s men vs. women.”
Once we were both elected in 2015, we found a lot of common ground on issues that do tend to affect women—breast cancer research and now sexual harassment.
Rep. Dingell: Barbara and I have been friends for decades, I think because we saw early in our careers that women needed to support each other. There weren’t many women back then, period. We were always two of a few women in the room. Neither Barbara nor I drop people! So we’ve kept up with each other all this time. We may not agree on all the issues but we do agree on supporting women and that friendship really matters.
“Washington isn’t Democrats vs. Republicans. It’s men vs. women.”
I’ll just add that when I was first elected, it was a really hard time for me. My husband [Rep. John Dingell, who represented Michigan in Congress for almost six decades] was in the hospital, and I was trying to adjust to a new job, take care of him, get everything in order, and Barbara knew what I was going through and checked in on me. I remember the afternoon she said, “You have to leave the hospital,” and we met at McClean Family Restaurant [in McClean, Virginia], and she said, “This is a mental health break.”
Rep. Comstock: We have tremendous mutual respect, and we share a worldview when it comes to values, when it comes to women at work. From the floors of factories to the boardrooms, we want to make sure that women’s voices are heard.
Jessica Ramos and Alessandra Biaggi
Both Democratic New York State Senate candidates, Ramos and Biaggi won their respective primaries, defeating entrenched (male) incumbents. Jeff Klein, whom Biaggi opposed, spent $3 million on the race. She won with 54 percent of the vote.
Alessandra Biaggi and Jessica Ramos met at a No IDC NY activist meet-up at the start of their respective bids for New York State Senate.
Ramos (District 13): I met Alessandra around nine months ago, or so. We were professional women who wanted to challenge these men in power whom we felt didn’t represent us at all. In New York, they’re called the Independent Democratic Conference, but they’re Democrats in name alone. They really vote like Republicans.
Biaggi (District 34): Because we were running against these candidates, it made sense to know each other. And then people started to endorse us as a pair, which was kind of great. I knew I think from the start that I could learn a lot from Jessica. She has experience in government, and she’s a mom, which I think is heroic. I’m engaged and I said to her, “I barely see my fiancé.” The fact that she has kids is remarkable. She’s shown me that as women, we don’t have to segment our lives to run our shelve our other responsibilities somewhere else. We incorporate our lives into these races, because our families and our friends and are our communities are the reason we’re in this.
Ramos: We can be each other’s cheerleaders, and not just because we’re both women, but because when it comes down to it, I don’t want to work with the incumbent. I want to work with Alessandra Biaggi. That’s who I want to pass laws with. That’s who I trust. I may not be able to vote for her because I live in another district. And I may not be able to contribute to her campaign because I haven’t seen a paycheck in months, which is part of running for office, but I am sure as hell her biggest cheerleader.
Biaggi: When I can’t sleep at night, I scroll through Twitter. Recently, I saw that Jessica’s opponent posted a video that was outrageous. The lies! It made me want to crack my phone in half. So I retweeted the video, and I said something like, “These are lies! Vote for Jessica!” I think I said, “Is this a joke?” I couldn’t believe it.
Ramos: That was hilarious, Alessandra. That is so representative. Alessandra is just like this. Sometimes, when I just can’t find it in me, I’m so tired, I’m so exhausted, I think about Alessandra. I do. I hear her, over my shoulder, like, “Go finish door-knocking in that building, Jessica. Go make 10 more calls.” She makes me better.
Ashley Selmon and Zahra Suratwala
Selmon and Suratwala are running for DuPage County Board in Illinois. “At times, I do feel discouraged,” Selmon says. “Like, when party leadership tells us we need to raise unfathomable amounts of money, and I’m looking at our account, and I’m like we’re not quite there! But I have Zahra, and we have this, and we have all these volunteers and all this enthusiasm. I think about that and I can’t help but believe what we want to achieve is possible.”
Ashley Selmon and Zahra Suratwala, candidates for the DuPage County Board, realized fast that collaboration could boost their chances at the ballot box.
Suratwala: We met after we both had decided to run back in September 2017, and we met because there are two seats on the board that will open in November, so we were introduced to each other. We text all the time, especially because campaign season is heating up and there are like 100 decisions to be made per second. Who can print yard signs? Who was that person who said she’d host a meet-and-greet for us? It’s just a constant stream of communication going on between us. But it’s wonderful because it means the work is divided in half. Whoever can take something on does, and as much as we ask each other to help out, we know we’re also both giving 100 percent.
Selmon: In a way, our friendship is a big part of our approach. Where we live, there’s one Democrat on this 18-seat board. If people don’t know the candidates on the ballot, in this area, they’ll just pick Republican. It makes sense to let voters know about both of us, have our faces and names together, so that voters are motivated to turn out for us. Zahra will never take credit for this, but after we won in the primary, I moved and had to have surgery. In any other timeline, I would have incredibly stressed about being out of pocket for a month in the middle of campaigning. But I knew Zahra would look at the emails and would text me if she needed me. She’s what I never could have expected when I decided to do this. And knowing what I know now, I never could have done it without her.
Liuba Grechen Shirley and Christine Pellegrino
Grechen Shirley is a progressive candidate for the U.S. House, who notably won a petition to the FEC that allowed her to spend campaign funds on childcare. Pellegrino beat a Republican in a deep red district in a special election in May 2017. She is now a member of the New York State Assembly.
“We take selfies all the time. At events, people come over and offer to take our photo, and we’re just like, ‘No, no, we’ll take a selfie,’” Grechen Shirley tells me. It was Pellegrino’s idea: “I wanted a record—we did this together.”
Christine Pellegrino, a member of the New York States Assembly, and Liuba Grechen Shirley, a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, made an instant connection over local politics and their (loud!) children.
Grechen Shirley (NY-2): After the presidential election in 2016, I started a grassroots Facebook group, and I called it New York 2nd District Democrats, and probably two days after this group went up, Christine reached out to me on Facebook and asked if we could talk. It was 11:00 p.m., I had a screaming six-month old infant to nurse, and Christine called me. We talked for an hour. She was one of the founding members of another activist group in the area, and we just delved into a plan to activate our people across the district. Her daughters were in the background; my child was sobbing. I knew in a second we’d be friends.
Pellegrino (District 9): This is what happens with women activists. We take up the call, literally.
Grechen Shirley: We put it all on the line because we’re fighting for change and we believe we can make a difference. But we have the same commitments that we did before. I’ve been at events with Christine where she’s had to run home to take her daughter to practice. Sometimes I have to rush out to get my daughter to dance class. It’s hard, but it would be harder alone.
Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids
Haaland and Davids (who, fun fact, is an ex-MMA fighter are both progressive candidates for the U.S. House and each could become the first Native American woman ever to serve in the chamber if she wins in November.
Sharice Davids (L) and Deb Haaland (R), campaigning together in Kansas in September 2018.
Davids (KS-3): Deb and I both went to the same summer program at the American Indian Law Center, a program that changed my life and enabled me to even be in a position to run for Congress. We weren’t the same class, but I felt connected to her because of that. Deb and I spoke soon after I announced I would run. The first time I called Deb, she was like, “If you need to sleep on my couch you can.” In some ways, I almost feel—Deb, you don’t even know this—that just hearing her on the other end in that first call, telling me, “Yes, do this,” was the validation I needed.
Haaland (NM-1): I had been at it for a lot longer than Sharice, at that point. It feels like a lifetime. A mutual contact put us in touch, and we share a lot of history. She was raised by a single mom. I’m a single mom. We’ve paid off our student loans. We’re both products of the public school system. We have a lot of similarities in our background, and when you share that struggle, it establishes a bond.
Davids: To me, Deb embodies that concept of someone who leads with love, who has genuine love and care for what we want to do here with Native candidates and women and the direction we’re headed in this nation. It’s been 240 years and we’ve never had a Native American woman in the House of Representatives in our government. It’s long overdue. I wish there were five of us and we all got sworn in at the same time. But we’ll take two for now, and we’ll leave the ladder down.
These conversations have been edited for clarity and concision.
Mattie Kahn is a senior editor at Glamour.
In a pivotal election year, Glamour is keeping track of the historic number of women running (and voting) in the midterm elections. For more on our latest midterm coverage, visit www.glamour.com/midterms.
The guy who left the voicemail didn’t address Beth Fukumoto by name.
“Hey, C*nt,” he said.
Fukumoto, a member of the Hawaii legislature, was in an airport when she heard the message and its warning: “We know where you live. We know what you drive. We’re on you,” the caller said. “Just wait. We can’t wait.”
As a lawmaker, Fukumoto, 35, had gotten used to fielding (and ignoring) angry messages and threats—particularly after leaving the Republican Party and becoming a Democrat. But when she heard that voicemail, “I just immediately started shaking,” she says.
“I definitely spent some time before running for Congress [this year] deciding if it was worth it, deciding if elevating my profile was a good idea, because of this kind of stuff—and because how easy it would be to just walk away.”
After weighing her options, Fukumoto did end up waging an unsuccessful Democratic primary bid for a U.S. House seat. She shared the unsettling voicemail with Glamour to highlight the toxicity that can plague women officials and candidates—and even make them think twice about getting in the ring.
Fukumoto says she’s seen plenty of crassness and creepiness as a young woman in politics, like donors who hint they expect a little side action for cutting a check. And yes, even threats.
She’s not alone.
In a record year for female political contenders—and in the era of #MeToo—women on the trail are besieged by comments that go from sexist to scary almost daily.
Cynthia Nixon, the actress and activist who just lost her primary challenge to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, says she found herself the target of a kaleidoscope of slurs. “This kind of misogyny is hardly limited to political candidates. Running for office just makes it that much more visible. The reality is this is what women have to deal with every single day,” Nixon told Glamour via email ahead of the Sept. 13 vote.
“In a strange way, I think my family was probably more prepared than most for the ugliness that comes with a political campaign. The fact is, when you’re a woman on television, and a queer woman no less, people say some pretty nasty things about you. So this isn’t entirely new to us,” said Nixon, who wed longtime partner Christine Marinoni in 2012.
PHOTO: Getty Images
Cynthia Nixon rallies before the Sept. 13 New York primary election.
A few graphic examples—and there are plenty to choose from—show Nixon’s policy tweets on healthcare and immigration drawing uncouth, ungrammatical responses like, “Oh shut up you ugly Dike,” “FUK YOU SCUM BAG FAG SLUT,” and “rabid despicable bitch.”
But the trolls, she told Glamour, didn’t win: “For every person who’s insulted me online, there have been countless more women who have come up to me on the street or on the subway to say, ‘Thank you for running. I believe in you. I know you can do it.’“
Responding or confronting a commenter engaging in verbal sexual harassment and hurling insults can be tempting, but Jessica Proud, a New York-based Republican strategist, says how she would advise a candidate to handle a misogynistic attack can depend on the source.
“You shouldn’t punch down. If it’s an isolated incident [involving] a voter, I don’t think it’s politically useful to engage,” she said, but there are occasions that merit a witty response—ideally “served with a smile.” (Case in point: Michigan gubernatorial hopeful Gretchen Whitmer, who mocked her hecklers in her own version of Jimmy Kimmel’s “Mean Tweets.”)
If the attack comes from “someone of prominence” or a direct opponent, however, Proud said it may be necessary to call it out sternly or have an ally do so.
Fair or not, she added, women have traditionally risked looking “weak” for making an issue of sexism on the trail—and that risk extends well beyond the campaign trail.
Tennis superstar Serena Williams, for example, got denigrated after arguing with, and demanding an apology from, a U.S. Open umpire who issued her a series of violations. (Williams lost the competition, but won some accolades for speaking up after an incident some observers said grossly entwined sexism and racism in the sport.) In business, women have long paid a price for objecting to verbal abuse from male bosses and colleagues.
Even the highest-profile female figures, elected or not, have to deal with sexist slurs: After a male Congressional candidate called Melania Trump a “hoebag” who “works by the hour,” the first lady’s office told Glamour the remarks were “disturbing and despicable.”
Christine Jahnke, a political communication expert who has advised former First Lady Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, has seen some head-spinning stuff while working with Democrats and progressive groups. The author of “The Well-Spoken Woman,” Jahnke recalls an incident in Indiana, where a candidate she advised arrived to campaign at a veterans’ hall and “some old guy comes up to her, looks her in the eye, and says, ‘Are you the stripper?'”
The best thing a woman can do, according to Jahnke, is have a cool-headed, practiced response ready to go when someone does take that cheap shot: “What you don’t want to do [is] lash out in a way that will be perceived as ‘angry’ or out of control,” she said—and that’s not always easy, because attacks rooted in gender can be distracting and distressing.
In some cases, the vitriol even crosses continents.
Cristina Osmeña, a Republican House candidate challenging incumbent Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier in California’s 14th District, came to the U.S. at age six when her family left the Philippines to escape the Marcos regime. When a newspaper there profiled her in February, noting her deep political roots, she was appalled to see a commenter dismiss her as a “little brown fvcking machine.”
“Since this is the first time I have run for office, and this happened early in my campaign, I really wondered what I had gotten myself into,” Osmeña, 49, told Glamour. “I stopped reading the comments sections of articles for awhile. I spent about half a day seething over the comment, regretting putting myself in the limelight, [and] then I let it go and moved on… I did not respond publicly. I internalized it.”
As to any future woman-bashing she may encounter, “If delivered to me anonymously, as mean comments often are, there is not much recourse,” Osmeña said, but “if in person, I would call them out pretty quickly.”
Vermont’s Christine Hallquist also made international headlines this season as the first transgender candidate to secure a major-party nomination for governor.
Christine Hallquist
In a phone conversation with Glamour shortly after the primary, Hallquist said she’s mainly gotten a warm reception from Vermonters on the trail. She mixed humor with a bit of pity in discussing the people “with issues” who go to the trouble of sending her hate mail.
“It comes from men, and here’s the most common thing that I believe a woman hears: It says, ‘You’re ugly.’ I get so many of these ‘you’re ugly’ things: ‘You’re ugly as a dog,’ blah, blah, blah,” Hallquist sighed. “I’m like, ‘First of all, I’m 62 years old. I get to be ugly!’ … What the hell do you expect? I’m not 20.”
Hallquist said she warned her campaign team that “the more we win, the more we’re going to get attacked. The more successful you are, the greater the threat you are. Read that as success, not failure.” But despite trying to frame even negative attention as a good sign, Hallquist, as the Associated Pressrecently noted, has started taking precautions after receiving death threats.
Violence, threatened or otherwise, aside, the rules of engagement in politics can be blurry.
When Gov. Cuomo used Cynthia Nixon’s stage career to suggest she wasn’t qualified for real-life leadership, was that inherently sexist? Could he—or would he—have attacked a male rival that way? Or when President Donald Trump mocked Nevada Rep. Jacky Rosen as “Wacky Jacky,” how did that measure up to his jabs at male critics like “Crazy” Bernie Sanders or “Cryin’” Chuck Schumer?
In the #MeToo era, women are frequently heard saying they feel more empowered to call out misogynist talk. But are they dealing with more of it? Are things worse this year, with record numbers of women running—and winning nominations—for federal and state office? Are more people making gender-based remarks or threats? Are they more violent?
Tough to say, per Kelly Dittmar of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.
Past female candidates certainly got told, implicitly if not literally, to get back in the kitchen, and “that represented only a fraction of the bias and sexism you might hear in more private spaces and, of course, that might have been in voters’ minds,” Dittmar told Glamour.
Now, “all that stuff that may have been said in bars, at dinner tables, or even just in someone’s head can be said [online] without much consequence,” she said. “Measuring frequency of attacks would be near impossible because of the scope of what we’d be counting.”
As to intensity, it’s also hard to judge, since threats also aren’t new to women in politics: “I think most about an interview with Shirley Chisholm where she talks about how close one man came to stabbing her in the back,” Dittmar said, referring to the first black woman elected to Congress.
Strategically, Dittmar said, “there had [been] a concern in past elections that if women called out sexism they were ‘playing the gender card’ and trying to garner sympathy.” Today, “I think it is harder to make that case (not that people will not…) without some backlash.”
When it comes to issues of sexism and misogyny on the trail, Dittmar said, “the positive note about this year is we are talking about it and, importantly, not accepting that it is just the cost of being a woman or a person of color in American politics.”
For Fukumoto, looking back on her experience in electoral politics, she says it “helped me a lot to have other women sort of come alongside me and just say, ‘That’s happened. I don’t talk about it, but yes, it’s happened.’ [That] kind of whisper network has been supportive. So knowing that you’re not alone, and knowing that other people are dealing with it, too, is very helpful to remember.”
After the ugliness, the threats, the drama she’s seen in politics… What’s next? Right now, working on a podcast and processing what she’s seen and heard.
“I’m going to wait to see what the opportunities are,” Fukumoto says. “I think I’m going to maybe run for City Council.”
In a pivotal election year, Glamour is keeping track of the historic number of women running (and voting) in the midterm elections. For more on our latest midterm coverage, visit www.glamour.com/midterms.
Celeste Katz is senior politics reporter for Glamour. Send news tips, questions, and comments to celeste_katz@condenast.com.
Imagine, for a second, that you’re a candidate for the United States Congress with the following profile: female, 28, minority, with a resume that doesn’t include any elected positions but does include bartender. Your primary opponent, meanwhile, is male, 56, white, has three decades of experience, and isn’t only the incumbent but one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic party. It’s a challenge to even get him to show up to debate you (he sent a surrogate in his place during your first scheduled face-off), and when you finally get the chance to square off with him, a week before the election—right around the time polls begin to show that, wait a second, you might actually have a chance at winning this thing—you decide to seize the moment with an important tweet. About lipstick.
It might sound like a gaffe, a sort of beauty-aisle version of Howard Dean’s primal scream. Yet that’s exactly what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did hours after she debated Rep. Joe Crowley on June 16 and—spoiler alert for anyone getting on the Internet for the first time in a week—went on to win the democratic primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District in an upset so stunning it dominated the national news on a day when a Supreme Court justice announced his resignation.
The tweet in full: “I have been getting so many inquiries about my debate lip color in the last two days,” she captioned a picture of a flat-screen TV broadcasting a close-up of her (impeccably ruby-lipped) face during the debate. “I GOT YOU. It’s Stila “Stay All Day” Liquid in Beso [lipstick emoji].”
Women in politics have always had a fraught relationship with fashion and beauty, and there’s a spate of evidence to support that—unlike their male counterparts—they’ve got to look good and be competent to have a shot at winning. But not too good, because that’ll hurt their credibility. The narrative had long been that real progress would only be achieved when the clothes female politicians wear or how they do their hair isn’t something that factors into our conversations or the way we vote. (How many times have you read a headline along the lines of: “It’s [insert year], why are we still talking about [insert female politician]’s clothes?”)
Likewise, conventional wisdom for female candidates has been they shouldn’t ever acknowledge their makeup or outfit choices (leave the press releases to the discretion of the designer’s PR) and instead walk onto the debate stage in a custom Ralph Lauren jacket that was vetted by eight image consultants, a face full of Temptu, and a tasteful lob held in place by two cans worth of Elnett. The goal: to get the public to focus on the budget surplus, not a suit. Consider this exchange Hillary Clinton had in 2010 while speaking on a panel in Kyrgyzstan:
A congressional candidate willingly sharing beauty tips seems to challenge the bounds of what seems appropriate in politics, but there’s been very little about Ocasio-Cortez that’s been by the book.
Consider this exchange Hillary Clinton had in 2010 while speaking on a panel in Kyrgyzstan:
Moderator: Which designers do you prefer?
Hillary: [Awkward pause] What designers of clothes?
So it’s remarkable that here we are eight years later, and there’s a candidate—a young progressive candidate, no less—who’s not only fielding questions about her appearance but doing so voluntarily, with the enthusiasm of a genuine beauty junkie.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” says Chris Jahnke, a Washington, D.C.-based speech coach who was a consultant on Clinton’s 2008 campaign and has worked with Michelle Obama. “It goes against the conventional wisdom of how women candidates should act.”
“If Hillary was revolutionary on pushing back on critiques of her clothing, Alexandria’s revolutionary in saying, ‘I’m a woman who wears lipstick,'” says Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor at Rutgers University and a scholar at the Center for Women in Politics.
Equally remarkable was the tweet’s reception: more than 5,000 likes and nearly 80 comments, most being of the “yesss girl” variety. “To be honest, [your lipstick was] so fierce, I’m surprised the moderator didn’t ask,” one follower wrote, with another remarking, “A true queen. Saving the community and [sic] keep the ladies up to date on makeup and style. I stan!” On the heels of Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, the post got a second wind, even bigger than its first go-round—getting pickup by national news outlets with the kind of breathless enthusiasm usually reserved for stories about Meghan Markle’s royal wedding foundation. By the end of the week, the inevitable: The candidate’s $22 lipstick of choice had sold out on both Stila’s website and Sephora’s.
PHOTO: Jeff Neira
Ocasio-Cortez during a visit to The View
A congressional candidate willingly sharing beauty tips seems to challenge the bounds of what seems appropriate in politics (even in this climate), but, then again, there’s been very little about Ocasio-Cortez that’s been by the book. She’s not even 30 years old and a political neophyte, yes, but she’s also a self-described socialist who hasn’t taken a dime of corporate money for her campaign. (More than two-thirds of her campaign’s $300,709 in fundraising came from small donors, or those who contributed $200 or less, according to reports.) Even her choice to wear that particular shade of lipstick in the first place—a bold red with blue undertones and matte finish—was relatively surprising. Same goes for the style choices that she hasn’t tweeted about: trendy oversize wire frames to canvas in Queens and a pair of skinny white jeans to visit border detention centers in Texas. And it’s this very quality of being a different kind of candidate that she’s played up during the campaign, including a viral ad that features the opening line, “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office.”
As unprecedented as Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet may be, it seems to be part of a broader trend of current female candidates losing the political-statue act and leaning into authenticity.
PHOTO: Scott Heins
A sign for Ocasio-Cortez at her victory party in the Bronx, New York.
“A record number of women are running for office, and they’re trying to run unapologetically as themselves,” says Amanda Hunter, communications director at the Barbara Lee Family Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which promotes gender equality in politics and contemporary art. She points to Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kelda Roys, who, in March, put out a campaign ad in which she talks through the finer points of her platform while breastfeeding. “There’s no such thing as conventional wisdom in this election cycle,” says Jahnke. “We’re debunking myths all over the place as women candidates become more free to be themselves.”
Granted, appearing authentic is often a studied move when you’re in the public eye—and one that’s having a moment, but there are distinct strategic advantages. “Alexandria’s a candidate who’s built her persona on being like you,” says Dittmar. “And a lot of women in the U.S. wear lipstick.”
One of the things that women candidates must be able to do is connect with voters—men will go on TV and they’ll have their favorite baseball cap on. They do it with abandon.
“She’s normalizing how women talk to one another,” adds Jahnke. “One of the things that women candidates must be able to do is connect with voters and what that means is coming across as approachable… Because men obviously have had their version of this—you’ll see this all the time, men will go on TV, and they’ll have their favorite baseball cap on—they do it with abandon, without shame.”
But breastfeeding in a campaign ad is one thing—that spot, conveniently, was lead-in to Roys discussing her successful ban of BPA, a toxic chemical found in baby bottles—makeup and fashion, another. And there’s a reason that conventional wisdom is what it is: In 2013, the Women’s Media Center conducted a study of 1,500 likely voters that found no matter what is said about a female political candidate’s appearance, the more coverage her looks get, the less likely they are to vote for her—a point experts think is still worth considering, regardless of whether the candidate appears to care. “The concern has been that if you open that door, then it’s fair game for the media to take stories about your appearance and run with it. Her campaign may want to take a look at how many stories come out about just that tweet,” says Dittmar, on whom the irony of her comment was not lost. “I mean, you’re writing this story, right?”
“Women have to work twice as hard as men to prove they can do their job, so there could be a danger in appearing frivolous. Women still have to walk a tightrope,” says Hunter. “I wouldn’t recommend, you know, talking about how much you love Benefit makeup during a debate.”
PHOTO: MediaPunch/Bauer-Griffin
Ocasio-Cortez in New York
It may seem like obvious advice, but the truth is, in today’s age of increased transparency, it’s become pointless at best and harmful at worst for politicians to hide the fact that they put effort into the way they look. (Remember the backlash when it became public that Sarah Palin spent $150,000 on Escada skirts for the 2008 campaign or that John Edwards spent $400 on a haircut?) Even Hillary Clinton—five years after calling that journalist sexist for asking about her favorite designers—posted her first Instagram, with a neat line of red, white, and blue pantsuits hanging on a garment rack and the caption, “Hard choices.” Yes, it was a quiet jab at the fact that the media had been so fixated on her clothes (softened by a bit of self-deprecation winking to criticism that she’s a formulaic dresser), but it demonstrated that even this woman, so famously guarded about her public image, felt it was time to pull back the curtain on her fashion choices.
Still, don’t expect every local female politician to be tweeting her fashion and beauty credits. “Even though we’re allowing women to be more full versions of themselves, not every candidate is going to do that,” says Dittmar. Adds Hunter: “We always say, ‘Every race is different, every woman is different, and it comes down to finding a balance that’s right for them.’”
In fact, it looks like that’s a balance that can even change by the day for a candidate: Just a week before she spread the gospel of her great lipstick to the internet, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a picture of a stack of campaign materials that featured a portrait of her without even a swipe of lipgloss. She captioned it: “Sending out a no-makeup GOTV mailer. Are we living in a feminist Utopia yet?”
