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As we head full-steam into 2020, here's a brief refresher on the resources on our
Election Watch
page. First, you can find information on the women currently running for president in the Democratic primary, as well as historical information on women and the presidency, on
Presidential Watch
. For a list of all the women who are expected to run or have filed for Congress and statewide elected offices this year, head to
2020 Candidates: The Buzz
, which will transition into a list of all filed candidates as filing deadlines continue to pass. Deadlines have already passed in AL, AR, CA, IL, NC, OH and TX. For the raw numbers of women running for congressional, statewide, and (following the primaries) state legislative offices, check out our
2020 Summary of Women Candidates
page, which includes the numbers of both filed and potential candidates, as well as historical records to beat. The 2018 elections were huge for women candidates, but many of them didn't end up winning their election. On our
Rebound Candidates
page, you can see the 2018 candidates that are running again in 2020. Lastly, if you're looking for some context for all these numbers, our
Election Analysis
site contains the latest perspectives from CAWP scholars and guest contributors.
Now here's what's in store for CAWP programs in the New Year...
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New
Year's Resolution: Get Ready to Run®
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Early bird reduced registration rates are still in effect for the 2020 Ready to Run® New Jersey conference, held from March 20-21, with pre-conference programs for women of color beginning on the afternoon of the 20th. Ready to Run® is a non-partisan campaign training program to encourage women to run for elective office, position themselves for appointive office, work on a campaign, or get involved in public life in other ways. Our two-track system has courses both for women preparing for an upcoming political campaign and for those who are looking to deepen their political engagement and learn how best to interface with public officials. Start the year off right by re-committing to getting more politically involved.
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| 2019 NEWL Attendees with New Jersey Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg |
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It's a brand new year, and CAWP is as focused on fostering new generations of leadership as ever through our NEW Leadership® program. We're currently accepting applications for our Susan N. Wilson NEW Leadership® New Jersey 2020 cohort. NEWL® is a week-long residential program for undergraduates that educates them about women's participation in politics and helps the students hone their own public leadership skills. The program will be held from June 11-16 at the Eagleton Institute of Politics on the Rutgers University-New Brunswick campus. All students at New Jersey two-year higher education institutions and rising juniors and seniors at four-year institutions are strongly encouraged to apply.
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Speaking of our education and training programs...on February 24th CAWP hosting our annual networking reception, Women of Power, at Marsilio's Kitchen in West Trenton. The proceeds from Women in Power directly benefit our NEW Leadership
® and Ready to Run
® programs, and it is co-hosted by New Jersey's congresswomen, lieutenant governor and every woman in the New Jersey Legislature.
Become a sponsor or
purchase a ticket today to attend the event and mingle with a bipartisan group of people committed to a more equitable future for women in politics. Host Committee sponsors receive special recognition during the reception, on promotional materials, in the printed program booklet, on CAWP's website, and at Ready to Run® and NEW Leadership®.
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You can still support CAWP's educational programs through a generous donation today.
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CAWP Senior Scholar Kira Sanbonmatsu published a new piece in the journal
D
ædalus
, "
Women's Underrepresentation in the U.S. Congress
", in which she summarizes the current status of women's representation at the national level, while providing historical and structural context, as well as intersectional analysis, regarding political parity in the United States.
Read more
here
.
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Illustration accompanying the NJ.com article by Andrea Levy
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Between Christmas and New Year's,
NJ.com and The Star Ledger broke a story about widespread and long-standing sexual harassment perpetrated in New Jersey state politics. While the story notes incidents in a variety of circumstances, it singles out in particular two annual political events, the Chamber of Commerce train trip to Washington and the League of Municipalities convention, as frequent sites of harassment and abuse. Following the article's publication, the two groups
released statements pledging to find ways to combat sexual harassment, and
Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg announced that she was forming an ad hoc committee to find ways to combat the toxic climate that creates pervasive harassment.
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| Rep. Kimberly Dudik and her young son on the floor of the Montana House of Representatives. |
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CAWP Associate Director Jean Sinzdak gave important context to
The Associated Press for an article about the drive to allow campaign funds to be used for childcare, an important step to allow women, and all young parents, greater opportunity to participate in politics. For federal elections, recent FEC decisions have made it easier for candidates to apply funds to childcare, but rules at the state level vary widely. Sinzdak's
Election Watch analysis of the practice and CAWP's
state-by-state rundown are extremely useful resources to find out the status of legislation and rule-making related to childcare costs on the campaign trail. Sinzdak also spoke to
KRCC on this topic, telling them, "This issue is really important to opening the playing fields to women of all ages and from all types of family backgrounds to be able to consider running for office."
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Final Results from the 2019 Elections
At the end of December, we posted the most up-to-date information about the 2019 off-year elections, including some updates to our
state rankings
of women's representation in state legislatures. As a result of the 2019 elections, Mississippi will move up 4 spots in our state rankings, from 49th to 45th, and Louisiana will move up from 47th to 44th. Both states remain in the bottom 10 states for women's representation in state legislatures. Virginia, which saw a modest gain in women's representation, will move from the 31st to the 25th spot, and New Jersey, which saw no change in the number of women in its legislature, will return to the 21st spot. Read more, including some new milestones in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia, in
our press release
.
WHYY interviewed Kelly Dittmar following the most recent Democratic debate and one of
Dittmar's tweets highlighting disparities in debate questions from our
#GenderLens2020 livetweet of debate night was featured in a
New York Times article about gender and the debate. Meanwhile, Amy Klobuchar, who was able to capitalize on a narrower field of candidates on the debate stage, was featured in an ABC article about her 27 county bus tour through Iowa ahead of the caucuses, and Debbie Walsh was interviewed about how the upcoming impeachment trial may impact her ability to compete on the campaign trail, particularly as other prominent moderates in the race like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg will not have to divide their attention with a Senate trial.
On the electability beat,
Maclean's spoke to Dittmar about whether voters see women as electable, and specifically the conundrum of voters being willing themselves to vote for a woman candidate but seeing other voters as unwilling.
The New Yorker takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to electability, fashioning the perfectly electable woman candidate by imagining her as fulfilling every contradictory and impossible demand placed on women candidates at once.
Lastly, Liza Mundy at
Politico writes about Elizabeth Warren's career, the ways she broke new ground as a woman throughout her career, and how feminism informs and intertwines with her other political and economic beliefs. Mundy spoke with Walsh about Warren on the trail in the 2020 race and how we can expect her to act in a match-up with Trump: "If Trump were to stalk behind Warren during a debate, says Walsh, 'I would expect a level of fearlessness from her. She is not going to be cautious with him.'"
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New Senator
As
Politico notes, Kelly Loeffler was sworn in yesterday as the new Senator from Georgia, following her appointment to replace freshly retired Senator Johnny Isakson. Loeffler becomes the 26th woman in the Senate during this term, a new record high for the institution. She'll face a special election this year to determine whether she will serve the remained of Isakson's term. See more information about the women in the Senate
here.
Jersey Women to Watch
New Jersey Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg released her annual bipartisan
Powerful Women of New Jersey list
, featuring notable women politicians, lobbyists, activists, scholars and more, including our own Director, Debbie Walsh. Erica Jedynak of Save New Jersey released the
2020 Right Women to Watch
list of conservative women in politics and media, as well as some key races to pay attention to for 2020.
In Other News
Nancy L. Cohen writes in
The New York Times about Republican women in the era of Donald Trump. Starting with the rise to prominence of Sarah Palin and how her politics paradoxically presaged a reduction of women's influence in the party, Cohen goes on to discuss the contrasts between women supporting Trump and those reluctant to go along with the party's current trajectory, pointing to these latter women as the future of the party.
The Los Angeles Times profiles Blanca and Susan Rubio, the first sisters ever elected to the California state legislature. The children of an immigrant laborer, the Rubio sisters were deported along with their family when they were children, before immigration reform during the Reagan administration allowed them to seek citizenship. They became citizens in 1994, and Blanca won an Assembly seat in 2016 and Susan won a state Senate seat in 2018.
In a 2019 year-in-review column for
The Richmond Times-Dispatch, Marsha Mercer writes about how the chaotic past year wasn't all bad, and she uses CAWP data to tell the story of women making political progress in the nation and in Virginia specifically, citing an increasing proportion of women in the Virginia state legislate and the assent of Eileen Filler-Corn as the first woman speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates and Charniele L. Herring as the first woman and first Black person to serve as majority leader. That's not just not bad...that's pretty great!
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Center for American Women and Politics
Eagleton Institute of Politics
Rutgers University | New Brunswick
191 Ryders Lane, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8557
(848) 932-9384 - Fax: (732) 932-6778
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