May 23, 2023

Primary elections were held in Kentucky last week for statewide elective executive offices, while there were also key results for women candidates in Philadelphia and Jacksonville municipal races. Here’s results reporting from CAWP:

• Of the seven women candidates in last week’s Kentucky primary elections, five women won their contests, two of whom could make history in November.
• State Representative Pamela Stevenson is the Democratic nominee for attorney general. If she were to win in the general, she would become the first woman attorney general of Kentucky.
• Sierra Enlow won the Democratic nomination for agriculture commissioner. Should she win in the general election, she would become the first woman to hold the office.
• Current Treasurer Allison Ball, one of two women serving in statewide elective executive office in Kentucky, won the Republican nomination for auditor and will face Democrat Kimberley Reeder in an all-woman general election.
• Jacqueline Coleman, the state’s incumbent lieutenant governor and the 2023 running mate of Governor Andy Beshear, is once again the nominee for lieutenant governor.
• In Philadelphia, Councilwoman Cherelle Parker won the Democratic nomination for mayor in Philadelphia, putting her on the path to becoming Philadelphia’s first woman mayor. Currently, 8 (7D, 1NP) Black women serve as mayors in cities among the top 100 most populous cities in the United States.
• In Jacksonville, Donna Deegan won a runoff election and will become the city’s first woman mayor.



Learn about all the women running in statewide elective executive office and state legislative races in 2023 on CAWP's candidate fact page. For information on women in mayoral offices, visit our pages on women in local office.

New research released earlier today from CAWP Research Grant recipients Martina Santia and Sylvia Gonzalez shows distinct approaches to emotional appeals in campaign messaging from women of different racial and ethnic groups. In Harnessing the Power of Gendered Emotions: How Women of Color Use Emotional Appeals in their Campaign Messages, Santia and Gonzalez combine an analysis of over 27,000 campaign advertisements aired between 2010 and 2018 with an online survey experiment gauging voters’ reactions to simulated campaign messages from a variety of hypothetical candidates. Some key findings from Santia and Gonzalez’s project include:

• Women of color employ different emotional appeals on the congressional campaign trail than their white counterparts and are rated differently by voters. 
• Women of color, and especially Black women, are less likely to employ negative emotional appeals compared to white women candidates. 
• Voters are more favorable towards positive messages, as opposed to negative messages, from a hypothetical Black woman candidate. 
• Hypothetical Latina candidates deploying positive emotional appeals received less support from women of color survey respondents compared with white women respondents, suggesting possible avenues of message modulation for Latina candidates directed at specific sub-audiences.



Read the full report here and learn more about our CAWP Research Grants here.

Come join the CAWP team as our new program and events coordinator! A crucial component of CAWP’s mission to expand women’s political representation is through developing education and outreach strategies which translate research findings into action and addressing women’s underrepresentation in political leadership with effective, intersectional, and imaginative programs serving a variety of audiences. The program and events coordinator assists the program and senior staff in managing logistics and administrative tasks relating to CAWP’s public programming and special projects, including educational programs like Ready to Run® and NEW Leadership®, as well as other events like our Senator Wynona Lipman Chair in Women’s Political Leadership lecture. Learn more and apply today here.

In honor of the passing of political scientist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin earlier this month, the academic journal Politics & Gender, which counts CAWP scholars among its editorial board, is ungating articles from a 2012 Critical Perspectives symposium, "Hanna Pitkin's 'Concept of Representation' Revisited." All articles in the symposium will be open access through June 2023; find them on the Politics & Gender website. Also available now on the Politics & Gender site: a collection of articles about academic publishing that aims to expand access to the publication process. Articles address how to submit, demystifying reviewing, publishing during the Ph.D., responding to reviewers, expanding publication opportunities, and advice from editors on submitting to Politics & Gender specifically. Find all the articles here and learn more in this Twitter thread.