Key takeaways on DCCC promoting women in campaign leadership:
- 16 of 33 Red to Blue candidates have female managers (48%)
- 40% of Democratic campaign managers nationally are female
- 51% of Democratic finance directors nationally are female
- DCCC Training Department stats (through 3/22):
- Total trained: 8,069
- Total sessions led: 204
- 25 cities trained
- 3,652 operatives trained online
- 155 webinar trainings
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Young Women Help Lead Campaigns to Success at the Polls
New York Times
Michael Tackett
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/us/politics/women-campaign-managers-midterms.html
[…] Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss in the 2016 presidential election prompted a surge of Democratic women running for office this year, and right behind them, a new legion of young women like Ms. Brown managing campaigns. With a seat at the head of the table, they will be responsible for strategy, message, staff and creating networks for future campaigns.
They will have the potential to reshape a profession long dominated by men.
This year, 40 percent of the campaign managers for Democratic congressional candidates are women, according to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In contrast, Kelly Dittmar, a political scientist at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, recalled excising data on female campaign consultants from a book she wrote in 2010 because the numbers were too small to be statistically reliable.
“For years, women were the fund-raisers and the communications people,” said Anita Dunn, a Democratic consultant and former communications director for President Barack Obama. “But when it was the big-boy decisions, there weren’t women in the room.”
That is changing. Ms. Brown alone is in regular contact with a half-dozen other young women managing congressional campaigns.
[…] She connected with the Virginia chapter of Emerge America, a group that trains Democratic women to run for office. That led her to Wendy Gooditis, then a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates who had $700 in campaign money and very little chance to win. Ms. Brown helped her create a compelling message, then relentlessly worked on raising money and contacting voters. Within six months, the campaign had raised $500,000, and Ms. Gooditis won her race in November.
Ms. Brown’s success made an impression on Ms. Davis Stover, a former chief of staff to a Democratic congressman, who is running against Representative Barbara Comstock, one of the most vulnerable House Republicans.
“I wanted a woman to run our race,” Ms. Davis Stover said. “I wanted Emma because she’s intelligent, she’s compassionate, she’s driven. I wanted someone with grit to walk through the fire.”
Ms. Brown said young female campaign managers like her can “hold that space for other women.”
“We talk a lot about how male managers come in, and there’s this respect,” she said. “Women managers come in, and they have to earn it.”
Ms. Brown said she has felt the sting of sexism: Men have questioned whether she was really a campaign manager. She has been told she would have to wait her turn. And there has been the not-so-subtle “when did you graduate from college” question to discern her age.
She uses that as motivation. “I feel very compelled to the front lines of electoral politics and electing women, in particular, in the Trump era,” Ms. Brown said.
Ms. Dittmar, of Rutgers, said women who run campaigns are critical as “the key players in drafting a plan, drafting a message and a platform.”
“The people you have at that table when making those decisions should be as diverse as the constituency that you are trying to persuade,” she said.
[…] Women have played prominent roles on campaigns for decades, including several on the presidential level, but managing a race was still more the exception than the rule.
Ms. Brown said she and the other women running campaigns know that their opportunity was borne of Mrs. Clinton’s loss.
“Hillary opened up this space for women,” Ms. Brown said. “If she had won, I don’t know if any of this would be happening. I don’t know if #MeToo would have happened. I would give my right arm to have won in 2016, but I am really grateful for everything that’s come out of it.”