Black Women in Politics
These 6 Women Had No Plans To Run For Office. Then Trump Came Along.
After a wave of first-time female candidates in 2017, we followed up with some to see where they landed.
If there’s one area where President Donald Trump has been effective, it’s at inspiring women to run for office to fight against everything he represents.
A staggering number of first-time female candidates has emerged over the past year. More than 26,000 women have reached out to EMILY’s List, an organization that recruits and trains pro-choice Democratic women, about launching a campaign. Just 920 female potential candidates contacted the group in 2015 and 2016 combined. Run for Something, which trains young Democrats to run for local and state seats, has recruited 15,000 people since its launch in late 2016. The vast majority of them are female.
HuffPost met several women last year who were either thinking about running or who did run for the first time, and we got to thinking: What happened to them? Did they follow through with it? Did they win? If they lost, what are they doing now?
We tracked down six of these women from around the country to see where they landed and what their plans are for 2018. They’ve taken different paths, but all said they are committed to pushing back on Trump’s rhetoric and polices however they can.
Nikita Richards of Bloomington, Illinois
Nikita Richards was one of a few dozen attendees of Build the Bench, an all-day boot camp last February designed to train Democrats on how to run for local office. Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) organized the event, which offered nuts-and-bolts details on how to run a successful campaign. By the end of it, the 35-year-old single mom was raring to go.
“I was scared,” Richards said at the time. “Now I’m ready.”
A year later, Richards is a candidate for McLean County Clerk in Illinois. She doesn’t have a primary challenger, but she’s going up against a Republican in November who has held the seat for two terms. If Richards wins, she will be the first African-American elected to the position and the first Democrat in 40 years.
Richards said she’s been focused on talking to people about what a clerk actually does and raising concerns with the current clerk’s plan to remove three polling places and consolidate them. Those stations are based in largely minority and low-income neighborhoods that don’t run along bus lines, she said, so removing them would make it difficult for people there to vote. Richards successfully fought to keep one of those polling places where it is, but two were removed and consolidations are moving forward.
“Ultimately, it’s a voter suppression technique,” she said. “I’m having people question the clerk’s claims that this isn’t happening.”
Kelly Gonez of Los Angeles, California
The day after Trump became president, students in Kelly Gonez’s seventh-grade science class told her they felt scared. Gonez, 29, had just started teaching at a Los Angeles school after serving as an education policy advisor in the Obama administration. She worried that Trump was planning to undo the policy work she’d done to protect kids like her students, some of whom had undocumented family members.
She decided to run for a board seat on the Los Angeles Unified School District.
“I looked at the country, in terms of who is running for office, and reflected on my experience in D.C. and thought, ‘Why not me?’” Gonez said in May.
She won. In the months since then, Gonez, who lives with her husband in Sylmar, said it’s been “infuriating” to see Trump ramp up immigration enforcement efforts in her community, where students have been missing school because they have family …
Please read original article- These 6 Women Had No Plans To Run For Office. Then Trump Came Along.
