From breastfeeding on camera to sharing intimate stories of sexual abuse, women running for office are turning campaign norms — and long-held gender stereotypes — on their head with a flurry of new ads that highlight once taboo topics.

With a historic number of women running for Congress or governor in 2018, many say it’s long overdue that female candidates stop conforming to a “winning” playbook written mostly by men.


President Donald Trump has played a part, too. A majority of the female candidates running this year are Democrats who are not only enraged by his presidency but motivated by the way he was seemingly able to break all the rules and still win.

“This is a guy who’s been accused of sexually assaulting and harassing dozens of women,” said Kelda Roys, a Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate who breastfeeds her infant daughter in a recent video announcing her campaign.

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“The idea that women will still have to walk this very narrow tightrope to be taken seriously and [be] seen as credible, I just think women candidates and women voters, they’ve had enough,” Roys said.

For several of the women, taking an unconventional approach to their campaign playbook can help attract much-wanted media attention in a crowded field of candidates.

For others, a deeply personal story may help win over voters when competing against a much more established and well-known opponent. Democratic House candidate Sol Flores in Illinois, for example, recounted being sexually abused as a child in an ad.

Flores lost in her primary bid in March. And Roys is competing against more than a dozen other Democrats — most of them men — for the chance to take on GOP Gov. Scott Walker.

But campaign consultants, operatives and researchers say that, win or lose, women could leave a lasting impact on the way future candidates, both male and female, approach their campaigns and the long-held rules they are expected to follow.

How current cultural dynamics shape campaigns this year is one of several trends being analyzed by the Women Rule Candidate Tracker, a research collaboration between POLITICO and the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers-New Brunswick and the Women in Public Service Project at The Wilson Center.

After primaries in Texas and Illinois, at least 480 women are still vying for House and Senate seats — a number that will shatter current records for both chambers if it holds — according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics. And 76 female candidates are expected to compete in gubernatorial races in 34 states this year, another record-breaking statistic.

For women in particular, rewriting the typical campaign script means leaning on gender “as an electoral asset” and not a hurdle they have to overcome, said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics who wrote a book on gender stereotypes in campaigns.

“When we want to measure success and we want to think about allowing for a diversity of candidates … we have to start disrupting the male, particularly white male, masculine norm of what it means to be in a campaign,” Dittmar said. “I think that’s what you’re seeing in these ads, and I think it’s really valuable.”

Compelling and controversial campaign ads are not new for men or women running for office.

But several people interviewed for this article said the number of videos in which female candidates have highlighted their gender in one prominent way or another — from a candidate in California talking directly to the camera about the possibility of having an abortion to women in Kentucky and Arizona highlighting their careers as fighter pilots to a Florida House candidate detailing her efforts to fend off “handsy” men — is a shift from the past.

Roys’ decision to nurse her baby while continuing to talk to the camera and include that footage in her announcement video wasn’t planned, she said. But for Krish Vignarajah, the only woman vying for the Democratic nomination for governor in Maryland, the idea to breastfeed her daughter in her ad was entirely intentional.

“It was no accident, it’s my life,” Vignarajah said. “It’s what moms have been doing forever between juggling work, raising families and frankly getting the job done. So I wanted to record a video that was authentic to me and true to my life.”

While an eye-catching ad can help cut through the noise and increase name recognition — and potentially fundraising — several experts said the current political environment also plays a big role in the type of ads cropping up.

Resistance to Trump and female empowerment are prominent themes on the left, especially as the broader public faces a reckoning around sexual harassment — all factors that may make it easier for women to push long-held political boundaries in their campaigns.

Some campaign operatives say they’re waiting to see if female candidates ultimately revert to more traditional ads that might appeal to a wider swath of voters as the general election approaches.

Most of the attention-grabbing campaign ads and announcement videos from female candidates have so far been on the web. Unlike on TV, where advertising is often pricey and can eat up a limited campaign budget, web videos offer candidates low risk and high reward if they go viral.

“My guess is you won’t see that [kind of ad] when you’re running a competitive race against somebody of the other party,” said Ashley O’Connor, a Republican media consultant who has worked on several high-profile Senate, presidential and gubernatorial campaigns.

“You’re going to need real messages when you want people to vote for you and I think a gratuitous breastfeeding shot is not going to do it.”

Most of these kinds of ads come from Democratic candidates. That’s no accident, according to campaign consultants and researchers, who say the lopsided statistics aren’t just because nearly three-quarters of female candidates at the congressional and gubernatorial levels are Democrats.

“On the Democratic side, primary electorates are overwhelmingly women voters. On the GOP side, primary electorates are at best 50/50 [men and women],” said Margie Omero, a veteran Democratic pollster. “[Republicans] also don’t have what we have on the left, which is outrage at Donald Trump.”

Female candidates generally talk about and approach gender differently in their campaigns depending on their party affiliation, according to Dittmar.

“It’s not to say that in some areas and races Republican women can’t use gender in ways that are advantageous," she said. "It’s just they have to think differently about how they talk about gender and those messages.”

Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), for example, deployed her gender in a much different way. She launched her bid for the Senate by highlighting her 26-year career as a fighter pilot — and telling “Washington Republicans to grow a pair of ovaries.”