A string of victories for women in primary elections across the country is beginning to reshape the face of the Democratic Party and accelerate a conversation about its future — with consequences that reach well beyond the 2018 midterm election horizon.

The prospect of a record number of female candidates on the November ballot — and running for president in 2020 — has Democratic leaders leaning into increasingly explicit, gender-based appeals and focusing renewed attention on education, health care, sexual harassment and other issues perceived as critical to women.


The party itself is casting women as a focal point of the pre-presidential campaign, ahead of a presidential primary season in which women are expected to prove critical — as volunteers, donors and most important, as a bulk of voters.

“I can tell you, women are leading the resistance,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York senator and prospective presidential contender, said at a Center for American Progress event in Washington last week. “A year and a half after our generation’s own women’s march, the grass-roots energy is growing, it is not fading. And women are holding our democracy together in these dangerous times.”

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Volunteering that she is writing a children’s book about women’s suffrage, Gillibrand said, “The next chapter of the women’s movement is being written right now. … The last year and a half really gives me hope for the future. I’m really optimistic, because we are poised to elect more women than ever for state, local and federal offices.”

At a women’s leadership conference hosted by the Democratic National Committee three days later, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), told the crowd, “We see women taking that old saying, ‘Don’t get mad, get even,’ to a whole new level. It is now, ‘Don’t get mad, get elected.”

A decade after Hillary Clinton tamped down talk of gender in her groundbreaking 2008 presidential campaign, top party leaders and Democratic presidential prospects vigorously embrace it. Clinton herself put the issue at the forefront of her 2016 campaign — but to mixed effect. There’s still an ongoing debate over how gender played in her defeat, and Clinton has frequently asserted that misogyny and sexism were contributing factors.

At the DNC Conference, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), another prospective Democratic presidential contender, heralded her credentials as California’s first woman and person of color elected state attorney general, and second black woman elected to the U.S. Senate.

“Let’s speak truth,” Harris told leadership conference attendees at a dinner. “There are three men for every one woman who is in elected office in these United States … There has never been a black woman elected governor of any state in these United States. And in fact, right now in our country, there are only two black women in the entire country to hold statewide office, and one is about to retire.”

Harris, who has been careful to deflect presidential speculation, stressed that she was talking about 2018. But her message was one she could carry into 2020 when she told the crowd of mostly women, “Our country needs us.”

Asked on Friday if the political climate advantages women considering running for president in 2020, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez pointed to a deluge of support for women in Virginia’s elections in November.

“The 15 former members of the Virginia House of Delegates who are no longer members of the Virginia House of Delegates were all male,” he said, “replaced by 11 women.”

Perez suggested the impact of women’s success this year could be better measured by the issues he said they are “giving meaning to,” regardless of the gender of any politician addressing them. But even men who might run for president are being pushed to both recognize the significance of women’s gains this year, while casting themselves as champions of issues significant to women voters.

“It’s not a cliché to say the resistance is female,” Jason Kander, the former Missouri secretary of state and a potential presidential candidate, said in a hallway off the women’s forum floor on Friday.

Kander, like most Democrats, insist they are focused solely on the midterm elections. Clinton, who addressed the conference Friday, urged Democratic activists to help “make sure that every table has not just one, but many seats for women.”

“I think if you are, as I am, viewing our country at a real crossroads right now, you know we cannot leave a stone unturned in this upcoming election,” Clinton said. “We have to win back the Congress. We have to hold this administration accountable.”

But it is not just the midterm elections that are boosting women’s prospects. For Democrats bidding to succeed where Clinton failed in 2016 — the field of prospective presidential candidates includes Gillibrand, Klobuchar, Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — a broader shift within the electorate appears to be at work, as well.

According to a Pew Research Center survey in March, 56 percent of American women identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, a 4 percentage point increase over 2015. The Democratic Party’s advantage among younger voters is even greater with women, with 70 percent of millennial women identifying themselves as Democrats or leaning Democratic.

Those women are paying more attention to politics since Trump’s election, according to the Pew survey, and they are far more likely than men are to say that who is president makes a significant difference in their lives. While men account for a majority of donations to House candidates this election cycle, donations from women have surged to 31 percent of all donations, a historic high, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

For Democrats, the rising level of engagement from women is significant for pre-presidential campaign maneuvering because of a gender gap that that has grown even more pronounced than on election night in 2016, when Clinton carried the popular vote. According to a Gallup survey in January, Trump’s average job approval rating among women in 2017 sat 12 percentage points lower than men, and Democrats are becoming increasingly eager to exploit Trump’s weakness.

Cecile Richards, former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said women’s marches following Trump’s election in 2016 served as a “springboard” to increased political activism. Buoyed by a recent Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll showing 1 in 5 Americans have participated in political protest, rally or campaign event since President Donald Trump’s election — with many of those rally-goers motivated by women’s rights — Richards said at the Center for American Progress event, “I actually think that’s a sign that there are literally millions of people out there who are agitated and are voting with their feet … taking that all the ways to the polls.”

Clinton’s public appearances since the 2016 election have been met with a mix of appreciation and dread, with many Democrats fearful her revisiting of the campaign will only distract the party from future elections. But on Friday, she was greeted by a standing ovation and chants of “Hillary,” while the set list at the DNC event included a mainstay of her 2016 campaign, Katy Perry’s “Roar.”

Valerie Jarrett, who served as a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said Clinton remains a “huge asset” to the party and alluded to her role as a trailblazing candidate.

“I think what we cannot allow is for people to come after women in a way that is inconsistent with our core values,” she said. “It’s hard when you break glass ceilings. … Those of us who break glass ceilings are going to get cut with some of the shards.”

Carla Marinucci contributed to this report.

