All-women ticket offers Henderson voters a chance to make history

Voters across the country have chance this year to elect the nation’s first female president.

But voters from Green Valley to Water Street have an even more historic opportunity — to elect female candidates up and down the ballots for the first time.

In Assembly District 29 in Henderson, voters could choose the first all-female ticket in state history: Hillary Clinton for president, former Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto for U.S. Senate, Jacky Rosen for Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District, Joyce Woodhouse for state Senate and Lesley Cohen for state Assembly. All five of the candidates are Democrats.

“This has never happened before,” said Stephanie Schriock, president of the group EMILY’s List, at a news conference Wednesday.

“The fact that we have an actual ballot where we’ve got Hillary Clinton, a woman running for president, and a woman running all the way through the statehouse — this is a big deal,” said Schriock, whose organization works to elect pro-choice Democratic women.

The United States has lagged behind other countries in electing a woman to lead it. As a sample, Germany, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, South Korea, Nepal, Chile and Namibia all currently have either female heads of state or heads of government.

The country has come a long way since 1937, when the Gallup Poll found that 33 percent of people would vote for a woman for president with the same qualifications as a male candidate. A CNN poll in March found that 80 percent of Americans are ready to put a woman in the White House.

Still, concerns about electing the nation’s first president remain. At a recent focus group of middle-class mothers in Las Vegas, two of the 10 women worried whether a woman could lead the country.

One said it was against her religion to elect a woman president, while another said she didn’t think a female president was the best option for the country at this point, though she planned to vote for Clinton. Other women in the group feared Clinton wouldn’t be treated fairly in other countries as a woman.

“It's hard to believe what you've never seen before,” Schriock said in an interview. “Having Hillary Clinton win this election and serve as our president will, I believe, knock out that perspective ultimately and seed opportunities for young women and girls all over the country who have never seen this.”

Nevada, too, has fallen behind in electing female politicians. It is one of the 23 states that has never had a female governor and one of 22 states that has never had a female senator, though Cortez Masto would change that.

“As attorney general, the first meeting I ever walked into with AG's across the country, there were probably eight women. The rest were all males sitting around a table,” Cortez Masto said in an interview. “That's why you focus on being a voice, making sure that you're pushing forward an agenda with a different perspective, which is so important.”

But more important than making history is making sure that women have a seat at the table, she said.

In its history, Nevada has also only elected three women to congress: two seven-term congresswomen, Republican Barbara Vucanovich and Democrat Shelley Berkley, and Congresswoman Dina Titus, who represents Nevada’s 1st Congressional District. That would make Rosen, a former computer programmer and local synagogue leader, the state’s fourth.

“If I would've told my teenage self with my first Ms. magazine that I would be here, that would've been a long stretch,” Rosen said at the news conference. “I can tell you that I'm so so very proud of it.”

Rosen says women know how to build consensus, make friends, and work across the aisle. “We’ll all go out and have a cup of coffee and we’ll talk about things because that’s what women inherently do,” Rosen said. “We figure out how to get things done.”

Nevada actually has one of the higher proportions of women state lawmakers, but they still only make up a third of the Legislature though women are half of the state’s population.

Woodhouse, one of the state’s female legislators seeking re-election, said Nevada women working full time were losing $2.4 billion a year due to the gender pay gap. She's facing a female opponent, Republican Carrie Buck.

“The issues that affect women's lives are not just women's issues, they are family issues, they are economic issues, and they are crucial to future competitiveness for our state and our nation,” Woodhouse said.

At the same time, former Assemblywoman Cohen is trying to take back the seat she lost to Assemblyman Stephen Silberkraus in the 2014 election.

“This might be the first time we've seen a ballot with women all the way up and down the Democratic ticket, but it definitely won't be the last,” Cohen said. “Women are capable everywhere on doing this, running for office and being involved in politics.”