news desk The Women Running in the Midterms During the Trump Era This year’s wave of female candidates has some striking features besides its sheer size. By Margaret Talbot

Illustrations by Cristiana Couceiro

Four hundred and seventy-two women have entered the race for the House this year, which is a lot of women. Fifty-seven women have filed or are likely to file their candidacies for the Senate. A useful comparison is to 2012, which marked the last big wave of female candidates: two hundred and ninety-eight ran for the House, thirty-six for the Senate. The number of women likely running for governor this year, seventy-eight, is a record high. The majority of female candidates in 2018 are Democrats, so it seems safe to conclude that many of them are fuelled by frustration, not to say fury, with Donald Trump. The President may have been inadvertently motivational in another way as well. The major reason there are fewer women in congressional office is not that they are less likely to win than men but that they are less likely to run. And one reason they are less likely to run is that they are less likely than men to feel that they are sufficiently prepared. According to a study from 2013, college-age men who doubted they’d be qualified to run for office were fifty per cent more likely than women who felt the same way to go for it anyway. Trump clearly never agonized over whether he was qualified.

Density of Women in the Midterms Toggle between the House, Senate, and gubernatorial races. Pennsylvania’s Fifth Congressional District has the highest number of female congressional candidates over all. Candidates with asterisks are briefly profiled below.

This year’s wave of female candidates has some striking features besides its sheer size. There is also a great deal of diversity within the group. It includes more women of color than previous electoral years, as well as a number of immigrants. There are more female veterans in the mix than we’ve seen before, and they’re representing both sides of the aisle. Mikie Sherrill, a mother of four who is running as a Democrat in New Jersey, is a good example: she was a Navy helicopter pilot before becoming a federal prosecutor. “This is a new image and a different kind of résumé,” Debbie Walsh, the director of Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, said. At the same time, there seems to be less of an expectation that the women running will conform to dated ideas of female politicians: donning boxy red blazers, presenting picture-perfect family lives, and keeping personal stories discreetly in the background. A number of women who are running this year are young and single. Some of those who have children are explicitly incorporating their identities as mothers into their appeals to voters. At least two gubernatorial candidates—Krish Vignarajah, in Maryland, and Kelda Roys, in Wisconsin—have produced campaign ads in which they breast-feed their babies while discussing their political positions.

Density and Party Affiliation of Women in the Midterms Dark purple, such as in Arizona’s second district, indicates that there are a large number of women from both parties running.

The last time women challenged the overwhelming gender imbalance among elected officials this forcefully was in 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman. Twenty-four women were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives that year—the largest group of women ever to enter the House in a single election. The number of women in the Senate tripled—though because there had only been three to begin with, the resulting total wasn’t exactly a throng. One advantage women had in 1992 was an unusual number of open seats in Congress—many more than are open this year (though there are still opportunities for more seats to open, potentially narrowing the gap). Walsh says that part of her center’s job this year has been to temper some of the runaway enthusiasm about a new Year of the Woman. After all, she says, incumbents at all levels have historically won about ninety-five per cent of the time. On the other hand, the politics of the Trump era are sui generis, and recent election results that might be taken as harbingers of the midterms have been, for women and Democrats, encouraging. Last November, for example, the Virginia state legislature replaced eleven men in the House of Delegates with women, including the first Latina, the first Asian-American, and the first transgender woman to be elected to the chamber. When conventional wisdom is up in the air, Walsh said, “some of our assumptions based on past performance, given the moment we’re in, might not translate to Election 2018.” A Varied Cast of Women Candidates Fayrouz Saad, Dem. (Mich., District 11) Thirty-four-year-old Fayrouz Saad, a progressive Democrat running for Congress in Michigan’s Eleventh District, exemplifies the wave of female first-time candidates galvanized by Trump. The daughter of Lebanese immigrants who own a wholesale meat business at Detroit’s Eastern Market, Saad projects a relatable, millennial poise: in her campaign-announcement video, she jokes that while in Arabic her name means “precious stone” in English, “it means a least seventeen different spellings on my Starbucks cup.” Most recently the director of immigrant and international affairs for the city of Detroit, Saad formerly served in the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama Administration. Her campaign pledges, which include fighting for a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage and guaranteed family leave, situate her in the Bernie Sanders wing of the Party. Saad will be running in a crowded Democratic field, but the seat is open, as the Republican congressman David Trott is retiring, and it is considered flippable. The Eleventh District picked Trump by less than five per cent and went to Obama in 2008. If elected, Saad would be the first Muslim-American woman to serve in Congress.

Veronica Escobar, Dem. (Texas, District 16) Before Trump was elected President, Veronica Escobar says, she never imagined running for Congress. Still, the forty-eight-year-old Texan’s experience exemplifies how a stable, methodical career in local government can prepare someone for a political moment like this one. Escobar, who grew up on a dairy farm, taught English and Chicano studies at colleges in El Paso, then became a county commissioner and, in 2010, a county judge. In March, she bested five other candidates in a primary that was expected to go to a runoff, and she will almost certainly win the general election in November in a district that has not elected a Republican to Congress since 1962. Escobar sounds excited to represent El Paso—which she celebrates as a generous, binational city with a low crime rate—though maybe not to leave it for D.C. “I love our geography in the middle of the desert, that we’re isolated from other areas and having to make do,” Escobar told HuffPost, in September. “I love our position on the U.S.-Mexico border. I love that we’ve always been the underdog. I just love this community so much that even without Donald Trump, I’m inspired by El Paso.”

Sara Jacobs, Dem. (Calif., District 49) The twenty-nine-year-old California Democrat Sara Jacobs is one of the youngest congressional candidates in the country, and her résumé is correspondingly short. But in the year of #MeToo, #NeverAgain, and a surge in youthful activism, being young, female, and digitally fluent may confer a political edge. Jacobs has other advantages as well. She is running in a congressional district due to go blue—California’s Forty-ninth, which includes parts of San Diego and Orange counties, and which is twenty-five-per-cent Latino. The Republican Darrell Issa, who is not seeking reëlection, won the seat in 2016 by less than a percentage point, making it the closest congressional race in the country. The district went to Hillary Clinton. And Jacobs, who previously held jobs at the United Nations and in the Obama Administration State Department, has plenty of money to spend: she’s the granddaughter of the Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, and has so far put more than a million dollars of her own money into her campaign for the Democratic primary, in June.

Barbara Comstock, Rep. (Va., District 10) Barbara Comstock is a favorite of the gun lobby. She has an A rating from the National Rifle Association, and in 2016 was one of the top fifteen congressional recipients of funds from the gun-rights organization. She is also one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents in 2018. Her district went to Clinton in the Presidential campaign. In October, 2016, Comstock condemned Trump’s “Access Hollywood” boasts about groping women as “disgusting, vile, and disqualifying,” and called on him to step aside in favor of another Republican nominee. More recently, she has spoken out about the importance of paying attention to sexual harassment, whatever your political affiliation. In Congress, she has voted with Trump’s position more than ninety-seven per cent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Claudia Tenney, Rep. (N.Y., District 22) The first-term Republican congresswoman Claudia Tenney is a lawyer who co-owns a family printing business and represents an upstate New York district that includes Binghamton and Utica. A deep-red conservative, Tenney takes a dim view of gun-control measures, opposes same-sex marriage, and said, in a 2014 interview with Fox Business, that “we shouldn’t even have a minimum wage.” In Congress, she co-sponsored a bill that would make it easier to buy gun silencers. A week after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Tenney told a radio host in Albany that “so many of these people that commit the mass murders end up being Democrats, but the media doesn’t talk about that.”

Lauren Underwood, Dem. (Ill., District 14) Thirty-one-year-old Lauren Underwood decided to run for Congress in large part because its current representative, Randy Hultgren, was bent on dismantling the Affordable Care Act. Underwood is a registered nurse who served as a health adviser in the Obama Administration, and herself has a cardiac irregularity that qualifies as a preëxisting condition. In the March Democratic primary, Underwood easily defeated the six white men she was up against, but winning in November won’t be easy. Underwood is a black Democrat in a northeastern Illinois district that is eighty-five-per-cent white. It has voted for the Republican nominee in all but one of the last five Presidential elections. “For so long, African-Americans have only had elected representation from those traditional districts that are historically Black, maybe urban. But not all of us live in all those majority-minority districts,” Underwood said in a recent interview with Refinery29. “Now we are able to step forward and say, ‘Hey! I grew up in this predominantly white area and my family has been here for years. I’m a leader and I have ideas.’ ”

Heidi Heitkamp, Dem. North Dakota Senate The incumbent Democrat Heidi Heitkamp’s North Dakota Senate seat is regarded as one of the most vulnerable in 2018. Trump won the state in a landslide, and Heitkamp’s leading Republican challenger, U.S. Representative Kevin Cramer, has won three statewide races since 2012. (North Dakota has a single, at-large congressional district.) Polls at this early stage show the race as a tossup. Still, Heitkamp is the kind of Democrat for whom North Dakotans may well continue to make an exception. Down-to-earth and mildly profane, the red-headed, sixty-two-year-old prairie populist is skilled at the kind of retail campaigning that is vital in small rural states. More to the point, she is a resolute centrist who distanced herself from Barack Obama when she first ran for Senate, in 2012. Heitkamp supported the Keystone XL pipeline and has earned an A rating from the N.R.A. She has also broken ranks with her party on several key votes since Trump took office: she was one of three Democrats in the Senate who voted to approve Neil Gorsuch’s appointment to the Supreme Court, and one of sixteen who voted in favor of rolling back the Dodd–Frank Act. Heitkamp, Politico noted in June, is in a unique position: she’s a “one-woman North Dakota Democratic Party simultaneously shouldering national Democratic hopes of eventually taking back the Senate.”

Martha McSally, Rep. Arizona Senate “I’m a fighter pilot, and I talk like one. That’s why I told Washington Republicans to grow a pair of ovaries and get the job done,” Martha McSally says in one of her campaign videos. She is a two-term Republican congresswoman running for Jeff Flake’s Senate seat in Arizona who talks a lot about border security, favoring Trump-tested scare terms such as “chain migration,” “Sharia law” and “illegals.” Her rivals in the G.O.P. primary include the civil-rights-flouting former sheriff Joe Arpaio, whom Trump pardoned last year, the Steve Bannon-endorsed conservative state legislator Kelli Ward, and Craig Brittain, the founder of a revenge-porn Web site. McSally represents a swing district that went narrowly for Clinton in 2016, but Arizona voted for Trump over all. Her career has been predicated on her willingness to challenge gender norms. She graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1988, and became the highest-ranking female fighter pilot, flying her first combat mission over Iraq in 1995. While serving in Saudi Arabia, in 2001, she successfully sued Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over a military policy that required servicewomen to wear abayas over their uniforms when off base. McSally has been known to perform the national anthem at public events. Recently, an Associated Press reporter asked her if she was a trained singer. She replied, “No, I’m a trained killer.”

Tammy Baldwin, Dem. Wisconsin Senate Of the ten Democratic senators running for reëlection in states that Trump carried in 2016, Tammy Baldwin is facing the biggest influx of outside money from donors who want to defeat her. According to a report in late November from the Center for Responsive Politics, outside spending against Baldwin by groups such as the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, which is partly funded by the Koch brothers, had already “exceeded the combined outside spending against the other twenty-one of the Democratic Party senators up for reelection in 2018 by a factor of five.” One reason the equable, fifty-six-year-old Baldwin “is being so heavily targeted,” Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, said, is that she is the most visible elected Democrat in the state. “Over the past eight years, Republicans have had tremendous success retaking the governorship, both chambers of the state legislature, and statewide offices,” Burden said. “The Baldwin seat is the most highly coveted prize for Republicans to gain.” And Baldwin is “seen as vulnerable because she has one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate despite representing a purple state won by Trump.” Baldwin, who served seven terms in the House before her election to the Senate, in 2012, is the first openly gay person to serve in the Senate.

Catherine Templeton, Rep. South Carolina Governor Catherine Templeton, who is hoping to be the Republican Party’s nominee for governor in South Carolina, is crafting a campaign of defiant conservatism and Trumpian appeals to identity. At a town hall in August, Templeton said she was “proud of the Confederacy,” and promised that as governor she “would not allow monuments to be taken down. We’re not going to rewrite history.” Templeton introduced the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon at a speech in November as a “patriot” who “speaks for the rest of us.” In a January campaign video, she refers to professional football players who take a knee during the national anthem as “spoiled, entitled, ridiculous.” Templeton advocates arming teachers and opposes concealed-carry permits, because we “shouldn’t have to pay a fee to exercise our God-given right to protect ourselves and our families.” In the course of her campaign, her stance against abortion has hardened: though she had first supported making an exception for incest, she recently embraced a total ban. Templeton, who is forty-seven, likes to call herself a “union-busting attorney” and a “buzzsaw” when it comes to government spending. Credentials like these brought her to the attention of President Trump, who reportedly considered appointing her Labor Secretary.

Stacey Abrams, Dem. Georgia Governor Stacey Abrams, a Democrat running for governor in Georgia, has earned a lot of attention in 2018, though her victory is a longshot. To win, she would have to first defeat Stacey Evans, a fellow-liberal and state legislator, in the May Democratic primary, then go on to beat the Republican candidate in November in a state that has voted Republican in every Presidential election since 1996, and which currently has a trifecta—a Republican governor, and a Republican-led state House and Senate. But Abrams, who is forty-four, has had an intriguing career. She’s a Yale law graduate who moonlights as a romance novelist. As the leader of the Democratic caucus in the Georgia House of Representatives, Abrams earned a reputation for her willingness to work with colleagues across the aisle. To many Democrats, though, Abrams also stands for the latent promise of mobilizing a multiracial coalition of voters to turn Southern states such as Georgia blue. Georgia’s population is on track to be minority-majority by 2025. Abrams talks about solidifying this new Democratic base and energizing more young and low-income voters, but she does not seem particularly concerned with accommodating white working-class Trump supporters who might once have voted Democratic. If she wins in November, Abrams would be the first African-American woman governor in U.S. history.