Meet Sarah Blahovec and Neal Carter, the nonprofit founders empowering people with disabilities to run for office
Founded in May 2023, Disability Victory is fighting the ableism often baked into politics, from inaccessible debate stages to the idea that people with disabilities are unfit to serve.
By Marisa Wright
In a well-functioning democracy, everyone has access to civic participation. In the United States, though, disabled people are too often left out of the political process due to barriers like physical inaccessibility, stigmatization and ableism, and lack of engagement.
Sixty-one million Americans — that’s one in four — have some form of disability. In contrast, there are few elected officials, campaign staffers, and public leaders with disabilities, and civic engagement remains largely inaccessible for people with disabilities.
Addressing this problem is the goal behind Disability Victory. Co-founded by Sarah Blahovec and Neal Carter earlier this year, the nonprofit seeks to empower people with disabilities to actively participate in the civic process by running for office, joining campaign staffs, and more.
Like EMILY’s List, Run for Something, and the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, Disability Victory aims to build a pipeline of disabled candidates and campaign staffers to increase the political representation and power of people with disabilities.
Blahovec is a disability civic engagement expert who has previously worked as the Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Director at the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL) where she also developed and co-created “Elevate: Campaign Training for People with Disabilities” and created the first guide on disability inclusion on political campaigns. Carter is a disabled political strategist and has more than 20 years of experience as a political consultant.
He also teamed up with Blahovec during her time at NCIL on the Elevate campaign training program. Over Zoom, they recently discussed Disability Victory’s mission, why the end goal is not mere representation, how they created this organization, and their visions for an inclusive, well-functioning democracy for people with disabilities.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Q: What is the mission of Disability Victory, and why are its specific goals important right now?
Blahovec: Disability Victory is working to build the political power of disabled people — disabled progressives in particular — through training, networking and leadership development. One in four adults in the United States has a disability. However, whenever it comes to running for office, working on campaigns, and serving an elected office, disabled people are underrepresented because they experience a number of barriers to the political arena that come from long-standing access barriers. The [Americans with Disabilities Act] is 33 years old this year, but there are still challenges throughout society with systemic inaccessibility because the ADA was not a magic wand that just made everything accessible. When it comes to even just showing up to the halls of government, whether that’s in your town, your state, Congress, there can be access barriers just to being able to talk with your legislators, let alone actually be able to serve an elected office. And then there’s also the prejudicial barriers, the ableism that disabled people experience that we often see in the political arena, like discussions of whether John Fetterman should be able to use accommodations that were legally allowed for him.
Q: In a Forbes article, Neal said, “Representation for representation’s sake is not a good enough reason for getting more disabled people in elected office.” Beyond representation, why is having disabled people in elected office and engaged in politics important for democracy?
SB: Every policy issue is a disability issue. Whether it’s transportation, housing, healthcare, employment, all of this impacts disabled people’s lives and like really any other, marginalized community, it’s going to impact them differently based on their experience in society due to ableism, racism, sexism. When it comes to people with disabilities, we have the perspective of our lived experience. If you’re talking about transportation, you need to have that conversation about accessibility. Whenever we’re talking about health care, the ways that impact people with disabilities might be different than non-disabled people, so it’s really important to have that representation that is grounded in understanding how those policies impact disabled people. Obviously, one person cannot be a representative for an entire community. That’s why we also talk about not representation for representation’s sake. It’s important to understand policy and be running based on ideas you have about how to improve that policy, not to be the first disabled person in this position or running based on that alone. There needs to be a groundedness in community and understanding the needs of the community and bringing in your experience to support that.
Carter: I think from my standpoint when we think about representation on this side of the aisle, you’ll hear different answers as it relates to representative government. Most folks want the representation for representation’s sake and that’s it. They will take a Vice President Kamala Harris, for instance, and say we’ve checked off the South Asian box, we’ve checked off the African American box, we’ve checked off the woman box, we don’t need another vice president. In the case of Tammy Duckworth, they’ll say we have a disabled veteran, so we don’t need anymore. They’ll say the same thing with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley and Senator John Fetterman. They’ll say the same thing on the other side of the aisle with Greg Abbott and the former congressman in North Carolina, Madison Cawthorn.
When we think about what a representative government actually looks like, it’s more than just checking off boxes. It’s, as Sarah said, having substance behind your position of power and not just being the first. You don’t want to be the first. You want to be the first of many. You want to create space so it’s not just you opening the door and sitting at the table. You want to create space so there are several disabled people in elected office at the federal level, state level and local level. You want to create space so there are several neurodivergent folks at all levels of government. You want to create space so there are multiple blind or low vision, multiple deaf or hard of hearing folks. You want to create all of these spaces, so it’s not just one and it’s many.
Q: What are the unique barriers and challenges disabled people face when trying to run for office or get involved in politics?
SB: There are so many because disability is a very diverse experience. In terms of the umbrella of what disability covers — and as Neil will often talk about, the definition of disability is expanding — it differs based on the type of disability and the type of challenges that you can experience. Some of the ones that we’ve seen are people who are deaf and use [American Sign Language] who have not been able to get accommodations from their own political party to participate in debates where the political party does not want to cover the cost of an ASL interpreter, so that has been one of the challenges. There was an incident last year with Chris Hinds, who was running for reelection for Denver City Council. There was a debate, and he was unable to get on the stage. It was an inaccessible place. They did not get a ramp, so he had to climb up on stage and have people hoist his wheelchair up there, which is unacceptable, especially when they knew he was going to be there. The event organizers knew that he was going to be there, so you can have those just physical access barriers. There are also just the challenges of whenever you’re running for office, facing the barriers of how to canvas in neighborhoods that aren’t accessible to you. What do you do if you have kind of a dynamic disability — something where some days you’re feeling better and some days you’re feeling worse — making sure that you’re able to protect your well-being on the campaign and still be able to campaign? And then of course the attitudinal barriers. There can be a lot of ableism around whether disabled people should be able to serve in elected office, and it absolutely can be different for different groups where there are some communities that are more stigmatized. And so, you’ll see politicians be less open about mental health because there are these attitudes that someone who has a mental illness or is getting mental health treatment can’t be trusted when that’s not the case.
NC: The different experiences that different disability groups face are vast. I’ll just go back to Senator John Fetterman asking for a reasonable accommodation during an interview (and I also think we should take away “reasonable” out of that conversation and just say accommodation because every accommodation is reasonable. There is no such thing as an unreasonable accommodation.). When we think about just general accommodations not just for existing elected officials but also for folks running for office, there needs to be a more expansive conversation on whether there is internalized ableism. There is internalized ableism within disabled people. We can’t just look outward and say, well, the world is ableist and that’s the only issue. There is a lot to unpack with varying levels of disability as it relates to internalized ableism within the disability community itself. That’s not to say that ableism outside of the disability community doesn’t exist. Obviously, it does. But I think it’s important for us also to recognize that unfortunately internalized ableism and external ableism are both real things, and it’s not just external.
SB: And with that assistive technology, whether the tools that are available whenever you’re running for office — the different platforms, donor databases, fundraising tools, things like that — are even accessible because a lot of times accessibility isn’t a priority or developers may not be aware. These tech tools are becoming increasingly more important — call time apps, things like that — whether those are accessible to disabled people who use assistive technology is certainly a big question.
Q: Sarah has written about the gender gap in elected officials with disabilities. And Neal also said that “We need disabled people who are from communities of color, disabled queer and trans people, disabled people from different economic backgrounds, and disabled people with different lived experiences to be part of policy decisions.” How is Disability Victory seeking to achieve that goal?
SB: Your disability identity is not a silo. With the other marginalized identities that you experience, you can’t really extract the ableism from the sexism or the racism. Someone who is a disabled person of color has a fundamentally different experience than I do. One thing that we do — and what we did at NICL when we started the Elevate Program — is ensure that when we are creating our programs, we are recruiting disabled people and trainers who have marginalized identities so that they can speak to candidates and program attendees in a way that can address more than just their disability identity. There are a lot of challenges in the disability rights space where there’s a lot of focus on disability only and not looking at how it intersects with other identities. We’re making sure that we are not perpetuating that, making it much more diverse, and not saying you can’t talk about these other things here. We need to embrace these other challenges that people will face from other oppression and talk about how that impacts them on the campaign trail so it’s more holistic.
NC: For me, the reason why we are intentional about intersections is that we believe that intersections can break down those ableist barriers. Whether it’s our trainers, whether it’s the folks that are in our cohort, whether it’s Sarah and myself as far as running the organization. We already live at multiple intersections already, and we want to cultivate multiple intersections within the ecosystem of our organization so that those barriers are knocked down.
Q: You both have worked together previously, like on NCIL’s Elevate Campaign Training program. What was the genesis for creating Disability Victory? How did you both connect to bring it to fruition?
SB: Several years ago, I was working at NCIL on civic engagement issues, including voting, and started getting interested in civic engagement beyond voting, like what information is out there for running for office for disabled people, and realizing there were no particular resources on it. There was no real acknowledgment of it. The places where we could find any information about running for office with a disability were “disabled people should volunteer,” but not that they should be candidates or campaign staff. Very reductive views, so we realized there was this massive need for something in this space. Especially after 2016 where you saw all these organizations pop up around getting women to run for office and there were record numbers of women running for office, the infrastructure started to pop up with this recognition that there needs to be more diversity among our elected officials and there has to be an infrastructure to support that training. But there was just nothing around disability, so I started looking for funding to be able to do that. At the time just through I think our networks of people that we know, I learned about Neil and that he was, at the time, the only disabled political consultant who was out there talking about this. And so, it’s like, well, I have to work with him. It was absolutely fundamental to be able to work with someone who had been already in this space for over a decade, to be able to learn from him and be able to start to put this program together.
NC: When it comes to disability electoral justice work, there are other organizations that are doing this work hyper-locally obviously, but we are the only ones doing it nationally. And while that is the case, we want more organizations in our ecosystem. We don’t want less. We don’t want to be the only. There were a number of organizations — Run for Something, EMILY’s List, Higher Heights, Collective PAC — that were hyper-focused on electing people of marginalized groups. They were allowed to operate and exist and not take over from other organizations. They were existing simultaneously and not even in their own silos. We’re doing a lot of the same with our trainers and who’s going to be in our cohorts, but at the end of the day, the organization thrives on not being the only. The disability community thrives on not being singular.
SB: It’s just like when we talk about representation, not being the first for the sake of being the first but being the first of many. That’s the same thing here. We don’t ultimately want Disability Victory’s work to be siloed. We also want to work with these other groups. We want to see them hire disabled people in their communities, especially if they are representing other intersections.
Q: In some of the coverage of Disability Victory, you have cited elected officials like Senator Tammy Duckworth and Representatives Ayanna Presley and David Ortiz. Although they make up just a handful of our leaders, what has been their impact on disability issues and representation since being in office?
SB: With Tammy Duckworth, we’ve seen many consequential things with her. One of the biggest examples for me would be her role in making sure that H.R. 620 — The ADA Education and Reform Act — once it passed the House, did not make it through the Senate because it would create so many burdens. It passed the House, and she rallied her colleagues to make sure that it was blocked in the Senate. We’ve also seen work from Representative Ortiz around trying to expand on the promise of the ADA in Colorado.
NC: Ayanna Pressley initially was just kind of voting with the majority, and she wasn’t as vocal when she was a freshman in Congress, but now I think she’s kind of risen to power. She has become such a strong advocate in the House that we didn’t really have. She has come out staunchly for the disability community, and it didn’t take prodding or pushing.
SB: Legislators like Jessica Benham, who is in Pennsylvania, helped to pass a law that disabled people and people with pre-existing conditions can’t be denied life-saving medical procedures in Pennsylvania. She’s worked on issues around climate change, which is a disability justice issue. We are certainly seeing that with stories out of Maui right now where people were talking about the people who are elderly and disabled had a harder time being able to evacuate. Certainly, their disability experience and connection to the community play a significant role.
Q: In your view, what would a truly inclusive and equitable democracy look like for people with disabilities?
NC: I think the easy answer would just be recognizing disabled people as human. I think a longer answer would be making the world more accessible and not seeing disability as a liability.
SB: Seeing just community solidarity would be really what I’d like to see. I think that’s something that we’ve seen as a challenge in the COVID pandemic, with climate change, all these issues where it feels like our communities are being fractured into groups and sometimes there’s this kind of scarcity around if some people have things, then others cannot have them. Being able to see something where everyone can get what they need to live a good life. That means getting the long-term services and support you need, getting the social security you need, being able to thrive in the community regardless of the type of disability. It can’t be extracted, for me, from getting rid of these other forces of oppression because they’re linked. Racism, ableism, and transphobia, all these things are linked together. Being able to have a society that is more welcoming to all people, regardless of what their lives look like, and to be able to have community support for differences. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to be able to accomplish that, so we’re just really excited to continue to do as much as possible in our work — and in our personal lives — be able to push that vision forward.
Marisa Wright is a student at Harvard Law School and a graduate of the University of Michigan.
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