2021: How We Stay on Track to Close the Gap

CTGCA Executive Director Susannah Delano describes how the work we accomplished in 2020 lays the groundwork for the Motherlode of open seats and what to expect from our campaign in 2021.

What are you most proud of regarding the work CTGCA completed in 2020?

I’m proud that we aimed high in 2020, and came out with two important steps forward for women in California.

One, we held the line for women in the Legislature.

As far as the 2020 election cycle, we knew as far back as 2018 that it would be a challenging year for women to make progress. Although a lot of people think of Presidential election years as “the big ones,” the reality for women is that we historically make larger strides in midterm election years.

The 2020 cycle was not an exception. We knew the odds were on women backsliding in terms of numbers, with full knowledge that our larger play for equality is to leverage the big Motherlode opportunities in 2022-2028. But women overperformed and because of that, we ended 2020 with the same 32% all-time high for women in the Legislature that we started the year with.

There were really only a handful of open seats for us to target in 2020 (SD 5, 13, 15, 17, 19), and our Recruits ran valiantly. But we didn’t stop there — we did some lightning round recruiting in a couple of late-breaking open districts down the stretch and got progressive women ready to be on the ballot. AND we went ahead and recruited 3 more outstanding progressive women to challenge in Republican-held districts (AD 1, 35, 72).

None of them were able to overcome the voter registration margin in the end, but when you look at the trail these women — women like Elizabeth Betancourt up in Redding — blazed in their communities, the fires they lit under the committed activists, the infrastructure they helped to build, the way they forced fence-sitters into action by calling out policies the community’s leaders should be pursuing but aren’t, that’s priceless.

I truly believe all of it adds up to something at the moment the district finally does flip, whether that’s in 2022, 2024, or even further out. I know at least two of our Recruits who ran to flip GOP districts in 2020 are now hard at work launching their own PACs that fund progressive candidates who reflect their communities on the ground now because that mandate is strong.

The fires will stay lit and the momentum will keep building.

So I’m proud that we made a contribution to the long game on the ground this past cycle, as well as helping our female State Senate delegation become majority women of color!

But more importantly, in 2020 our supporters enabled our campaign to lay the foundation we will need to propel the big gains for women that we are all so impatient to see, starting in 2022.

We worked to grow our movement in 2020, to ensure women get to 50% by 2028.

We launched our $20.28 monthly giving circle and worked hard to spread the word with virtual local events like “Forward Into Light” on the Central Coast, bringing together elected women leaders and grassroots activists from across the progressive spectrum to invest in making gender equality by 2028 a reality.

That increased support for our campaign translated directly into more capacity to recruit outstanding progressive women. In 2020 our recruiting team grew to twice the size it’s ever been, and importantly, our team is far more diverse in terms of age, race and geography than ever before. This talented group of women spent the bulk of the year analyzing a record number of target districts for 2022, building lists of women who have what it takes to win, and approaching those women to begin exploring a run. And we couldn’t be more appreciative that our supporters have doubled down on recruiting with us.

2020 really marks the end of the “small opportunity” election cycles for women —

The next four cycles hold massive promise, and it’s incredibly important for our campaign to continue to grow in these ways as we scale up to meet the Motherlode.

Can we expect to see anything different from the campaign in 2021?

Absolutely. Up to this point, our campaign has been homegrown and volunteer-driven, with few paid consultants and one staff member max. Nine of the women we’ve recruited have joined the Legislature and contributed to that all-time high in women’s representation. We achieved that historic result by targeting about 30 districts in total since 2016. While we have been a lean team, it was manageable because 2014–2020 were low-volume cycles. But the Motherlode, the 96+ seats that will become open between 2022 and 2028, is the big leagues. We’re talking 30 districts to target per cycle, and therefore three times the volume we’ve taken on in total since our launch in 2013.

In 2020, we reached the limit of what a team as lean as ours can manage the way women need us to, without adding dedicated resources.

So we’ve begun to scale our recruiting capacity in earnest to match the volume of the Motherlode. And the way we’re scaling is something to get excited about.

It’s equal parts:

• adding expertise to prepare our Recruits to be as competitive as possible
• doubling down on a more racially representative, inclusive series of leadership networks; and
• bringing a new generation along to get the job done.

What this looks like for the first half of 2021 is:

• Continuing to expand the size of our volunteer recruiting team and the breadth of leadership pipelines they tap into
• Adding the formidable expertise of all-star strategist Rose Kapolczynski as our Senior Political Consultant
• Hiring our first-ever dedicated Lead Recruiter, to be based in Southern California
• Stepping up our collaboration with statewide allies around addressing racial disparities, advancing progressive values, and prioritizing our efforts to maximize all progressive women’s odds of winning
• Expanding our Board of Directors (details coming soon!)
• Running an email and event program that brings new supporters in to grow our movement

Our first big test this year will be the Sacramento Symposium, to be held in late April in a virtual format. The Symposium is geared toward the women who will run in 2022 (though we are working to add some program elements for those more likely to run in future cycles).

The Symposium is an in-depth exploration of the Sacramento networks and dynamics that can make or break a campaign. It’s pivotal to our process, so between now and then our team is 100% focused on moving talented progressive women into and through our intensive process to get them ready for the big event.

Our capacity to execute this priority work is boosted by the addition of Rose Kapolczynski, as well as Emily Zahn, who is serving as Interim Lead Recruiter while we search for our permanent team member in Southern California.

So the Symposium in late April is our big internal benchmark for the first half of the year, along the path to getting the Class of 2022 ready to win.

In the second half of the year, we aim to:

1. Begin recruiting in districts set to come open in 2024, the biggest single cycle of the Motherlode with, at minimum, 40 open seats. This will be the first time in CTGCA history that we recruit for multiple cycles at the same time, but the volume demands it.
2. Explore some auxiliary leadership bodies to help grow our capacity, including a Board of Editorial Contributors and an Advisory Board of formerly elected women.
3. Continue to grow the movement by spreading our campaign’s message and expanding our community of supporters, so more people have a chance to realize how much further we have to go in our own backyard and how big a role they can play.
   For example, you may have noticed our new email program. Our supporter base has grown, and some are very new to state-level politics, so our goal is to offer some programming geared toward this new generation of political activists and justice champions.
   On the heels of COVID and the national reckoning on racial justice, they want to go deeper on the very worthy notion that year-round investment is the way to sustain change, and we want to nurture that to show why our state and local leaders, especially in California, are absolutely essential to creating the lasting change we need at every level of leadership.
4. And finally, at year’s end, we want to be responsive in real-time to the unveiling of new district lines, currently set for November/December. We’ll need to revisit our 2022 target districts and look for ways to contribute to the larger community of progressive women by making sense of the new lines, which we’ll have for the next 10 years.

If we can sustain the level of resources we need to execute all of this priority advance work, we’ll be well on our way to gender equality in California.

What are your goals for the campaign for the next year and into 2028?

In many ways I think the challenge for all of us in 2021 is to stay focused on the big gains we can make this decade, but only if we are focused and strategic this year.

For CTGCA and women in California’s Legislature, those big gains are achievable between 2022 and 2028, and we have to approach 2021 as the onramp that it is.

So in short, my goals for our campaign this year boil down to these:

• More women: Flood the electoral field with diverse, progressive women candidates for 2022 and begin working with more for 2024–2028. At the end of the day, it’s a numbers game and as long as more qualified women don’t run, we’ll never close that gap. That is perhaps the biggest contribution our strategy is designed to deliver cycle over cycle.
• More credibility: Recruit women who are deeply credible within their communities and prepare them to compete harder than ever before. Our Recruits need to be able to stand up to the trends 2020 highlighted: unprecedented spending in open districts, encroachment of moderates and their corporate allies, and a surge in anti-choice, anti-union GOP women elected in California. The antidote is what we have been able to do in the past, which is recruiting outside the “usual suspects” for future candidates, very often women of color, who can leverage their track records of championing progressive values to credibly represent their communities. We need leadership that reflects every community, but especially right now in terms of the Legislature, we need to prioritize recruiting Black women and API women who are committed progressives.
• More justice: Step up our campaign’s leadership among allied organizations to dispel disparities and advance progressive values within the ecosystem of those working to support women. At CTGCA, our allies are our strength, but at the Board level we have resolved to do more in order to speed up progress on racial disparities and larger inclusivity, while prioritizing progressive values. This means more partnerships, ensuring an intersectional lens to everything we touch, and it means devoting resources to raising and grappling with tough questions around business as usual. Our Board is working through a framework to accomplish this within our own recruiting model and we look forward to sharing more.

2021 will be a year full of challenges, even if the challenges aren’t on par with 2020 — from the ongoing pandemics of COVID-19 and white supremacy to the frustration of not seeing every bit of the transformative change we crave happen as soon as we’d like.

But the real challenge is to keep our eyes focused on the prize of building the future we want.

We have to understand the pace of change (the state of Georgia is a great example of big change after a decade of investment), take the long view of the Motherlode opportunity, and be about the work.

You talked quite a bit about racial justice in your CTGCA series interview. How do you see that piece continuing to fit with CTGCA’s work in 2021 and beyond?

Racial justice is at the core of gender equality and vice versa.

There is no equal representation without Black women in robust numbers or without representation for all those who have been marginalized for centuries, and there is no justice without a values commitment.

What is gender parity worth if all women in leadership are white, or straight, or anti-choice like Amy Coney Barrett? What is racial equity worth if there are only two women of color (neither of them Black) in the US Senate to kick off the Biden era? What is parity worth for that matter, if our elected leaders won’t do anything about the fact that the climate crisis affects communities of color immediately and disproportionately or if women’s labor is still not recognized or valued in the long run? (Editor’s note: Say it louder for those in the back!)

We have to bring an intersectional lens to closing the gender gap, and we can’t afford to lose our focus for one moment.

Case in point: look at Southern California right now, where all four of our Black women State Legislators of recent history have been based. Now, two of them, the Honorable Holly Mitchell and Dr. Shirley Weber, have been elevated to new levels of service. But the races to fill their seats in 2021 special elections are already as hot as they get, and there is absolutely no guarantee that Black women will be elected.

With all of the musical chairs around vacancies and appointments, one outrageous possibility we have to entertain is that we could blink our eyes and find by the end of this summer that we have ZERO Black women serving in our very own Legislature, let alone any Black women representing Northern California as well. That’s an intolerable outcome.

It matters that we all do everything we can to avoid that, but it all hangs in the balance in this moment. If we aren’t deliberate, if we don’t walk into this work knowing that every opportunity comes with the odds stacked double digits against us (especially when it comes to BIPOC candidates) we will never get to where we need to be in terms of just, equal representation and the transformative policies we need to ensure accompany that. I can’t overemphasize how strong the gravitational pull is in politics towards those who have historically enjoyed power.

And that goes for the bigger picture on women as well. As I’ve mentioned, we’ve been prepared at CTGCA for a possible backslide in women’s numbers overall, and it’s why we’ve targeted the Motherlode for our big win and not 2020 or 2021. The ever-present threat of backsliding after one big jolt of progress, like we saw in 1992 or 2018, is the reason our Founders launched this campaign —

Sustainable progress requires a sustained effort, year in and year out.

But this is a perilous moment in time for women’s leadership in California. In many ways, you can take the view that we have been backsliding on Democratic women in our Legislature these past couple of years — 5 of the 6 women members elected since 2019 are Republican, and 3 are Republican women of color.

We’re prepared to push past the flatlining at turbo speed in 2022 and over the subsequent three election cycles, but 2021 stands as a red flashing light signaling just how focused and smart we need to be. We have to work extra hard to #KeeptheSeat on multiple levels, we have to keep the resources flowing to where they’re needed, and we have to constantly be laying the groundwork for the larger prize. No one but us is going to make sure we get there.

What would you say to a potential donor or volunteer who wants to understand what differentiates CTGCA from other campaigns and organizations in the women’s movement?

We get this question a lot because we are lucky enough in California to have such a rich ecosystem of organizations supporting women. We work in close partnership with the most well-known of those, as well as the lesser-known groups, but there are a handful of key differences.

The shortest answer is: We recruit.

But the longer answer is coming soon! Keep an eye out for our next post.

Close the Gap California is committed to building on progressive women’s historic momentum by recruiting them statewide and achieving equality in California by 2028. Join us!

About Close the Gap California

Close the Gap California (CTGCA) is a statewide campaign launched in 2013 to close the gender gap in the California Legislature by 2028. By recruiting accomplished, progressive women in targeted districts and preparing them to launch competitive campaigns, CTGCA is changing the face of the Legislature one cycle at a time.

One in every four women in the Legislature is a CTGCA Recruit. Our Recruits are committed to reproductive justice, quality public education, and combatting poverty, and nine of 10 serving today are women of color.