On the Heels of VP Pick, Women are Coming for Equality

2018’s Wave Will Grow in 2020, Becoming Sea Change This Decade

Today, the Close the Gap team and I are celebrating as California’s own Kamala Harris joins the Presidential ticket. On the eve of the 19th Amendment’s Centennial and a historic March on Washington to make voting rights real for all, history is on the move. And as usual, women are the front line of change.

The first Black and South Asian woman Vice Presidential nominee-to-be is historic and we are on fire with excitement. But the transformative sea change we need to see in our leadership is just getting started.

Depending on who’s counting, it’s taken us anywhere from 100 to 400 years for women to get to this point, and we are #2 at best — if we can push a Biden-Harris ticket over the finish line in November!

Even then, our elected representation will continue to be badly out of sync with who Americans actually are: as of today, women still make up only around 25% of legislative bodies nationwide, and women of color are only 7% of state legislators. Kamala Harris has been the only Black woman serving in the U.S. Senate.

The selection of Kamala Harris should galvanize us to speed up the pace of equality. That is what we’re about at Close the Gap California.

My motivation to get out of bed, set my 13-year-old up with something approaching educational, and walk across the hall to my home office day after day in 2020 is this fact: women in California have the opportunity of a generation within reach — to transform the face of leadership, within the decade.

Just over the horizon in 2022, redistricting will present a massive scale of open seat opportunity for women all over the nation. And in California, the opportunity is exponential, due to our term limit rule. Over 90% of today’s legislators (who remain 68% male despite historic strides by women in recent years) will reach their term limit between 2022 and 2028. Close the Gap California is working every day to take early advantage of this opportunity by recruiting progressive women to begin charting their paths to a competitive future campaign.

But first, November is coming (again). The stakes could not be higher to get Kamala into the West Wing, along with the new record number of progressive women running down the ticket.

With 2018’s wave election now distant in the rearview and 2020’s moment of virtual ballot box truth less than three months away, the through line to progress, for all communities too often denied justice, is women. And particularly, women of color, or BIWoC.

2020 has three-dimensionalized the conditions that fostered 2018’s “Year of the Woman.” In 2018, #MeToo and smoldering outrage over the Trump administration’s antagonism, kids in cages, and threatened repeal of the Affordable Care Act, drove turnout. This year, COVID’s devastation, Black Lives Matter, and our leadership’s failure to deliver a timely plan to address either, highlight a truth that is new to some but not to all:

as long as women are missing from the budget negotiations, the crisis response team, the hearing room, the school board or the police commission, our entire community stands to lose.

Whether women will cast the deciding votes to send the first woman Vice President to the White House, or mobilize the district that flips the Senate blue, or set a new all-time record for their numbers in the California State Legislature, we are most certainly coming for a fuller equality than ever attained before in 2020. Not just fuller in numbers — but fuller in our commitment to progressive values and in our diversity of race, age, and life experience. This matters.

At Close the Gap California, we are working on leveraging the power these women have to transform our politics for good. We’ve got 6 Recruits running off in November to join the 9 already serving in Sacramento, and today we’re working with prospective Recruits for the first cycle of the Motherlode, 2022.

In the interest of speeding up the pace of history and getting to that fuller equality, cycle by cycle through 2028, I want to share some takeaways from 2020’s Veepstakes and Presidential primary:

For those already in power:

· Be intentional about seeking out diverse women. Vice President Biden — by deciding on women early in his search and paying attention to the power of BIWoC — “showed us in the biggest way possible that if you’re willing to dive into pools you have not swum in before, you can find more talent than you ever imagined,” as CTGCA Founder Mary Hughes sharply observed in the SF Chronicle this week. Worth mentioning is that every single S&P 500 company found the same once California Senator Hannah Beth Jackson’s groundbreaking 2018 legislation forced them to add women to their corporate boards. Today they may recognize the benefits of diverse leadership during challenging times.

For those still unsure of what’s about to happen:

· Women, and particularly women of color, who step forward will continue to campaign through vicious harassment, widespread belittling, blatant double standards and outright death threats, for daring to be ambitious. They will win anyway. Not every time in every race, but their numbers will continue to grow if we support them.

For those women and their allies who are coming for a fuller equality:

· Much has been written about the unique set of challenges presented to women who run for executive office, as Mary’s Op-Ed also notes. To conquer the glass ceiling specific to our nation’s loftiest executive role might just require an opening.

It is not a coincidence that the 2008 election of our nation’s first President of color came when the seat was open. Whereas in 2020 a uniquely entrenched incumbent pushed many voters — women, people of color, LGBTQi and progressives among them — to cast their ballots for a 77-year-old, moderate, straight white man. And this in the most diverse and richly progressive Democratic primary field in history. Voters are more likely to take a chance on something new in an open field.

· Candidates from historically excluded populations, including women, have their most opportune pathways to office in open seats. Indeed, of the record 355 women who ran for Congress in 2018, only 14% won when they challenged incumbents, whereas a whopping 47% — just about half — who ran in open seats prevailed.

I’ll take those open seat odds any day.

With the California Motherlode of 96+ legislative seats coming open over the next 4 cycles, transformative equality is attainable in our state. And the policies and priorities our future legislators set can go on to inform the nation in a Post-Trump era.

To get there, women and their allies must continue to be strategic in plotting their courses, especially in light of persistent disparities in resources available to us. Close the Gap helps prospective candidates do that in California, where we target open seats in the Legislature and recruit progressive women to run in them years before elections.

One in 4 women legislators in our state is already a CTGCA Recruit, so we just need to scale our successful but lean recruiting strategy up, to meet the volume of opportunity ahead. It’s notable that at least 4 of the women considered for the Vice Presidential slot served previously as State Legislators: we believe the future Legislators we’re recruiting today can build on the history Vice President Harris will make in November, and one day rise all the way to the Oval Office.

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

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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.

About Susannah Delano

Susannah Delano has served as Executive Director of Close the Gap California (CTGCA) since January 2018. During her tenure, women members of the California State Legislature have rebounded from a 20-year low of 21% in representation to an all-time high of 32%. Today, California more than doubles the national average for the number of women of color serving in its statehouse.

From 2010–2017 Susannah led Planned Parenthood Northern California’s advocacy work, delivering key votes that expanded access to reproductive health care during a time of unprecedented national assault. Throughout the 2000s, Susannah worked on behalf of SEIU homecare workers throughout California to raise the standard of care and block dozens of proposed budget cuts that would have forced their low-income, elderly and disabled clients into costly institutions. Susannah is based in Vallejo, CA.