This past February, Dr. Kathryn Allen, a 64-year-old family physician with a sleek gray bob who also goes by Kathie, was one of more than 1,000 angry constituents who packed into a high school auditorium in the Utah suburb of Cottonwood Heights for a town hall meeting with their then-congressman, Rep. Jason Chaffetz. The fiery cell phone videos from the event have since become the stuff of cable news legend: Some people chanted “Do your job!”; others just booed at top volume. They were angry that Chaffetz, then the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, had failed to investigate Trump’s potential business conflicts with the same vigor he’d shown Hillary Clinton and Benghazi; they were also angry over his stated interest in defunding Planned Parenthood.
“He did not listen,” Allen told me by phone recently from Utah, her voice still indignant. Chaffetz would later muse that the rowdy crowd was made up of paid protesters, but Allen remembers very real, very emotional moments, including when one woman in the audience stood up to tell Chaffetz that Planned Parenthood had provided vital screenings for her when she was an uninsured single mother of three with a family history of cancer and asked him point-blank: Why was he trying to take Planned Parenthood away?
“Instead of answering her question, he started talking about the fact that both of his parents had died of cancer. He got all teary-eyed and talked about cancer research and how he’d like to see it increase,” Allen recalls. “It was so manipulative.” In fact, over the course of that now-infamous town hall, Allen says, Chaffetz “deflected almost every question. To me, it was appalling.”
So appalling that six months later, Allen, a Democrat and political newcomer, is running in November’s special election to replace Chaffetz—and turn his long-red seat blue—in what will be one of the country’s most-watched races. Spurred to action by the town hall, Allen first declared her intent to challenge Chaffetz in the 2018 midterm elections. By April, she had raised roughly $400,000 more than the incumbent, outpacing Chaffetz’s donations that quarter on the argument that she could be her district’s antidote to the Trump era. (Yes, the medical puns come handily; her campaign slogan touted her as “strong medicine for the 3rd Congressional District.”) But when Chaffetz stepped down in June to follow the (now well-trodden) pipeline from GOP leader to Fox News commentator, it was another, ahem, shot in the arm. Allen fast-tracked her campaign and swiftly set her sights on November’s special election. In June, she handily won the Democratic nomination.
Allen is one of a new wave of Democratic women who are taking resistance to the next level, not only wading into the murky waters of politics, but boldly running against (or in Allen’s case, running to replace) some of the most powerful men in Congress. In June, Cathy Myers, an English teacher, union leader, and school board member based in Janesville, Wisconsin, announced that she was entering the state’s Democratic race to unseat Speaker Paul Ryan in 2018. Dr. Mai Khanh Tran, a 51-year-old pediatrician who came to the U.S. from Vietnam as a 9-year-old refugee, is taking on Republican Rep. Ed Royce, an 11-term incumbent and chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, in the California congressional district that includes parts of Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Orange counties. And in New Jersey, U.S. Navy veteran, former federal prosecutor, and mother of four Mikie Sherrill is challenging Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, the Republican chair of the House Appropriations Committee who has held the district’s seat since 1995.
“We are so tired of men making decisions for us,” Allen says. “The GOP has assaulted all of these things that many women care deeply about,” including health care, women’s reproductive rights, climate change, and education, to name a few. For Allen, it conjures a primal analogy: “If you harm our young, we’re going to come after you like a mama bear.”
Allen, Myers, Tran, and Sherrill join more than 15,000 women across the country who have contacted Emily’s List in 2017 to express interest in running for office—a new record for the organization. “It’s unprecedented,” Emily’s List president Stephanie Schriock tells Vogue. Last year, Emily’s List celebrated the “Hillary bump” when a then-record 920 women, inspired by Clinton’s historic clinching of the Democratic nomination, contacted the group about running.
“We had a bump,” Schriock says. “Now we have a tsunami.”
Or, perhaps, a Trump jump: women rising up to fight back against a president and a GOP governing class that have been notoriously hostile in their policies toward them and to the few women in their ranks—women comprise only about one-fifth of all Congress members (84 in the House and 21 in the Senate). They’ve watched as senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren are interrupted and silenced by their male colleagues, and lamented that at an all-male cohort of senators retreated behind closed doors to draft a Senate health-care bill that would have imperiled millions of women’s health, from maternity care to access to birth control.
“If there is ever a time for women to speak up against the giants to protect our little ones, to protect our weak and our elders, this is the time,” Tran, the California pediatrician challenging Royce, told me. “Women are made of steel, and we’re made of heart, and we’re going to fight for those we care for.”
The bitter health-care fight was a tipping point for Tran, who sees firsthand the implications of repealing the Affordable Care Act and stripping coverage from millions every day in her practice. On the eve of the House’s first repeal attempt, the mother of a child with a brain tumor came to Tran’s office in tears; she worked as a manicurist and worried that she’d lose coverage and be unable to afford her child’s treatment. Tran reflected on her own battle with breast cancer and the eight rounds of IVF that she underwent to get pregnant with her now-5-year-old daughter; she couldn’t have prevailed in either of those cases, she says, without insurance.
The hot-button issue of immigration also hits home: Tran and her family fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975; as a girl, she picked berries in Oregon with other immigrant workers. She went on to attend Harvard, helping pay her tuition with janitorial work. She’s running for office, she says, to express her gratitude to America and stand up for the values she knows so well. “I remember seeing a picture of that little Syrian boy with dirt on his face, and it brought me to tears, because I remember being in that same position. I was lost. I was so scared, and yet a Marine literally carried me off the plane into this country,” she says. “What made him less deserving than me? What makes this country turn its back on him?”
In New Jersey, the Muslim ban similarly stung Sherrill. As a former federal prosecutor, “I’ve taken the oath many times to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Sherrill tells Vogue. “When I saw the attacks on the Constitution, I was personally offended.” Of equal concern to Sherrill as a former Navy helicopter pilot was Trump’s sharing of classified information with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador (“I knew when the president gave those secrets to Russia, he was putting people’s lives in danger”) and his repeated dismissal of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“I’ve fought for this country my entire adult life,” Sherrill adds. “To see the Trump administration tearing apart the institutions of our government is incredibly troubling for me.”
Newcomers like Sherrill, Tran, Myers, and Allen are hoping Trump’s hollow promises, persistent blunders, and low approval rating, as well as Republican incumbents’ willingness to stand by him regardless, will create yet another propulsive desire for change in Washington. Their opponents have hitched their wagon to Trump’s exploding star (Sherrill points out that Frelinghuysen has almost unilaterally voted in favor of the president’s policies), and the women taking them on are hoping it’s a gamble that won’t pay off.
“The shine has come off of Paul Ryan,” Myers, the teacher and Wisconsin Democrat, tells Vogue. She points to the Speaker’s initial failure to drum up support for the House’s American Health Care Act (AHCA), aka “Ryancare,” which threatened to cut Medicaid funding and strip opioid addiction treatment from his working-class constituents. “He can’t blame that on anybody else,” Myers says. “That’s his baby.”
She says Ryan has spent the past eight years in Washington growing ever more out of touch with the people of Wisconsin—unlike Chaffetz, Ryan didn’t bother to return to his state for a single town hall during the Presidents’ Day recess. But Myers, a single mom who grew up working at her parents’ truck stop and is often photographed atop her Harley-Davidson (“My mother just traded in her motorcycle for a hot tub, and that was only because she was in her late 70s”), says she has her finger on the pulse. “I am just like most people in this district,” she says. “I won’t let them down.” She nevertheless faces stiff competition in the Democratic primary, as her opponent, Randy “Ironstache” Bryce, has already catapulted to national attention and raised funds to match.
Myers, Allen, and their fellow female candidates acknowledge the challenge of taking on the well-oiled—and well-funded—GOP machine that powers candidates like Ryan and Royce (Tran and Sherrill have been endorsed by Emily’s List, which will help funnel donations and campaign support their way). Despite respectable fundraising hauls, it’s difficult to financially outmatch veteran incumbent opponents. There will be inevitable sexism—Sherrill has seen it already, with a local newspaper ignoring her military service and federal prosecutor cred with the headline: “Montclair Mom Runs for Congress.” (The writer later apologized.) Sherrill also considered how she’d manage the campaign and family life, and received sage advice from her young daughter. “She looked at me and said, ‘You have four kids. You understand time management. You just run.’”
The stakes are particularly high as Democrats are in the throes of a losing streak—after the monumental loss of the general election and in recent special election battles in Georgia, South Carolina, Kansas, and Montana. Allen hopes that her special election race this November will end differently, thanks to forward-looking economic messaging about creating jobs and managing student debt. After her campaign hosted a fundraiser on Chaffetz’s last day in office in June—cleverly called “Ciao, Chaffetz”—“that’s about the last time I really want to be talking about him,” Allen says. She admits she had looked forward to running against Chaffetz: “Of course! He would say idiotic things every few days and it would boost my campaign.” (See: the time he told CNN that “rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe [people] should invest in their own health care.”) But Allen is now energized by an open race without an incumbent: “I know that I’m the last congressional chance for the Democrats to win a special election, and I’m going to give it all I have.”
Myers, Tran, and Sherrill are similarly passionate about what are sure to be their tough races. Asked about facing some of the most powerful men in Washington, they respond with a resounding “Bring it on!”
“Here is what I know,” Myers says. “Women get things done.”
