"A lot of female friends, relatives and colleagues who were previously politically passive have been activated, and, boy, they do not like Donald Trump." https://t.co/dxRALVR5Ry
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) October 17, 2018
From the Washington Post, “Anti-Trump fervor fuels a new movement aimed squarely at winning elections”:
JACKSON TOWNSHIP, Ohio — President Trump’s political nightmare, a mother of two in a custom campaign polo, bounded down the driveway like a sweepstakes winner. She had just chatted up a shirtless Republican out to mow his lawn, and he liked what she said.
“He’s with me on the cost of health care and preexisting conditions,” Lorraine Wilburn, a first-time Democratic candidate for the Ohio statehouse, told her 11-year-old son, Finn. “He said he would take a look at me.”
Finn was used to this sort of enthusiasm, ever since his mother started attending liberal activist meetings after the 2016 election. He had learned not to be surprised if Mom started sounding like a comic book heroine akin to Wonder Woman, whose image she keeps on her phone…
Thin margins of error have not discouraged the new foot soldiers of the Democratic resistance. They don’t cover their faces with bandannas, speak of socialist revolution or get lost in debates about the best model for Medicare expansion.
Instead, many of them juggle campaign events with school commutes and soccer practice. They leave the kids with their husbands to march, come out of retirement to register voters and form close bonds with neighbors who were strangers when Hillary Clinton was the presumptive president. An aspiring blue wave with a decidedly pink hue, they are women defined by a desire to atone for their relative inaction in 2016.
“People are making social connections that they really, really like,” said Abby Karp, an organizer for Swing Left in North Carolina, who works days as a dean at a private school in Greensboro. “I don’t even have a Facebook page anymore. I have a political page. I don’t know what my cousin is doing. I know what canvass is coming up.”…
ActBlue, a central conduit for Democratic campaign contributions, has recorded 4.5 million contributors so far in the 2018 cycle, with about 61 percent of the money coming from women. That compares with 1.5 million donations in the 2014 cycle, when about 52 percent of the money came from women.
“Coming together is the antidote. It’s the antithesis of the divisiveness,” said Lauren Friedman, an Ohio state Senate candidate and mother of three, who started organizing with Wilburn in Canton days after Trump’s election. “Even us just going and canvassing — that is making a change.”…
GOP Women's PAC supports…Haley Stevens and Elissa Slotkin. ???? #CountryOverParty #MI08 #MI11 https://t.co/KazRsKPnm6
— MichiganDivisible???? (@IndivisibleMich) October 19, 2018
Michelle Goldberg, in the NYTimes, on “A Cure for Political Despair”:
… There is, I find, only one thing that soothes my galloping anxiety, and that is talking to women who are actually doing the work of campaigning. The people who are knocking on doors and organizing rallies tend to be much more cheerful and confident than those who spend too much time on Twitter obsessing over each new poll.
Open Thread: An ‘Angry (But Positive!) Mob’ — of Women VotersPost + Comments (60)