A New Era: What the US Midterm Results Mean for Women

On the rainy, blustery Saturday morning before election day a bus idling in Union Square collected volunteers who had signed up to campaign for Mikie Sherrill. The bus, which seats 50, had just one spare seat when it pulled out into the stop-start fifth avenue traffic and headed over the bridge into Jersey. There was a broad slice of New York on the bus, men and women, young and old, a variety of ethnicities. They chattered quietly about seats to watch and whether there was any chance to flip the Senate and take back both houses from the Republicans.

Out the window the passing trees turned from the early-Autumn greens in the city to the deep-Fall hues of rust, sunshine and scarlet. The streets widen, the houses spread out. The bus stopped and the canvassers filed off to get their assignments and begin spreading the word.

In Wayne, New Jersey, there was plenty of ground to cover and canvassers were bundled into the cars of volunteers and driven to their assigned locations. In the car, driver Cindy says she wanted to find a way to help the campaign but didn’t like the idea of knocking on doors herself. She knows Sherrill through their childrens’ school. It’s personal.

“Things changed. More women are engaging, and the women who are engaging in ways that they never have before.” National Organisation for Women (NOW) President Sonia Ossorio, who is in Wayne to knock on doors herself, says. “It all changed the night that Donald Trump was elected. That was the turn-around moment for women in this country.” 

The story of how these midterm elections became a rallying point for the frustrations and grievances of American women is a straight line from the pussy-grabbing president to the shockwaves of the Me Too movement, to the confirmation of Brett Kavanagh to the US Supreme Court.

A survey by the Pew Research Centre released in October found 63 per cent of women now disapproved of the president.

“There’s been so many galvanizing moments. It’s a compounding effect that leads us to this midterm election right now. Starting with the election of Donald Trump and then the series of high-powered men who were exposed for their, just, blatant and ongoing sexual harassment of women, that of course then led us straight into the Kavanagh hearing,” Ossorio says. “Women describe that experience of the Kavanagh hearing using the same words that they described how they felt after Trump was elected. Sick to their stomach, ill, disgusted. Very visceral.”

In a small lane lined with small homes, a couple get out of their minivan. Ossorio calls out to them, asks them if they are planning to vote for Sherrill. The man beams broadly, raises a hand in a friendly greeting and nods. “Mikie Sherrill, I already sent my vote in for her. You’ve got our vote don’t you worry.”

Another man comes out of his garage to greet Ossorio, he’s older, early 70s, and he’s listed on the information sheet as a Republican. But he’s already set on voting for Sherrill. “I look at the candidate, and she’s got the goods.” He tells Ossorio he’d happily put up a sign if they bring him one. “For the first time in over three decades, our 11th district seat in the United States House of Representatives is blue,” Sherrill says in her victory speech on Election night. Flanked by her two sons, her two daughters and her husband, she talks of that same mood Ossorio spoke of. “Out of the cynicism the distrust and the attacks on our democratic ideals we have found what exists in all of us, it’s really that simple truth that we love our country and we are no longer taking the government of the people, for the people and by the people for granted. In fact, here in New Jersey we are going to do everything we can to protect it.”

The district narrowly favoured Trump in 2016, but with almost 56 per cent of the vote in Sherrill’s pocket, the shine appears to have worn off. “We know that doing what is right, doing what is just, is never a partisan issue,” Sherrill says to loud whoops and roars from the crowd.

New Jersey’s 11th is one of those places where middle-class white women supported Trump’s presidency. Ossorio says she believes many women who supported Trump have shifted in the two years since. “Many of the women who did vote for Trump would not be able to pull the lever for him again. The degree to which their personal values, the lack of civility that’s happening, has made them take a deeper look at what’s at stake.”

What’s at stake is brought sharply into focus rounding a bend on Preakness Avenue in Wayne. At the Temple Beth Tikvah a sign announces a Saturday morning service. There are two police cars visibly idling out front, a third parked in the lot, the officer standing guard at the door. After the events in Pittsburgh the previous weekend, the community isn’t taking any chances.

It’s a reminder that for many communities in the US, the election is about matters of life and death. “There’s more division at the extreme ends, but simultaneously there’s a blurring of the party lines in the middle. And rather than party lines, the idea of humanity and a simple sense of what’s right and wrong has taken precedence,” Ossorio says.

Moral issues are what compelled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to step into the ring and take on a Democratic party heavyweight. “We launched this campaign because in the absence of anyone giving a clear voice on the moral issues of our time then it is up to us to voice them,” she told supporters in her victory speech on election night.

Sherrill singled out healthcare and gun control in her victory speech, Ocasio-Cortez talked about immigration and student debt in hers.

“If we continue to believe that we are a threatened, scared, and limited nation, then that is exactly what we will become,” Ocasio-Cortez says.

As the results rolled in from around the country, it became clear that while the Democrats would take back the House, early indications of some promising results in Senate and Governor races wouldn’t pan out.

Star Texas Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke conceded defeat in a tight race against Ted Cruz, Oprah’s pick for Governor of Georgia, Stacey Abrams, couldn’t quite get over the line amid accusations of voter suppression, three sitting Democrat Senators, Heidi Heitkamp, Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly, lost to their Republican challengers. So far, the Democrats have only managed to claw one Senate seat away from their opponents, and the New York Times’ forecast had a final Senate make up of 47 Democrats, 53 Republicans.

The Senate was always going to be a hard ask, with some vulnerable Democrat incumbents and races mainly in traditionally ‘red’ states, there was little margin for error, little room for success beyond a ‘blue’ tsunami.

The Democrats did pick up seven Governors, including Laura Kelly in Kansas, and wins in ‘rust-belt’ states of Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. These are places that went for Obama, then Trump, and wins there might suggest a cooling in support for the President’s rhetoric and style.

Overall, it appears that white women, 53 per cent of whom voted for Trump, arechanging their minds. Democrats got their largest ever share of women voters, 59 per cent, up from 49 per cent in 2016. That jump was largely due to more white women, and independent women voters, choosing blue.

But not all white women have had a change of heart. In Texas, 60 per cent went for Cruz over Beto O’Rourke and in Florida 51 per cent voted Republican for governor, helping to scuttle Democrat Andrew Gillum’s run.

Ocasio-Cortez told supporters on election night not to be disappointed by the losses, but to think about the bigger picture.“In 2018 we turned the state of Texas purple. That’s what we did this year and that is a great position to be in going into 2020,” she said. “Today is a milestone but it is really a beginning.”

Among the at least 96 women entering the House of Representatives is Massachusetts’ first black congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. She took the seventh district unopposed after defeating the incumbent in a state primary earlier this year.

“When it comes to women of colour candidates, folks just don’t talk about a glass ceiling. What they describe is a concrete one,” Pressley told supporters during her victory speech. “But you know what breaks through concrete, seismic shifts.”

This election feels like a seismic shift for women, who threw themselves into politics with gusto this cycle, running in record numbers across the country.

“It’s so inspiring to see how so many individual women have just broken out of their shell and just decided to run. These aren’t necessarily women who have been involved in politics or policy. We’re talking about nurses, schoolteachers, military vets. It’s astounding,” Ossorio says.

As well as the firsts, there’s also the sense that these mid-term elections mattered. Voters turned out in record numbers. In New York’s subway system ‘I Voted’ stickers clung to the floor, loosed from the wet lapels of hurrying commuters. 113 million Americans cast a vote, the first time a midterm election has exceeded 100 million votes. 49 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, which might seem low when compared to Australia’s compulsory system, but it’s almost 13 percentage points higher than the 2014 midterms, where just 36.4 percent of eligible voters exercised their right.

High turnout, a loss in the House and some big losses in Governor races might make a Republican president nervous looking ahead to 2020. But Trump made it clear he saw the night as a victory for his own brand of Republicanism, not a rebuke. “Candidates who embraced our message… excelled last night,” the President told reporters on Wednesday. “They really excelled… on the other side you had some who decided to ‘let’s stay away’. ‘Let’s stay away’. They did very poorly. I’m not sure that I should be happy or sad, but I feel just fine about it.”

Trump singled out candidates who lost and chided them. Praised the ones that had stuck by him and won. It was a clear message to his party not to buy into the narrative of a ‘seismic shift’, not to be concerned by losses in the rust belt, by the erosion among women voters.

But in the next two years this new House, with more women in it than ever before, has a chance to make change and hold the President, previously unchecked by Congress, to some modicum of account.

“This is unprecedented. This is a new era. It’s a whole shift in mindset that is brought on by women collectively hitting a wall and saying, ‘enough is enough’. It’s really inspiring,” Ossorio said on the bus on Saturday.

Bring on the new era.

This article first appeared on FutureWomen.com. You can find it here.