EMILYs List has been devoted to electing pro-choice Democratic women for 40 years, a mission that’s grown only more critical since the fall of Roe. Joining us on this week’s episode of “The Downballot” is Christina Reynolds, one of EMILYs’ top officials, to tell us about how her organization recruits, supports, and advises women candidates at all levels of the ballot nationwide. Reynolds explains the unique challenges women face, from a lack of fundraising networks to judgments about their qualifications that never seem to stick to men. She tells us how Dobbs has—and hasn’t—changed campaigning for EMILYs’ endorsees and spotlights a wide range of key races the group is involved in this year.
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also discuss the rollout of the DCCC’s first “Red to Blue” list this year, highlighting the most promising Democratic pickup opportunities in the House. While the D-Trip is focused on general elections, the Davids explain why the committee has no choice but to get involved in a California primary thanks to the state’s verkakte election rules. And finally, they tear into the Tennessee GOP for a ridiculous set of rule changes designed solely to protect a scandal-plagued incumbent—changes that will probably bite them in the ass before long.
Subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts to make sure you never miss a show. New episodes every Thursday morning!
David Beard: Hello, and welcome. I’m David Beard, Contributing Editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir: And I’m David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. “The Downballot” is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. Please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.
Beard: We’ve got a pretty exciting show this week. What are we talking about?
Nir: We do, indeed. On our Weekly Hits, we are going to be discussing the launch of the DCCC’s first round of their “Red to Blue” program, highlighting their top-targeted House races, and then we are going to be discussing some crazy rules hijinks that the Tennessee Republican Party is up to, designed to protect a scandal-plagued incumbent.
Then, for our deep dive this week, our guest is Christina Reynolds, one of the top leaders at Emily’s List, an organization devoted to electing pro-choice Democratic women to offices at all levels of the ballot nationwide. We’re going to be hearing all about how Emily’s List does what it does and what races the group is focused on for 2024. So let’s get rolling.
It’s time for our Weekly Hits, Beard, and it almost feels like we’re in a little bit of a calm before the storm. The first downballot primaries will be starting next month, on March 5, and things are starting to heat up. I know we want to talk about one particularly big group that is making some moves in a few primaries, the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is the official campaign arm of House Democrats. And hey just launched their first “Red to Blue” list of the 2024 election cycle.
Beard: Yes. For anybody not familiar with the “Red to Blue” list, this is a list that highlights candidates that the DCCC thinks have a good chance of flipping Republican-held seats or holding competitive Democratic open seats. It’s primarily going after Republicans, but it will come up sometimes in Democratic open seats. But the idea is that it’s competitive seats and it’s not incumbents. The D-trip will have a separate list for the incumbents that they want to protect.
And the idea behind these lists really is to make sure folks far and wide know where the D-trip is going to be focusing its resources, where it thinks the most competitive races are, so that outside organizations can take that into account and focus their work in similar places, or if maybe they have a race that they really care about and it’s not on the D-trip’s list, they can account for that and adjust how they’re going to work on that race.
But we want to go through a little bit of this first list that’s come out. There’ll also be names added as we go through our primary season and races come online, but from this initial list, there’s a number of races that are the typical top competitive races that we saw in 2022. Obviously, most of the maps are the same. So a lot of these races are repeats. In particular, we’ve got a few candidates who are running again. So some familiar names to those of us who followed 2022 closely.
I want to highlight a few of those, starting in Arizona’s 6th District, where Kirsten Engel has a rematch. This was an open seat that Republicans narrowly won. She only lost by 6,000 votes. So I think this is a race that’s going to be really high on people’s radar when it wasn’t always at the very top tier. I think there was a while in 2022 that people thought that this race was a little tough to get over the top. So it didn’t get the full amount of resources I think at times that other races did. But this year, I think it’s going to get that full complement of resources and she’s going to have a really good opportunity there.
A couple others I want to highlight. California’s 41st District, where Will Rollins is taking a second shot at GOP longtime incumbent Ken Calvert. This was a district that changed in redistricting. It now has Palm Springs in it. So there’s a lot more of a Democratic base. Rollins ran a really good campaign in 2022. So this has really come on as a top-tier competitive district when people definitely didn’t think that at the beginning of last cycle.
Then, finally, Tony Vargas is back in Nebraska’s 2nd District. This is a district that Biden won in 2020. It’s a district that I think Biden has a good shot to win again in 2024, which is particularly important because Nebraska divides its electoral votes by congressional district. So that is actually an electoral vote that Biden can put into his column by winning just that district. As a result, this is a really key district. This is a race that Democrats need to be able to win to take a majority. They need to be able to go after these Biden districts, like the one that Vargas is running for.
Nir: To emphasize, these candidates really don’t have much in the way of primary opposition, and that’s true for almost everyone on the “Red to Blue” list, though the funny thing is that in Nebraska’s 2nd District, Republican Don Bacon, he has some MAGA primary opposition, and Democrats would certainly love it if Bacon didn’t win renomination. But that’ll be a competitive race, no matter what. But there are a few exceptions where the DCCC is getting involved in primaries, and we want to talk about one of them in particular, and that is the race in California’s very competitive 22nd District.
Beard: Yes, this is held by GOP Rep. David Valadao. He’s somebody who’s represented this district or a similar district for a while. He lost in 2018 only to make a comeback and win it back in 2020. But this is a very competitive seat. It relies a lot on Hispanic turnout and getting a really strong Hispanic vote for Democrats to be able to be competitive in this district. He’s facing a rematch from his 2022 opponent, former Assemblyman Rudy Salas, who lost a pretty close race by a 52-to-40 margin.
But the issue in this case is that there’s another Democrat who’s also in the race, State Sen. Melissa Hurtado. There’s also another Republican who’s another ultra-MAGA person primarying a Republican incumbent—that’s Chris Mathys. So the issue here is that these four candidates, they don’t run in separate primaries, where then you have one Democrat and one Republican to then go to the general election. In California, there’s a primary where all of the candidates appear on the ballot, and then the top two vote-getters advance to the general election. That means that it could be a Democrat and a Republican, but it could be two Democrats or it could be two Republicans.
I mentioned the issues with Hispanic turnout that we’ve seen in this district. Those tend to be lower in things like primaries. This is also a situation where the primary is happening at the same time as a potentially somewhat competitive Republican presidential primary at the top of the ticket. So there’s a real risk here that Republican turnout is a lot higher than Democratic turnout, and that makes it a lot higher of a risk that Republicans could end up with some sort of situation where both of their candidates get 24, 23% of the vote, while the two Democrats are 20, 21, 22. As a result, Democrats get completely shut out of the general election in this district that should be extremely competitive.
Nir: Needless to say, that would be a catastrophe, and in order to avoid that catastrophe, the DCCC-endorsed Salas and, in fact, has already started spending on an ad campaign designed to boost his name recognition ahead of the primary, which is coming up soon on March 5. We talk about this problem with the top-two primary a lot on “The Downballot.” In fact, we did so just last week, when we talked with Alejandro Verdin, who managed Janet Protasiewicz’s campaign for the Wisconsin Supreme Court race last year. Democrats and progressives in Wisconsin had a very reasonable fear that they would also be locked out in that race, and fought very hard to avoid that.
This is a terrible system that risks depriving voters of a real choice. I mean, if I lived in California 22 and I saw two Republicans on my ballot in November, I’d be so disgusted. I wouldn’t even want to vote in a race like that. I’m also going to guess that a lot of voters would probably at best be mystified as to why their ballot looks this way, with two Republicans on it, and they might even blame Democrats for seemingly not running a candidate, especially if they didn’t vote in the primary. The reason that so-called reformers pushed this change in the first place more than a decade ago was because they claimed it would reduce extremism.
That is so naive. They were warned at the time that that would never work, and guess what? It hasn’t. There is absolutely no way that you can say that politicians in California, especially Republican politicians in California, are any less extreme than their counterparts anywhere else. Some of the worst MAGA Republicans come from California. It’s really time to end this. It’s time to restore traditional party primaries. The same goes for Washington state. Both of these states have had some high-profile races in the general election that feature two candidates from the same party. We’ve seen it happen in Senate races in California.
We’ve seen it happen for statewide office, with two Republicans winding up on the ballot for a race in Washington state, which is a blue state. That’s completely absurd, and the DCCC shouldn’t have to do this. They shouldn’t have to get involved this early on. I’m sure that they don’t want to. They’d much rather spend this money on a general election. But a top-two lockout is such a disaster that they’re forced into this situation, and it just generates unnecessary hostility and even conspiracy theories about why D.C. Democrats are big-footing into a race. The alternative is much worse, but there is a better alternative still, and that is to get rid of this stupid top-two system and adopt normal primaries like almost everywhere else.
Beard: Absolutely, and this is an issue that the D-trip has faced before. We’ve seen them get involved in races as far back as 2012, when this system first got implemented. Current incumbent members of Congress who are still there today benefited from the D-trip getting involved early to make sure they made it to the general, so that they could defeat a Republican in a competitive race. So this is not new, we’ve seen this happen before, but it’s just a really unfortunate situation where folks have to pick so early and they have to go in so hard into the primary just to make sure we have a candidate in a competitive seat in the general election.
Nir: Beard, I want to change gears or at least change states and head down to Tennessee, and I want to talk about what Republicans are doing to ensure that primaries turn out the way they want them to. What the D-trip is doing in California is completely aboveboard. What Tennessee Republicans are doing is completely absurd and just supremely anti-democratic. Freshman Republican Congressman Andy Ogles, we’ve known for a while that he’s this mini-George Santos, thanks to some really amazing investigative work by Nashville-based reporter Phil Williams of News Channel 5. Sam Stockard of the Tennessee Lookout has also been on the case here.
Last year, Williams reported that Ogles has claimed to be, quote, “an economist, a nationally recognized expert in tax policy and health care, a trained police officer, and even an expert in international sex crimes.” Well, guess what? This entire résumé was pretty much all bullshit. So it’s no surprise that there are a couple of ambitious Republicans who want a primary Ogles, who clearly ought to be vulnerable when his life story appears to be largely fabricated.
Beard: Actually, this ties to another thing that Republicans love to do, which is cracking blue districts and making them safe Republican districts. This 5th District used to be a very compact seat that covered the city of Nashville and was represented by a Democrat. It was safely blue. In redistricting, Republicans cracked it. They put Nashville into parts of three different districts and turned this into a safely red district that resulted in an open seat that we knew Republicans were going to win, and that’s the district that Ogles won and now represents.
Nir: The key difference between Ogles and Santos, well, aside from the fact that Ogles represents a red district, Republicans actually finally decided they had enough of Santos and gave him the boot. But they have been very interested and motivated in protecting Ogles and political GOP leaders have gone to great lengths to do so. So party leaders just passed two new rules to limit access to the state’s primary, which is coming up in August. Rule No. 1, you must have voted in the GOP primary in three of the last four elections. And there’s a caveat: Even if you did vote for the GOP in three of the last four elections, if you voted even once in a Democratic primary, you’re not eligible to run. Rule No. 2, if you’ve ever sued the state GOP, you’re also not eligible. Does this seem so perfectly narrowly cast, or what?
Beard: I know. The first one is at least plausibly a thing related to elections where you’re like, “Oh, you want to be in the party and participating, or something.” Obviously, we know why they’re doing it, but at least the facial claim would make some sense. The second one is just so clearly absurd and targeted to just kick out someone that they don’t want to be on the ballot—it’s crazy.
Nir: Well, guess what? So rule No. 1, the primary voting history, businessman Baxter Lee, one of the two candidates who wants to primary Ogles, voted in the 2020 Democratic primary for president, saying he wanted to, quote, “help secure the best matchup for Donald Trump.” You know what? Beard, I actually believe him, because he said that he was doing this as part of Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos—do you remember this, where he wanted Republicans to cross over and vote, I guess, for Bernie Sanders, because he thought Sanders would be the easiest candidate for Republicans to beat? And very few people took him up on this, but I’ll bet that some did. I could believe that this guy, Baxter Lee, actually took his orders from Rush Limbaugh.
Beard: Yeah, it sounds like the kind of thing some activist Republican would hear and think it was some bright idea and go do, not that it made a difference. It is now coming back to haunt him now.
Nir: So, rule No. 2, this one pertains very specifically to music video producer Robby Starbuck, who also tried to run last cycle when it was an open seat, and he sued the state party because it cited some different rules back then to keep him off the ballot. Specifically, they said that he hadn’t lived in the state long enough. Now that suit was unsuccessful, but apparently, that’s also coming back to haunt him with this new rule that GOP leaders just passed. Now we know that Republicans love to embrace minority rule. We talk about it all the time here on “The Downballot.” Rather than support popular policies, they want to just try to make it harder for voters to hold them accountable at the ballot box. They’re almost these pure formalists. As long as they can come up with some set of rules, any set of rules that keep them in power, they don’t care whether those rules are fair at all.
But what we typically see is that this plays out with the electorate as a whole. Usually, it’s Republicans trying to suppress the votes of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters, make ballot measures harder to pass, like we saw with abortion rights in Ohio. But it definitely happens sometimes with Republican voters as well. In some states, for instance, Republicans like to pick their nominees at conventions instead of primaries, because that limits the voter pool only to the most hard-core partisans. And we know that Republicans are contemptuous of anyone who might vote for Democrats, but this really shows that they think poorly of their own voters too.
Beard: Yeah, and the interesting thing, if you take a little bit of a more big-picture look at it, is that the U.S. is an outlier for having these state-run primaries. In general, a lot of parties in other countries, they choose internally either from an executive board, or a convention, or even what we call firehouse primaries, which are party-run primaries. It’s something more like that, where parties are very much in charge of choosing their own candidates in one way or another, depending on how democratic they choose to be, and then they present those candidates to the general public for election at the general election.
Where America has this tradition of primaries where candidates usually get themselves on the primary ballot, run for the nomination of the party through a state-run primary, and then advance to the general election. And so, in that way, parties don’t have as much power as to who they nominate and who ends up as elected officials. And that has some pluses and some minuses, but instead of the Tennessee GOP being like, “Oh, we want more control. We want to use a convention, or do something else,” they’re just making up rules to throw everybody else off the ballot until they have their one candidate on the state-run primary ballot, which is crazy.
Nir: That’s absolutely spot-on. And what makes this super delicious is that, according to the Tennessee Journal’s Andy Sher, some members of the GOP Executive Committee, quote, “conceded they didn’t understand entirely what they were voting on.” That is just absolutely perfect to me. And what this is going to do is that, one day soon, there is going to be some Republican who actually is in good with the GOP establishment but runs afoul of these new rules, because that’s the problem with these rules: They will eventually come back to bite you in the ass. And if this Baxter Lee actually did participate in Operation Chaos, there probably are some other Republicans in Tennessee who did the same thing. So they might get jammed up too. Who knows? This is the kind of problem you face when you become this obscurantist organization that is simply devoted, like I was saying earlier, to just having some set of rules, doesn’t matter whether they’re fair or not, you’re going to wind up biting yourself in your own ass.
Beard: And of course, when they reach that place where they have a candidate who runs afoul of the rules that they like, they’ll of course just change the rules again and go back and forth as needed to get their preferred folks on the ballot and keep the people they don’t like off, but that is no way to run a party. Obviously, Republicans have lots of problems, we could go on for a while, but this is just another one that shows that they are not competent to run anything.
Nir: One last quick thing we want to mention on our Weekly Hits, we want to give a shout-out to our friends at 538, who just rolled out a massive new update of their pollster ratings, and they’ve added a hugely important new dimension that I really love. So, in addition to judging how accurate each firm’s polls are, how close to the final result they get, they’re also now assessing how transparent each polling firm is. And this is such critical information in this day and age when we have so many crappy pollsters, so many brand-new pollsters we’ve never heard of before, especially fly-by-night GOP pollsters who seem to exist only to drive certain narratives. So G. Elliot Morris, who we’ve had as a guest on the show, he had his team dig through thousands, thousands of poll press releases to answer questions like “Did the survey include cross tabs? Did it say who the sponsor was, if there was a sponsor? Did it release the sample size for smaller subgroups, like women voters or noncollege voters?” This is great, great information to have. It’s an incredible labor to produce it. It’s just a fanatic dedication to accuracy that we strive for ourselves. So much respect for what the 538 team did here. You should definitely check it out. Just Google “538 pollster ratings,” it’ll come right up.
Beard: And the great thing about focusing on transparency is both, A, it proves that the pollster knows what they’re doing. Obviously, to be transparent, you have to understand all of this information that people are asking for and be able to produce it. So that’s a first checkmark. And then the second checkmark, of course, is that folks can then evaluate all of this information for themselves. This allows folks to look through all of this extra information and say, “Hey, this part seems screwed up,” or, “This seems like something went wrong here,” and potentially address it with the pollster if there is actually a problem. And so those two things combined really make the most transparent pollsters the best, and that’s why it makes sense to weigh it into this pollster accuracy rating.
Nir: Well, that does it for our Weekly Hits. Coming up next on “The Downballot” for our deep dive, we are talking with Christina Reynolds, who is the senior vice president for communications and content at Emily’s List, one of the most important players in Democratic politics, about their plans for the 2024 elections. It is a great discussion, so please stick with us.
Joining us on “The Downballot” this week is Christina Reynolds, who is the senior vice president for communications and content at Emily’s List, an organization dedicated to electing pro-choice Democratic women to office nationwide. Christina, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.
Christina Reynolds: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Nir: So most of our listeners, I suspect, are probably at least a little familiar with Emily’s List, but for folks who may not know as much, or who are just learning about the organization for the first time, can you give us a quick overview of what it is you folks do, how you got started, and what your goals are?
Reynolds: Sure. We started nearly 40 years ago at a point when no Democratic woman had been elected to the U.S. Senate of her own right. And our founder, Ellen Malcolm, decided to do something about it. She gathered her friends in her basement and told them to bring their Rolodexes. For those of you who are not my age, that is text from your phone. And they wrote people and they raised money for Barbara Mikulski, was their first candidate. Fundamentally, what they saw was that women face a number of structural disadvantages. This is a system built to elect wealthy white men. And to get over that, and to make sure that the establishment saw these women as viable, the first thing Emily’s List did was help them with fundraising. They literally bundled checks, physical bundles, and would mail them to the campaigns.
And since then, we have grown to be an organization that now works up and down the ballot and does more than fundraise. We run independent expenditures, we help them raise money, but we also help them learn how to raise money. We train these candidates, we get in with them and help them build budgets and build staffs and hopefully get some more attention. We are thrilled with the growth of women in office, but the reality is there is one state legislature in the country that is majority women. That is Nevada—yay for Nevada. There are states that have never elected women to the U.S. Senate or as governor. No Black woman has ever been elected governor in this country’s history. Our former president Laphonza Butler is now only the third Black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. I could go on and on. My favorite statistic, favorite is a stretch, but one of the statistics that I like to throw out is there have been more episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy” than women who have served in Congress in the history of this country.
Nir: Oh, wow.
Reynolds: Yeah, yeah. So we still have work to do, and so we are proud to be doing it. We are excited to be doing it, especially in this time when our rights are so under-fire.
Beard: Absolutely. And that brings me to my next question. Now, we started this podcast in the beginning of 2022. We did not know, obviously, at the time that abortion would become one of the topics that we talked the most about, and comes up the most often when we’re talking about elections over the past two years. Obviously, I’m sure the Dobbs decision also had a major impact on how Emily’s List does its work. So how has that changed and evolved in the past two years since that ruling?
Reynolds: Yeah, I think what’s interesting is in some ways it hasn’t changed. We have always been an organization that focused on Democratic, pro-choice women. And so that was always a part of the litmus test, going back for our entire history. And we have done, for years and years, we have done research and messaging research and all sorts of things on reproductive rights. And we’ve been working with allies, like Reproductive Freedom for All and Planned Parenthood, on how we help elect more people who will protect our rights.
What Dobbs did and what it changed was it went from an issue, and this happened almost overnight, it went from an issue where the majority of the country, the overwhelming majority of the country is with us. They believe this is a right you should have. They believe that Roe was rightly decided. They support those protections, but they didn’t vote on it. They thought that was true, but they thought Roe was sacrosanct, that it wasn’t going away, and that we’d be okay. And this goes back to, I worked for Hillary Clinton, and I remember watching focus groups and people, we’d say, “Donald Trump wants to overturn Roe.” And they’d say, “That would be bad, but I don’t think that can happen. It’s okay.” And so what we saw after the Dobbs decision was that voters knew immediately what had happened, they understood and they voted on it. And they voted like it. They took that understanding and went in, and it became an issue that voters cared about. Now, I’m not here to tell you that voters only care about one issue. We are humans. As my old boss Laphonza Butler would say, “You vote with your whole selves.” But it became an issue that drove turnout in surprising ways. And so what we did was just make sure that that research that we’ve been doing for years on how to communicate around abortion and all of that, that that got to our candidates, that that was something that people understood.
We didn’t have to do much convincing, I have to say. We saw it have an impact in 2022, and since then, we’ve continued to see it. He’s obviously not one of our candidates, he does not meet the female criteria, but Gov. Beshear in Kentucky is a great example of a state where you wouldn’t expect it to have become an issue, and yet he ran ads on it, he talked about it and won reelection in a red state. So we see that happening all over the place. So the short answer is we were like, “Yeah, we’ve been telling you all.” And we took that or were trying to make sure that that voter angst, that voter anger, they have a good understanding of where our candidates stand and where their candidates stand.
Nir: It’s so maddening, and I can’t even put myself in your shoes to be this Cassandra. But at least, you turned out to be right. And voters were, in fact, very motivated by these issues. So much so that this pro-choice majority has, like you’ve just been saying, really made itself felt to the point that Republicans are completely scrambling, gyrating wildly in trying to find some kind of message to push back when they aren’t simply scrubbing references to abortion from their websites. I think there was a new report about that just this week. What advice do you give to campaigns in terms of their own messaging and also how to respond to some of the more increasingly unhinged attacks that we are seeing from Republicans on the topic of abortion?
Reynolds: I think the first thing is make sure that voters understand truly where you stand and where your opponent stands because we know they’re trying to walk away from it. I mean, what I like to say is they are acting like they have a branding problem, and they have an agenda problem. They have a policy problem. So Gov. Youngkin, in Virginia, thought he could put a nice wrapper on it, he thought the problem’s solved. And he dined out all over town on how “I have fixed this, I have a compromise, it’s going to work.” And it didn’t work. Virginia voters rejected his compromise. I’m using air quotes. You cannot see that in a podcast. So-called compromise. And what we saw instead is that voters understand fundamentally what’s at stake. And we tell our candidates, “Tell your stories. Tell the stories of the people out there who are impacted by this because that’s what people understand.”
They look at Kate Cox, who is the tragic case in Texas of a very wanted pregnancy that unfortunately was going to impact her health, that was not viable, that was going to impact her health and potentially her future fertility, according to her doctors, that a bunch of right-wing judges decided they knew better. And they look at that and they understand what’s at stake here. It’s who gets to decide. It’s who gets to decide your future, your family, whether you start one, whether you add to one, when you start one, all of that. But also when you make those health care decisions, who gets to decide? Is it a bunch of bureaucrats? Is it, as my old boss would say, “Do you want Ted Cruz in your doctor’s office or not?” No, you don’t. It’s a horrifying idea. But when you think about that … And so we urge people to make sure that they’re telling the stories and that they are putting things in those simpler terms because voters get that.
I think that’s the reality, is that poll after poll, we show voters still understand that this is not a question of “Can we compromise?” This is a question of “Who gets to decide?” And Republicans don’t want you to, and however much they try and walk away from it, however much they rebrand it, they are stuck with their policy positions. So the other thing that we tell people is “Make sure you define what your opponent has said and what they’ve done because they are going to try and walk away from it.” They have pulled it off their websites. You have Donald Trump saying in events, “I’m not sure about a federal abortion ban, but also let me tell the Iowans coming out to the caucus that I am proud of ending Roe.” You can’t have it both ways. We know what they’ll do, and so we need to remind voters of that.
Beard: Absolutely. Now, the election results, obviously, from the past couple of years, post-Dobbs, have been really positive for reproductive rights, both candidates and ballot initiatives. So I’m curious, has Emily’s List engaged at all with these ballot measures? Obviously, I know you focus on candidates, but I was curious if you’ve connected with the groups pushing on these ballot measures in various states.
Reynolds: We focus on candidates. I will say we are very grateful. We sit at different tables and things like that and certainly work with some of the groups that are active with them. We are incredibly grateful for the work these groups are doing. It is incredibly important, both in terms of policy. I’m a political hack, so I jumped straight to the politics, and you all are a political podcast, so I assume you appreciate that.
Beard: Of course.
Reynolds: But policy, we can’t forget what they’re doing has an actual impact on people’s lives. One of the things that I think has been most powerful about these efforts is that they’re led by people on the ground, by the activists who know their states best, they know their voters best. And so they do their work, and we’re happy to take some cues from them and work with the candidates who also understand what’s going on.
As you mentioned, they’re eight for eight for ballot initiatives. Every time abortion has been on the ballot as an initiative since Dobbs, it has gone the pro-choice way. We’ll see. There are efforts to get that on the ballot in more places. Florida is certainly a good example. And I do think that has the potential to change the electorate and to bring out the people who will also, in addition to the ballot initiative, you need the people who will fight to protect those rights in the legislature, in Congress, in the governor’s mansion. Michigan’s a good example of that. Where we went at it in many different ways, and so your rights are better protected in Michigan than when we started. And so we are incredibly grateful for their work and proud to be in the same general space. And on the ballot-initiative stuff, they know their voters best, and I think they’re operating incredibly effectively there.
Nir: So let’s focus on the candidate piece. I’d love it if you could take us through your endorsement process, how you decide to back a particular candidate, and also especially the benefits that Emily’s List’s support can bring to a campaign.
Reynolds: Sure. We look at a number of things. Obviously, a candidate has to meet our three main criteria: Democratic pro-choice women. And then beyond that, we work with the candidates, and we work with them often before they’re endorsed, on making sure that we think there’s a path to victory. That doesn’t mean an easy path. That doesn’t mean they are guaranteed a win or anything like that. We’re not looking at “What’s our win percentage going to be?” It’s “What are we telling our supporters, our online donors and the people who follow us that this person is worth investing in, even if it’s a bit of a long shot, but still a shot?” And so we work with candidates there. We also take a look at where do we think we can have the most impact?
I am thrilled to say the volume of women running has increased exponentially in the Trump era. Just to give you a little example. In the 2015-2016 cycle, I think it’s somewhere around 990, but in the 900 range, of women reached out to Emily’s List for help running for office. Over 1,000 women reached out in the month after Donald Trump won the White House. And that continued. In that first cycle after, that 2018 cycle, 44,000 women reached out.
Nir: Wow.
Reynolds: We got to 66,000, and we’re like, “We’re just going to stop counting. We’re just got to take it in.” And so when you look at that, we can’t be in every race, we can’t be in every place, but we’ve tried to create resources. So we have a training center online that provides worksheets and things like that. We try and do work with partners on the ground. We’ve got a lot of partners so that we’re doing trainings. We also think about staff. So, for example, we have a finance staff training coming up for people who would like to go work for Democratic pro-choice women running for office and need to know how to ask for money.
I say this as a political staffer, there’s no magic to it, you don’t need a PhD. You need to be willing to work hard, believe in the cause of the candidate, and then you learn some of that as you go, and hopefully, someone can teach it to you. And we want to make sure that those candidates have what they need. So whether that’s resources—hopefully, when we introduce them to our community, they get a little boost in fundraising. Sometimes we will put them in mailings or do emails for them. We also try and help build them up on the coordinated side, helping them find staff, as I said. We do media trainings or debate preps or things like that. And then we have an independent expenditure. And so again, we can’t be everywhere, but we ideally try and help them where we can, through any of those means.
Beard: Now, sticking with the part about obviously helping these candidates as they go about their candidacy. You endorse women, you’ve probably got a ton of institutional knowledge around the difficulties that female candidates in particular face. So what are the biggest challenges that you’ve seen over the years, and what advice do you give to your endorsees to help overcome those challenges?
Reynolds: Sure. You’re going to have to extend the length of this podcast. So just stop me when I’ve started rambling. I think the first thing that we run into is that this is a country that has the overwhelming majority of who we’ve elected, including every person as president and every person but one as vice president, have been men and almost all white men. And so when you think of an archetype for leader or elected official or president or governor, you often think of a man. And that’s something that makes a difference in everything from … It’s why we used to talk about women candidates, and candidates. They’re both candidates. Why do we other? And the ways in which we cover women, a lot of this has gotten better, but things like women often, in either their coverage or from voters, have their accomplishments demeaned or diminished in different ways than men do.
Misinformation and disinformation that we see online. With women, it is more gendered, and for women of color, it is more about their gender or their race. With men, it is about their policy. And if you think about that, one of those sets that person up to be thought of as someone different, as not a leader, is not about their policies, but just about their identity. And that chips away at whether or not you think they’re experienced. We see, and the Barbara Lee Family Foundation has done a ton of research on this, women in office and elected officials and candidates have to be both qualified and likable. Men can be one or the other. You can have a Bernie Sanders and a Pete Buttigieg. And that’s not to say that Bernie’s not likable. But you can’t be a woman and be cranky and you can’t be a woman and be too young because then you wouldn’t …
I mean, I think Amy Klobuchar got it right. And I’m not saying Mayor Pete is not qualified, but I don’t think a woman at his level of qualification would’ve been taken as seriously. And so all of that is happening. One of the things that we try and do is elect more women. Because the more women you see in those positions, the more things change. The more we can close our eyes and if I say, “Think of a candidate.” You might think of Elizabeth Warren, you might think of Kamala Harris, you might think of AOC. And that wasn’t the case, I would say, 20 years ago—certainly wasn’t the case 40 years ago, when Ellen started this organization. We also try and call out some of the media issues with things like, I hate the words, electable or likable or authentic, because we use those as weapons against the candidates that are not like what we’ve elected before. Right? No one questioned whether or not Beto liked that skateboard. Right? Or whether or not, I don’t know, Bernie liked his mittens, right? No one questions those because you just assume that. But Hillary Clinton mentions having hot sauce in her bag, which that woman … I can point you to news stories showing that going back to the ’90s and suddenly she’s inauthentic. She’s just trying to be like Beyoncé. Right? There is—
Nir: That made me want to vote for Hillary Clinton even more, by the way. I have to say I’m a hot-sauce fanatic myself.
Reynolds: So there you go. So is she, I can tell you. But there were people who said, “No, she’s not.” I mean, I listened to political podcasts that questioned whether or not Chelsea had her first grandchild as the campaign was starting, just to make Hillary more likable. And it’s like, boy, you can’t catch a break. And so there are challenges, right? We also look at just the finances of things. If who you raise money from, if your network is most like you, then for women, and again, particularly women of color, that gender gap makes a difference, right?
It starts impacting how much money those people who are in your network, who are most like you, often can give. All of those things make a difference. All of those things are things that we aim to help candidates with to help them raise money, to help them overcome any of those internal biases. And one of the best ways is just to have more women out there being authentically themselves. I think one of the greatest things about that class of 2018 and the women who have come since is that they didn’t worry so much about “Do I fit in a little box?”
My old boss Stephanie Schriock would point out there was a book cover—you can find it somewhere. It was “Nine and Counting” when there were nine, ooh, women senators. And if you look at them, they are all wearing black pantsuits, I think, except for Olympia Snowe, they all have short, that kind of short boxy haircut. They were fitting themselves in even the male sartorial box. And now you have women who say, “I’m Sharice Davids. I’m going to talk about the fact that I’m an MMA fighter and also put myself through community college, went to Cornell Law, worked in the White House, and have come back home. I’m going to be authentically myself.”
I think that the more women we get like that, the more we fight through some of those issues, and it gets better. It’s not solved. Congress is still less than a third women, but we’re making progress. And that’s something that I’m grateful to have seen in my time at Emily’s List and, I think, we’ll continue to see.
Nir: I thought that was a fantastic answer. You certainly did not ramble in the slightest. If we had the time, I would be happy to double the link in this podcast and talk about this particular problem because it is such a serious one. But I think, ultimately, the takeaway it sounds like you’re saying is that the more women you elect, the more women you will elect. Because believing that you can run and believing that you can do it, I think, just seems so important to me in terms of just deciding to go for it. We talk about candidates, but what, in a way, really matters the most are pre-candidates, the people who even would consider it, that I think it’s just so much more common for men to think about it and to consider it and to view themselves in the candidate mold.
Whereas for women, that’s traditionally been less so, and I think that obviously we have seen so many terrible things wrought since the Trump era, but to me, this change that you’ve identified is one of the best and it just really gladdens me.
Reynolds: Yeah, it is. I’ve always said it’s the only good thing to come out of, I think, Donald Trump’s election, but it is real. And part of it is, up until 2018, no woman in her 20s had ever been elected to the U.S. House. You have to be the age of 25. We had over a hundred men had been elected in their 20s, going back to the 1790s. This wasn’t just a new phenomenon. So plenty of men, because men can have potential. Women often have to have met that potential. And what we see in the election, 2018, we elected the first two women in their 20s, and that was AOC and Abby Finkenauer in Iowa.
I think we’ll continue to see more of that, right? But we have to, I think, as voters and as people who think that government should look like the people it governs call out some of the biases out there. And that means in ourselves as well. If you’re sitting there thinking, “I don’t like the way … It sounds like she’s always lecturing me.” Okay, is that something you would apply to a man? When you think of some of the attacks, when you think of some of the criticism, is that something you would apply to a man? Is that something you would apply to a white man, and so on?
And if it is, then think about it, right? Then great. And that’s a fair line of attack. If it’s not, then examine where are you coming from, right? Does that make sense? I think we all owe it to candidates to try and just judge them on a level playing field.
Beard: Now, obviously, before we let you go, we have to talk a little bit about 2024.
Reynolds: Sure.
Beard: So who are some of the already endorsed candidates that you and Emily’s List are excited about? What are some of those key races that you really think are going to be important as we look towards November?
Reynolds: For sure. So first and foremost, Vice President Kamala Harris, she is a manifestation of our mission in so many ways, and we’ve been with her since she was DA in San Francisco. And we’re proud to be with her again. I think she’s such an important voice on reproductive rights. So we’re obviously with her and very supportive. We are very focused on, I think, a federal abortion ban will happen if they take the White House and they take Congress.
So we have to flip the House, and we have to protect the Senate. And what that means is protecting our incumbents like Jacky Rosen and Tammy Baldwin, keeping those blue seats. Elissa Slotkin. Obviously, we know Michigan is going to be a target, and so we’re with Elissa Slotkin there in Michigan. Laphonza will leave office at the end of this term, and we want to make sure that there are Black women in the Senate, as a travesty that there have only been three. And that we will once again have no Black women in the Senate.
So we are very proud to be with Angela Alsobrooks running in Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester in Delaware. And then flipping the House is very, very doable. We have to focus on a few things. No. 1, protecting our incumbents. Emily’s List was very proud in 2022 to be with 15 new women in the House, including 10 women of color. Many of them won in those very, very right-on-the-line seats. And so making sure that Emilia Sykes comes back in Ohio, where she’s been a tremendous leader. Mary Peltola who is pro-choice and pro-fish and pro-family, right? Getting Mary there.
Nir: One of our favorite slogans of all time.
Reynolds: She’s so great. I bought the T-shirt. I had to. She is a phenomenal leader. I already mentioned Sharice Davids in Kansas. Yadira Caraveo, who is a pediatrician in that new seat in Colorado. That is a straight-down-the-line seat, and we need to make sure that Yadira comes back. She is a young Latina doctor. I think we need more people who bring real-life expertise and some issues like that into Congress. So making sure that we’ve reelected the women who are there. We also want to make sure that we are flipping Republican seats.
Obviously, we need to flip a few. And so looking at places like in Arizona, Kirsten Engel nearly beat Juan Ciscomani last cycle. We know she can do it this time, and we’re with her again. Arizona has got a couple targets, and we know that’s a great targeted seat. So we are there and really excited about that. I should have mentioned, by the way, in the Senate, because of West Virginia, and we need to put some other stuff on the map. I already mentioned, I think, Florida has a ballot initiative that they’re working on for reproductive rights. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. Florida is tough.
We know it. It breaks our heart. A lot of cycles, but Debbie is absolutely the right candidate to beat Rick Scott, who has never won a race by more than 51%. So we can do it there, and we’re excited to be with Debbie again. We also just announced this week an independent expenditure that we’re running through our Women Vote program, for Joanna Weiss. Joanna is running in Katie Porter’s open seat, which is in Orange County. Joanna is a phenomenal … She’s a nonprofit leader. She is a law professor. She is someone who will take that reproductive-rights fight to Congress and make sure that seat has got to stay blue.
The Republican in that area will not. He will vote for a federal abortion ban. He will be on the wrong side of things. So that’s a few of them. I mean, I could go on and on and on. And if you go on our website, you can see who we’ve endorsed, and we continue to endorse as we get closer and closer to the election. There are a number of great women running, and we are really, really excited about what’s going to happen this cycle and what those women can bring to Congress and can bring to state legislatures.
I’ve not really talked about state legislatures, but please pay attention to them. I know you all do talk about them. We have got to flip some state legislatures. We’ve got to protect. We did flip Minnesota and Michigan, and we’ve got to make sure those stay in the right hands. And so keeping an eye on those wherever you are is also critical.
Nir: We’ve been talking with Christina Reynolds, one of the top leaders at Emily’s List. Christina, before we let you go, where can folks find out more about your organization? Where can they find you on social media, and where can they find you personally?
Reynolds: Sure. Emily’s List. It’s just emilyslist.org, is our website. You can find information about our candidates and our organization there. You can also donate directly to our candidates. We still bundle for them. We just do it online now. There are no longer mailings of checks, but you could do that right on our website. It’s very handy, and you can get more information about the women that we’ve endorsed. We are also on, I think, all the social media platforms. It’s usually @emilys_list, and you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, Threads, Instagram. I am on all of those as @creynoldsnc, and so that’s where you can find me talking about a little bit of basketball, a little bit of my dogs, and a lot of electing women.
Nir: I love it. Well, Christina, thank you so much for coming on “The Downballot.”
Reynolds: Thanks for having me.
Beard: That’s all from us this week. Thanks to Christina Reynolds for joining us. “The Downballot” comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing [email protected]. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcast and leave us a five-star rating and review. A special thanks to our longtime editor, Trever Jones, who’s pursuing a new opportunity and will be leaving us, and a special welcome to Drew Roderick, our new editor. We’ll be back next week with a new episode.
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