For years, Democrats have provided training and resources to women looking to run for office through organizations like EMILYs List. Republicans have not, and the current demographics of Congress show the results. Thats one of the reasons sisters Kodiak and Ariel Hill-Davis helped to found Republican Women for Progress, which provides policy-minded Republican women with the tools they need to win.
They discuss many of the unique roadblocks Republican women face on the campaign trail, but also touch on the many accomplishments moderate women have made in Congress. While the media likes to highlight individuals with the most outrageous rhetoric (men and women alike), many women are doing the hard, unglamorous work of governing behind the scenes.
Ariel Hill-Davis: I think there is more benefit to people like us being in the Republican Party than leaving it at this point. That does not make it easy. And it also does not mean that the road to re-creating space for people like us in the Republican Party is going to be a short-term prospect either.
Geoff Kabaservice: Im Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center.
Kodiak Hill-Davis: And Im Kodiak Hill-Davis with the Niskanen Center.
Geoff Kabaservice: Welcome to the Vital Center podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the mighty muddled, moderate majority of Americans drawing upon history, biography and current events. And today, Kodiak and I are pleased to be joined by Ariel Hill-Davis, the co-founder and policy director of Republican Women for Progress. And if it seems to you that Ariels last name bears a suspiciously close resemblance to Kodiaks, that is because they are in fact sisters. And in addition to both being movers and shakers at Republican Women for Progress where, full disclosure, I am a proud member of the advisory council the Hill-Davis sisters are both active in government affairs. Kodiak is the vice president of government affairs at the Niskanen Center. And Ariel is the vice president of government and regulatory affairs for the Industrial Minerals Association of North America. And if I recall correctly, Ariel, youve worked for over a decade in public policy with a focus on heavy industry like manufacturing and mining.
Ariel Hill-Davis: That is absolutely correct. And I would say that this will be interesting because Kodiak and I do sound very similar, to the point that our mother actually gets confused when we call. So we like to play tricks on her. So itll be interesting to have us both on a podcast together.
Geoff Kabaservice: We will have our sound engineer lower the decibel have on one or the other of the two of you, so you sound like youre coming from the bottom of a well or something like that.
Ariel Hill-Davis: That sounds perfect to me.
Geoff Kabaservice: Okay. How have you been faring during this pandemic, Ariel?
Ariel Hill-Davis: Ive been faring all right. I think that, unlike a lot of people around the country, I am fortunate enough to have most of my family based in D.C. So I have not been nearly as isolated as a lot of other people have. And I thank my family for keeping my sanity. Although, to be a little funny here, I did buy our mother a 5,000-piece puzzle as a joke. And I have now been roped into trying to complete said 5,000-piece puzzle, and that is having an undue effect on my sanity right now.
Geoff Kabaservice: Is there even a table in your house big enough to hold such a puzzle?
Ariel Hill-Davis: A dining room table, but we did have to add the leaves. So its been extended to its full It seats twelve, I think, so its quite big.
Geoff Kabaservice: And theres a Hill-Davis brother out there somewhere too, right?
Ariel Hill-Davis: Yeah. Hes located in Nashville. We lost him a couple years ago to the South, so thats our outpost in a much artsier city than we currently live in.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes indeed. Were happy to to have you with us, Ariel. And given that both of the Hill-Davis sisters were instrumental in creating Republican Women for Progress, Id like to turn the interviewing spotlight for a moment on my cohost, Kodiak. Kodiak, you and I talked to Linda Chavez a few weeks ago and asked her all about her background and political career. So let me now ask you some of the same questions. Where did you grow up and what was your path to politics?
Kodiak Hill-Davis: Sure. Well, its remarkably similar to my sisters, which is kind of convenient for our purposes today. But Ariel and I both grew up in a moderate Republican family where it was very common to discuss public policy and political happenings around the dinner table. This will date me a little bit, but I remember my first election in kindergarten where I got to choose between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis on my little worksheet and circled George H. W. Bush. So I think it had kind of always been a part of our growing up in our kind of family life. And then Ariel and I were lucky enough to go to the Madeira School, which is an all-girls high school in McLean, Virginia, where in your junior year, you have internships on Capitol Hill. So when I was sixteen years old, I had my first internship on Capitol Hill and was completely sold.
I moved back to Washington shortly after graduation from Smith College and hit the ground running, working for a moderate Republican from Connecticut, Nancy Johnson. And kind of the rest is history until 2015, and that infamous escalator ride, where I started to really question the trajectory of the Republican Party as I knew it and really started to wonder if the kind of classic, moderate conservative still existed the more fiscally responsible, big proponent of individual liberties, but socially quite liberal if that brand of the Republican Party was still viable, if it was still going to exist. And that kind of brought us to where we are today.
Geoff Kabaservice: And Kodiak, remind me where you went to college?
Kodiak Hill-Davis: I went to Smith. I found that the all-female environment was particularly conducive to my studies.
Geoff Kabaservice: And Smith College has lately provided a lot of fodder for Tucker Carlson and other conservative commentators. Smith was even then a progressive place, right?
Kodiak Hill-Davis: Very progressive. In fact, I actually think it was a formative experience for me in a variety of ways to be an openly Republican at a very, very liberal environment, a very liberal school. Of course, I was a poli-sci major, so I had these fights with not only my classmates but also with my professors pretty regularly. And I think it was really formative for me to find myself in the minority and really having to articulate my positions thoughtfully and firmly in the face of significant social pressure to change my line of thinking. I think I came out of Smith more conservative than when I went in, and I think it was overall a very positive experience. When I was there, we were already debating having non-gender-binary bathroom facilities. And that was, I dont want to date me, but like 15, 20 years ago so pretty progressive for a blonde Republican from Washington D.C.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes indeed. So Ariel, nows your chance to tell about all the details that Kodiak got wrong about your growing up! No, kidding
Ariel Hill-Davis: Yeah,. You know I do like to let her speak for me, which as my older sister shes more than happy to do on most occasions! Im kidding, Im kidding. So yeah, no, I mean, we grew up talking politics, grew up talking shop, I think around the table. It was just a really comfortable space for both of us, I think. And where our paths diverged We had the same experience were only two years apart so went to the same boarding school outside of DC, had the same experience being on Capitol Hill, different offices. I actually was telling somebody that my internship experience during my high school year, in my junior year, was during the anthrax scare. So opening a lot of mail as an intern was not exactly something that seemed great to me at the time
Geoff Kabaservice: The interns are expendable in DC.
Ariel Hill-Davis: Yeah. Yeah, apparently. So I had that experience and then I ended up going abroad for my collegiate experience. So I was at the University of St. Andrews and really thought that I was going to be an expat, to be honest. And then
Geoff Kabaservice: I detect no Scottish accent though.
Ariel Hill-Davis: No. Although if I spend time over with my friends in the UK, the cadence of my language changes. Its not so much that I get the accent but theres a lilt that comes into play pretty significantly. So yeah, I graduated, I came back to DC kind of looking basically for a short stop here in DC, and ended up on Capitol Hill working for another moderate Republican, Mike Castle from Delaware. I just adored him, thought the world of him, and was part of his staff when he got primaried by the infamous Christine ODonnell, started the Tea Party with I am not a witch.
It was incredibly formative for me, I think, to watch someone who just was a tremendous asset to the Republican Party in terms of his policies, how well he represented the people of Delaware, to see the legs cut out from under him, as he was looking to leave the House into the Senate, by somebody who was just not qualified at all to be running against him. It feels very much at this point, we got a bellwether. So after that, I shifted into the private sector, found my way into the trade association world, and Ive been there ever since. And its provided me a really interesting experience of, as Kodiak said, feeling very more kind of socially liberal. But I have a deep passion for the kind of people who do and make our modern world, who oftentimes fall into more conservative buckets.
Representing the mining industry for the last seven years has been educational in so many ways, but is this weird balancing point of feeling very much drawn to some of the deregulation and kind of Republican platform in that sense while also being very I mean, to not put too fine a point on it kind of repulsed by the social aspects of the Republican Party for quite some time. And so that kind of tension in myself is something that I still kind of struggle with I would say daily to be honest.
Geoff Kabaservice: And Kodiak, how would you describe yourself as a moderate Republican? What are the factors that make you define yourself in that way?
Kodiak Hill-Davis: Im not a Democrat.
Geoff Kabaservice: Thats a start.
Kodiak Hill-Davis: It sounds glib, but I think one of the ways that I like to conceptualize the labels Republican and Democrat is that we see the same problems, we just come at the solutions from different perspectives. And I think when I conceptualize what a Republican is for me, it is Our first impulse is not to build a government solution, our first impulse is not to spend more money on the problem. Our first impulse is a little bit more scaled back, a little bit more local, a little bit more, I think traditionally, individually reliant, more focus on individual accountability and not again, kind of thinking that theres another government program that we can start that will be the solution.
But I think in some ways, the way that I conceptualize myself as a Republican doesnt really line up with where the Republican Party is right now. I think its made it a little challenging. Because in some ways, culturally, I still very much identify with the party in the sense that, Well, Im a Republican and these are my people and this is my team. And were going to go forth with our solutions and promote these ideas. But then I look at the ideas that they want to promote, and they dont really line up with any of the values that I find myself being drawn to as a Republican.
So I think in this time of real identity crisis that the Republican Party is having, a lot of my fellow Republicans have left the party. And I understand why. I understand that they no longer recognize the party and they no longer recognize their values being reflected in the actions of the party. And I think, not trying to speak for my younger sister, but I think part of the reason that we stay is that on the one hand, it feels a little bit like this is our mess to clean up. So we need to clean it up.
But on the other hand, it feels very important that we not abandon the party structure when we are in a system of government that has a two-party system. If the moderates and the kind of thoughtful, sensible leaders no longer find a home in the Republican Party, youve really just ceded the field to the more outlandish and extremist elements of the party, the elements of the party that arent concerned with governing. I dont think that they actually support democracy at all, which is deeply concerning. And I think for the good of the democracy, for the good of the Republic, I think staying and challenging the current trajectory of the Republican Party is really important work. It is not fun, but its really important.
Ariel Hill-Davis: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that the other piece of this feels like I am so happy that government is starting to be boring again, but I really think that more than anything, I want people who are willing to come to the table on both sides who are willing to discuss hard issues. There are so many complex issues facing our country. I happen to think that a more fiscally conservative view, kind of free market individualistic approach, has a place at that table. And I dont see as much talk in that space on the Democratic side. Now, I dont think that Im seeing a lot of it on the Republican side either right now, but this is kind of my chosen space.
Kodiak Hill-Davis: Ariel makes a good point about choosing your battles. And one thing that we have to think about very strategically is not opening up multi-front wars because they tend to go very poorly.
Ariel Hill-Davis: Yeah. Historically, that doesnt work out well.
Kodiak Hill-Davis: No.
Geoff Kabaservice: I know that from playing Risk.
Kodiak Hill-Davis: I thought you were going to say Napoleon!
Geoff Kabaservice: Ariel, you work in what Trump likes to call the swamp, and Kodiak, you have too. What is it that people outside the Beltway dont understand about the work of people who work on the Hill lobbyists, people in the association world? And what is it that you wish they did understand?
Ariel Hill-Davis: Oh my gosh, Geoff, this is one of my all-time favorite topics of conversation. I have been saying for years, I dont understand how the rest of the country has such an ugly and negative view of an entire city and ecosystem and group of professionals. I have really struggled for a long time with the fact that when you travel anywhere in this country, if you say youre from DC, the immediate assumption is and its verbalized to you youre corrupt. Youre on the take, youre dirty, all of this. I cant think of another city in this country that entirely is maligned in one way. People say, like, Uh, New York City, big city But really because were a company town here, so to speak, everybody just assumes that if you think the government is corrupt, then if you live in DC and you work in DC, that youre corrupt.
I have a really big problem with that because I think that it demonstrates a fundamental lack of civic understanding for how our government works. So I, frankly, think that our whole country needs to be reeducated just in terms of what civics is. Basic 101: these are the three branches of government. This is what they do. This is how elections work. Because I just think that without that understanding, you build in so many misconceptions of not just what lobbyists or advocates do, right? You also misunderstand your own role and your own power in that. And I actually think that one of the most interesting things to come out of the 2016 cycle and then the 2020 cycle is just how important individual votes are. Like the margins on the last two elections for the Electoral College, right? Were not talking the popular vote, but for the Electoral College votes, your vote counts.
And Im really hoping that people start to get that understanding again, that its important to vote. And my biggest thing that I always tell people is vote in the primaries because thats where your real power is. So thats this other misunderstanding. But I think people misunderstand why people come to DC. Most people come here because they want to make a difference, because theres something theyre passionate about. And we all come here and we all understand that we have to work together. So you find your common ground in DC in a much different way than I think you do in other parts of this country. Its a much more collaborative space when its working. Now, I would say that the last four years have really undercut, I think, the spirit of collaboration and congeniality in this city, which I think was a negative. But yeah, I just think that people are really prone to think negatively of the swamp without understanding it. And I really wish the 24-hour news cycle would ease up on kind of painting us all in this really, really I think misguided way that actually just hurts the electorate.
Geoff Kabaservice: Ariel, let me go back to an episode that you had mentioned earlier, which is that you were working with Mike Castle when he got primaried out of what would have been a pretty easy win for Republicans in the Senate election of 2010.
Ariel Hill-Davis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Geoff Kabaservice: And what was it that allowed the Tea Party movement and Christine ODonnell to defeat the guy who had been governor, representative, had been in politics for a long time, seemingly knew and was known by and even beloved by so much of the state of Delaware where he had been for so long a respected public servant? How did that happen?
Ariel Hill-Davis: I think a couple of things. I dont think we really understood how polarizing primaries were going to get. I think that the Tea Party, to me, really feels like the jump-off for the really, really fringe portion of the parties turning out for the primaries. And I think what is really we said it at the time and I think weve clearly seen this play out in so many different districts and so many different states since 2010. But Mike Castle losing his primary to Christine ODonnell turned over that Senate seat to a Democrat, and its not coming back to a Republican any time soon. Because she couldnt win in the general. She was too I hate to talk about her as too extreme, knowing where we are now, but at the time she was too extreme. She was unqualified.
And so I think a lot of it was voters taking for granted that he was going to win the primary, so maybe not turning out. I also think that our campaign staff assumed that she was a joke. I mean, she was being made fun of on a national stage pretty regularly. When youre running campaign ads that are saying, Im not a witch, how seriously can you take that? And so I think it really was taking our eye off the ball a little bit and also misunderstanding how things were shifting in primaries. And then obviously because he was really beloved on the Democratic side as well they couldnt vote for him in the primary. So he was missing a whole kind of huge chunk of the population that usually would support him that then turned around and supported, goodness, it was Coons. Yeah. Gosh. Its been so long I cant even believe that Coons has been in the Senate for that long.
Kodiak Hill-Davis: And Coons is a great senator.
Ariel Hill-Davis: Oh yeah, absolutely. What I think is interesting about that episode is that it feels really reflective of where we are now, but in this way that we should have been able to model better to avoid certain outcomes today.
Geoff Kabaservice: Do you think that ODonnell and her supporters actually thought that she could win in a general election or was it simply that they wanted the emotional satisfaction of giving an upraised middle finger to the system?
Ariel Hill-Davis: I think the latter. Im not sure that they actually thought she could win. I mean, Mike Castle was really the old Republican standby. Most of the rest of Delaware was represented by Democrats at that point still is. So I think it was more about kind of giving it to the establishment more so than putting up somebody whod be viable in the general.
Geoff Kabaservice: So, Kodiak, lets skip ahead to 2015. Donald Trump comes down the golden escalator and announces that he will be a candidate for the Republican nomination for the president. Where were you at the time and what were you thinking?
Kodiak Hill-Davis: Sure. I was studying for the Virginia bar exam and I still remember watching that news clip and just being really concerned by it right away. Because I think, and I think this is actually something that Ariel and I had in common and that our co-founders of Republican Women for Progress also had in common, way back when, was that we saw him as a threat immediately. That he was going to be a disruptive force, it was going to be a crowded primary, and he was going to, because of his Ill give him credit here, Donald Trump has a very particular media savvy that a lot of establishment and career politicians did not have. So not only did he have pretty profound name recognition, but he also understood how to control and manipulate social media, and media kind of writ large, in a way that other politicians really didnt have a knack for.
So we knew that he was going to be disruptive right away. And a lot of the rhetoric that hed promoted during the Obama administration was, in my opinion, really racist and xenophobic, and was not taking the Republican Party in a direction that I thought was appropriate. And so in the spring of 2016, as he continued to kind of consolidate momentum and very effectively tarred his opponents with very pithy nicknames, a few of us got together and kind of found each other in the woods the kind of lone Republican voices saying, You know, Im really uncomfortable with this. This doesnt seem like were going in the right direction. And Jennifer Lim and Meghan Milloy founded Republican Women for Hillary. We found them, and in doing so, found really a group of women who were very like-minded in their concern about what Donald Trump meant for the future of the Republican Party.
Now, at that point, I dont think any of us were convinced he was going to win the 2016 election. But what he was doing as far as re-platforming the Republican Party was deeply concerning to us. And I think we all took him and his candidacy as a very credible threat. And truly I dont think any of us thought it was going to be a slam dunk that Hillary would win. We just didnt think that he would win. We thought it was going to be pretty tight, but that she would pull it out. She would prevail. And of course, on the heels of that election, we had to regroup and really think about what we wanted to do with this momentum wed built around Republican Women for Hillary.
And we decided that the only way we could save the Republican Party was to elect more sensible, moderate Republican women, which no one seemed to be particularly interested in doing. So we reformed as Republican Women for Progress in the spring of 2017 and started doing the work of sourcing moderate Republican candidates, helping not only find and connect them, but help getting them media coverage, help getting them funders, help getting them training that they needed to be more sophisticated candidates. And then also helping them to push back when they were getting any sort of friction from their local GOP chapters or their state chapters, and really kind of forcing our way to the table, which I think was a space that hadnt previously really been fully occupied. And so we really focused on: If we think this is the problem and we think the solution is more moderate Republican women in office to help prevent some of these outcomes, then weve got to do the legwork to make that happen. Were going to build that pipeline ourselves, because it doesnt currently exist.
Geoff Kabaservice: Although, to be sure, not all of the women who were part of and are a part of Republican Women for Progress were moderate Republicans. Some are considerably more conservative on some issues than others. Is that fair to say?
Ariel Hill-Davis: Yes, I think So part of our We clearly, I think, are well more in the moderate kind of centrist space personally, but I think that one of the things that we think is incredibly toxic in the GOP and I think youre seeing it mirrored in the Democratic Party, or youre starting to is this idea of party purity tests. And I dont have to agree with you on every topic, every public policy topic. If you are a Republican and you see yourself as a Republican, there should be space for you, in my opinion, if you want to do the work of public policy in the party. So we do have our policy principles and we use those to evaluate different candidates that we want to actively support, and those are way more kind of in the centrist space. But within those founding principles is this idea of a restoration of the big-tent party.
And I think that also when were talking about some of the issues that are more polarizing And I usually take any opportunity I can to say I am very Republican, and I am also very, very pro-choice. And that does peoples heads in. But I dont have a problem holding those two things for myself and the values that those two things come from. I understand, though, that the issue of reproductive healthcare is incredibly polarizing and its very hard for Republican candidates to make it through a primary being pro-choice. So Im not going to put that in as a test for what candidates we want to work with, nor would I, because I think that its important for other people to hold their values. And really what youre voting for, for a person, is youre voting on their judgment and that you can trust their value system is consistent less so, in my opinion, than voting because theyre going to support your values 100% of the time.
Kodiak Hill-Davis: I think thats right, and I think one of the things thats so important about this time is that we really have gotten away from being a big-tent party. We are increasingly skewed, I think, in the kind of what our base looks like and the kind of value propositions were providing. And I think we saw some gains in 2020, I think, because the NRCC and the NRSC started to cast a broader net and to kind of back off a little bit of some of those more stringent kinds of configurations. Thats how you get a candidate like Maria Elvira Salazar in Florida 27, who just got in a shouting match with Stephen Miller over immigration policy, because shes promoting immigration policy that is thoughtful and it is a way forward. It is not regressive and it is very, very different than the kind of policy outlined by the Trump administration and by Stephen Miller while he was in that administration.
So I think there is this tension, but in 2020, we picked up those seats because we were able to kind of broaden our horizons and move back towards that big tent. Unfortunately, some of the people now included in that big tent are deeply problematic and not at all reflective, I think, of the Republican Party as I would like to see it.
Geoff Kabaservice: If you go far enough back, like five decades or more, the gender gap as it existed was in favor of the Republican Party. At a time when the party was perceived as the party of stability and responsibility, women voted disproportionately Republican. But the gender gap in favor of the Democrats has been growing ever since and really widened significantly under Donald Trump. And Trump certainly seems to have accelerated the center of gravity of the party as being a sort of aggressively masculine party, and Trump himself seems to be particularly provoked by independent, forthright women, be it Megyn Kelly, or a whole bunch of others Im sure we could name. And what has that done for the situation of women in the Republican Party in your view?
Kodiak Hill-Davis: I have several thoughts about this. First, we didnt develop a pipeline and an infrastructure in the same way that the Democratic Party did with the formation of EMILYs List, where Democratic women realized that if they were going to achieve more parity, that they needed to build that infrastructure themselves. A lot of our thought process at Republican Women for Progress takes that principle and applies it to our own situation. They just got there 40 years before we did.
I think in terms of Donald Trump and kind of alienating women, especially more moderate women, thats very true. And I think one of the hardest parts about his presidency was the sense that if you were a Republican woman, you needed to answer for his behavior. And thats particularly challenging. It puts a lot of pressure not only on kind of general Republicans like we are, but Republicans who are in office to somehow explain the tension between his behavior towards women and his mantle as the leader of the party as president, and your own Republican kind of title as an elected official. So I think it created this deep tension where instead of being asked to explain his own bad behavior, Republican women were being asked to explain it. And that puts us in this particularly challenging position of not actually holding power and authority, but being forced to answer for the bad behavior or the misdeeds of those who actually control most of the power in the party, which its not women.
Geoff Kabaservice: If you go back to 1980, lets say, theres only about 3% women in the Congress, 97% men, but theyre more or less evenly distributed between the Republican and Democratic parties. But then what happens is that theres slow growth in the number of women in Congress on the Republican side, but a fairly explosive growth on the Democratic side. So in the last Congress, if Ive got my stats right, you had just 13 out of 200 House Republicans who were women, which is what, like 6.5%?
Kodiak Hill-Davis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ariel Hill-Davis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Geoff Kabaservice: But you had 89 of the 235 house Democrats who were women, which is closer to 40%. So really the Republicans were just left in the dust by Democrats when it came to recruiting women to run for Congress and get elected. And what were some of the factors for that lag as you saw it?
Ariel Hill-Davis: So I have kind of two different things that I want to tease out here as it relates specifically to 2018, but also in the trends that weve been seeing for quite some time in terms of Republicans just hemorrhaging support amongst women at different levels. So something that youll hear most Republicans say is, We dont play identity politics. I have a problem with this for several reasons. The first is when you look around and 90-plus percent of your elected leaders are one demographic, that is your de facto identity. Youre just not calling it that, but thats what your identity is. I think when you look at how that interacts with recruiting and supporting female candidates, or even really candidates who fall into any sort of minority group in the US, you cut the legs out from under campaigns from being able to lean into what makes them interesting and unique as candidates.
If you say, We dont play identity politics so we dont ever want to hear about your identity. We dont to hear about your identity as a black man. We dont want to hear about your identity as a woman. We dont want to hear about your identity as an immigrant although the immigrant angle is changing as they kind of, in 2020, sought to rebrand a little bit and make inroads with the Hispanic community and the Latino community. But I think that that really has been challenging for the Republican Party to overcome, because you just handicap good candidates from the jump. And it also has the other downside of isolating other members who could be part of your party from saying, You dont value me and my experience as a unique experience, so why on earth would I support your candidates who dont look like me, who dont reflect my experience?
I think that thats been a real negative and something that weve seen play a role in the homogenization of the Republican Party. As it relates to 2018, and the impacts of 2016 to 2018 to 2020, I think its undeniable that Donald Trumps election shocked a lot of women around the country on both the Republican and the Democratic side out of complacency and out of this idea that we were making better gains. I, for one, had assumed that we were much further along the road towards gender parity and gender equality than I think we actually are. And 2016 was kind of this wake-up call. I think what you then saw was a lot of women flooding into the Democratic side to run, because they wanted to unseat who they saw as bad actors. They wanted to add their voice to our government, which I think is wonderful.
And then on the Republican side, I think watching Democratic women gain so much in 2018 and watching, I think, a real failure on the Republican side in the first two years to hold Trump accountable for the things that he said, and his demeanor, and how he was treating people I think Republican women following the blue wave of 2018 said, Thats great that you guys are in office, but you dont actually reflect my values as a more conservative woman. And if you can do it, then I certainly should get off the sideline and get into the game. So I think its kind of a yin-yang in terms of Democrats seeing such significant gains and what that did on our side in terms of being an inspiration for Republican women to get involved.
Kodiak Hill-Davis: Which overall is a very positive thing, I think.
Ariel Hill-Davis: I would agree.
Geoff Kabaservice: Conservatives also are reluctant to admit to structural factors of discrimination when it comes to the way society operates. And yet even on the Democratic side, women are not at parity in terms of their representation in Congress. So what are the factors that confront women candidates generally that makes them less likely to run or to win a primary or to get elected on both the Democrat and the Republican sides?
Kodiak Hill-Davis: Sure. Thats a great question. Theres an anecdote that Im going to share because I think its really illuminating for how women think. If you ask a man to run for office, he asks, Can I win? And if you ask a woman to run for office, she says, How is this going to impact my family? And I think therein lies the rub, that women, on both sides of the aisle, feel a very strong pull to be good mothers, good spouses, good sisters, good community members. And they feel the weight of all of those connections and all of those expectations. And would I be letting those people who I value down if I wasnt successful in my campaign, if I wasnt home in time for dinner, if I couldnt be a caretaker for my elderly parents?
And when youre thinking about a decision to run and youre thinking about it on that kind of scale with that many variables, it gets a lot harder to convince yourself that its a good idea. Whereas if youre only thinking about, Ill run for this office if I can win. And you think I can win? Then great, Im running for this office thats a much cleaner line of decision-making. So I think thats a big part of it, the initial approach. And then theres a sense that women arent good fundraisers, theyre not good campaigners, or they just dont commit enough. And thats not the case. Women fundraise at the same pace as male candidates and theyre excellent and committed campaigners.
But the challenges that they face on the campaign trail are often very different. And theyre very different for Democratic women, theyre very different for Republican women. Theyre also different regionally. What it takes to run as a Republican woman in Alabama is fundamentally different than a Republican woman in Southern California. Theyre just very different expectations about what youre going to look like, what youre going to sound like, what your priorities are, what your community engagement had been prior to your run.
And I think the same is true for Democratic women. Its just different. Theres some different expectations.
Ariel Hill-Davis: Yeah. I also think that we would be foolish not to acknowledge that the societal expectations for things like how women present just requires a lot more output. You have to look a certain way. Im not talking in terms of exactly your physical build or anything, but you have to be pulled together. Your hair and makeup has to be done. You have to be in heels. All of these things are components that go into campaigning.
And Kodiak and I were just talking about the importance of having more female campaign staff at high levels for reasons like If you set up a candidate breakfast at 7:00 AM for a woman, she has to get up at 5:00. Thats how that works because she has to be pulled together in such a way that at 7:00, she is camera-ready. What shoes does she have? What events are you putting her in? And how long is she going to have to be in heels for and can she walk for long times in those heels? All of these are just these micro thoughts and calculations that you have to do as a woman that just dont have to happen in the same way for a man. There are different stresses Im sure on that side, but that is certainly a component of campaigning and being a woman on the campaign trail.
Kodiak Hill-Davis: Theres a great story from the 2012 presidential primary cycle where Michele Bachmann, who was the former representative from Minnesotas sixth congressional district, had kind of developed a reputation for being like a Sarah Palin-lite. And theyre in South Carolina and theyre ramping up. And in between campaign stops at these rallies, shes having to shower and re-have her hair and makeup professionally done because it is so humid that she is just sweating out of it. And so during those kind of intervals between these events, her male colleagues who are her opponents are maybe taking naps, theyre maybe brushing up on policy, they may be doing fundraising calls. And what is she doing? She is sitting in hair and makeup so that she can look presentable so that at the next stop, she looks like the constituents are going to want to see her look. Ever since I heard that example, it really stuck with me because its obvious to me as a woman thats how that would be. But when you look at the actual impact to a candidate, fundamentally different.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was involved briefly in some candidate recruitment back in 2015. And my experience could be partial and anecdotal, but I did notice that when we brought in some extremely well-qualified women to run for a congressional seat, they would give us all these reasons why they werent qualified. Whereas an objectively speaking mediocre man would come in, and we told him about the need you have to have a fundraising capability and an organization and experience and all these things that he simply did not have, and he was like Bill Murray inGroundhog Day: Me. Me. Also me! So I dont know how representative that was, but there really did seem to be a difference there.
Ariel Hill-Davis: Its pretty representative. I think that women are getting, and certainly I think younger women are getting more comfortable with kind of stepping into their experience and their power and their voice in a way that I think sometimes women of slightly older generations feel a little bit more constrained. So I think its starting to change. But certainly that is a question and an issue that we deal with when we work with candidates. A lot of it is just talking through the fact that you have valid experience and that you are perfectly capable of running for office, holding office, making decisions. Its obviously different when you deal with candidates who either come from a business background, as opposed to really coming from more kind of community organizing, almost like traditional motherhood, into stepping into a campaign. Those are different, but I do think that the experience of having to convince a woman that she is prepared, capable, and a good candidate thats half the battle, in my opinion.
Kodiak Hill-Davis: It is.
Geoff Kabaservice: And I think that Republican Women For Progress has done some work with the Yale Campaign School for Women as well. Am I right about that?
Kodiak Hill-Davis: Yeah. Weve had an ongoing relationship with them for a number of years now, which is fantastic. Patty, the executive director there, does great work. And we have actually implemented Were on year three of a one-day training that we do specifically geared towards Republican women who are thinking about either running or getting more involved in campaign work. And the one-day training that we do its typically here in Washington, although in these times its virtual really gives them a sense of the different considerations and pathways to entering that kind of campaigning sphere. And so it also has allowed us to develop kind of a mini-pipeline of Republican or more conservative-leaning women to then go to the five-day intensive training at the Campaign School at Yale and have the full kind of Patty and her wonderful roster of instructors really get them geared up to run for office.
And I think one of the things that Patty was very concerned about is the fact that they werent really tracking that many Republican women candidates to come through their training, and they werent quite sure why. And this goes back to something we were talking about earlier A lot of the assumption, when youre doing focused trainings or theres a structure thats built for women running for office, theres this underlying assumption that it must be for Democratic women, not Republican women. And thats a flawed assumption, but it means that Republican women were just assuming that it wasnt for them.
So I think being able to partner with us lent enough credibility back to the Campaign School at Yale that Republican women were looking at it and seeing, Yes, this is a pathway. This is a training that is also geared towards me. Im not excluded from this because Im not a Democrat. This is also a great opportunity for me. And so in our first year, we were able to increase Republican applications and attendance, I think by over 100%, which it was a very low number before, but we were able to bump it up. And weve consistently maintained that partnership to continue to be able to do so.
Geoff Kabaservice: And I think Im correct in believing that 2020 was in fact a record year for Republican women getting elected to Congress. So what went right?
Kodiak Hill-Davis: Well, we were here doing this
Geoff Kabaservice: Congratulations.
Kodiak Hill-Davis: No, its not just Republican Women for Progress. But I think what it was is a lot of organizations that operate in the space like we do had been pushing for more inclusion and more support of Republican women candidates. And I will credit Tom Emmer, whos the chair of the NRCC, with recognizing he and his leadership recognized that they needed to cast a bit of a broader net. And so they were willing to pull more Republican female candidates into their Young Guns Program thats what they call it, the Young Guns Program where they were then getting much more institutional party support.
And typically the NRCC does not weigh in on primaries, and doesnt weigh in especially if theres an incumbent involved. But because there were so many retirements, there were open seats, or seats that were very narrowly held by Democrats that seemed competitive, where they were able to really throw more support behind these female candidates early on because if we cant get these great women through the primary, that doesnt matter. You have to put up so many numbers to get these candidates through the primaries to actually have viable races in the general. So that if youre not supporting them in that primary stage I think Ariel mentioned this earlier youre really missing an opportunity to make a very, very large impact.
And I think that thanks to a lot of the work that organizations like Republican Women For Progress, like Julie Conway with Value In Electing Women PAC, like Elise Stefaniks Elevate PAC really pushing to support, not only financially, but in terms of helping getting these candidates media coverage, helping getting them trained, helping to really surround them by the support system to encourage them to, to see their candidacies through thats I think why we had different outcomes.
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Could Women Save the GOP by Running for Office? (With Kodiak and Ariel Hill-Davis) - Niskanen Center