Women Should Serve In Every Political Office. I'm Not Sure Her Bold Move Truly Does.

 

 

One of the oldest cliches in recent years is 'representation matters'.  I'd say that those who make that blanket statement are getting it wrong. Representation matters, yes, but only in a few critical areas. And the one where it matters the most  is elected office.

This isn't an abstraction to me because I live in New York  where women serve in the most important offices in the state and at a national level. Kathy Hochul is running for her second full term as Governor. Two years ago Kristin Gillibrand was reelected as Senator. And if the Democrats regain control of Congress this year – as looks increasingly likely – it will be because women such as Laura Gillen and Cait Conley were elected in swing districts.

All of these women have come under the same kind of brutal attacks from Republicans that are associated with members of the Squad (and yes a few more members of the Justice Democrats will likely be joining the Democratic caucus from New York this cycle). But it is my belief they represent the best of government because they understand who their masters are: their party, their country and their voters. 

In theory these are the masters that all elected officials are supposed to serve though it seldom works that way in practice. In recent years extremists of both parties have argued that there is a different agenda every elected official, regardless of party should serve, and they criticize those who don't meet those metrics. Having spent far too much time among both groups I feel safe in saying the far left has higher standard.

Both sides will actively hold those in office to an impossibly high standard. But those on the far right will always limit their attacks to Democrats whether they are in office or not and defend the Republicans. The progressive, by contrast, will attack both parties and will, if anything, be harsher on the Democrats then the Republicans. They will lambast them whenever they do something that they consider wrong and give them only faint praise if they do something they believe is right.

They believe the far left agenda is the only one that all elected officials should follow, even if they didn't run on it. And they have no use for an elected candidate serving any of those three masters. The only master they should serve is the progressive agenda, no matter how unpopular with the electorate it is.

For that reason I am wary of organizations who claim to be arguing for not only a left-wing agenda but who argue that it is the elected officials duty to serve only a specific group of identity politics. And that brings me to Her Bold Move.

I've been receiving missives from them for several years, as I have so many other Democratic candidates and left-wing missives but I didn't know much about them until recently. Her Bold Move was founded in 2021 as – and I'm quoting them – a PAC that supports women running for political office in the United States, with a specific focus on breaking male supermajorities and protecting reproductive rights in states with abortion bans.

As I said, I'm in favor of women hold political offices at any level, particularly a state one as well as protecting reproductive rights. Yet there are a couple of things in this that set off alarm bells.

The first is the timing. By 2021, as I've written before, the Justice Democrats had gone through two election cycles and had essentially failed as it mission statement. It had only managed to elect 6 representatives to Congress, no Senators and no governors and in most cases couldn't get past the primary. Furthermore many Democrats had tacitly endorsed parts of the Sanders/AOC agenda that year and the Democrats had suffered losses in Congress even as they took back the White House. The voters were endorsing a return to normality but not the left-wing agenda.

The second part is the tacit idea that female Democrat officeholders at a state level can serve the agenda of women better then Democratic candidates alone. There's a fallacy here because all elected officials, no matter their race, gender or sexual identification, have to win elections by getting the votes of everybody. A female candidate can't win elected office if she only gets the votes of women and that means she's going to having to appeal to issues that are not only limited to women.. Taken to the next level, if she wins elected office she is there to represent all the people in her district or state, not just the people who voted for her. Kathy Hochul is governor of New York and she represents all of them, not just the Democrats, and certainly not just all the women – some of whom almost certainly will vote for Bruce Blakeman in November.

These combinations, as with so many other progressive groups, seem to force Her Bold Move to run candidates with both hands tied behind their backs. Which is why it's not clear how successful they've been at their mission statement. That brings me to a different factor.

According to Google Her Bold Move reports that its endorsed candidates have won roughly 85-88 percent of their races." That sounds impressive until you read that 'it doesn't maintain a direct running list or a public directory'. And like many other groups it only highlights the candidates who win and ignores the ones who lose. Nor does it keep a static historical archive of past winners – or those who've lost.

You have to rely on other organization to check their record so I looked on Ballotpedia, one of the more verifiable sources for it. That site tells a different story then the one Her Bold Move trumpets.

They have endorsed high profile federal and statewide figures such as attorneys general and gubernatorial hopefuls, but the bulk of them target state legislative seats, county clerk positions and local school boards. Now I suspect that 85 to 88 percent success rate is built very much the same way our current President picks his endorsements for state and federal office: Her Bold Move will pick Democratic candidates (presumably all female), most of whom I assume are favored to win anyway and that counts them as part of their record.

Ballotpedia tells a different story. They list 84 candidates who meet Her Bold Moves standards Setting aside those who are currently running this cycle. At this point 11 of them  already lost their primaries. To this point I can only find 10 candidates who've managed to get somewhere since 2023. Two lost their primaries, three lost the general and two were nonpartisan.

Despite that I need to be clear I think more highly of Her Bold Move then the Justice Democrats for five reasons:

1. They're living up to their mission statement and running candidates in places that are absolutely much harder for progressives to win, such as Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky even after four years. The Justice Democrats stopped doing that at least three election cycles ago.

2. They're trying to win at state and local offices as opposed to the deep blue districts that the Justice Democrats have focused on and keep losing at.  Considering that I believe in a 50 state strategy and local offices at every level I approve of that.

3. They are running more candidates at every level in each new cycle as opposed to the Justice Democrats running far less than their initial cycles.

4. They are willing to embrace non-partisans and independents in a way organizations like the Justice Democrats aren't.

5. Their mission statement is far simpler than most progressive organizations and therefore more likely to have success.

For that reason despite their relatively limited success to this point I applaud on every level what Her Bold Move is trying to do.  The problem comes in their execution.

Because over the last two years I've been on their mailing list and its very clear to me that they would consider me and anyone who isn't a female, whether cis, lesbian or trans, as someone they do not want as an ally. And that's because despite the nobility of their mission statement the online missives they send out on a nearly daily basis are so blatantly leaned towards the most left-wing identity politics agenda it makes the missives I used to receive from Daily Kos and other progressive websites seem like exercises in diplomacy by comparison.

I think by far the best way to illustrate that is to relate some of the ones I got in regard to Graham Platner in July. Over three days they sent three different emails arguing – justifiably in this case – about how horrible a choice Platner was. To be clear I didn't receive any emails from them in regard to Janet Mills during that period  but let's let that go. Instead on July 9^th they showed the six candidates. Mills was there and they brought up the names discussed:

The women on this list are literal current STATEWIDE OFFICEHOLDERS on the same list as a former Congressional STAFFER and the co-founder of a beer company.

Women are held to a vastly different standard. Men often require less experience and far fewer credentials to be taken serious as political candidates. They are framed as 'fresh voices', 'outsiders', 'fighters' or 'the kind of candidate who can win."

To be clear this a truth that's being held to every single candidate who runs as an outsider including some progressives. I mention this because Her Bold Move was an early endorser of Annie Andrews who also has no political experience but is being framed as a fresh voice, an outsider and a fighter by organizations like Her Bold Move. In fact these are terms that are more or less used for every candidate who is running for office these days whether they are male or female, any race or sexual orientations.

And none of this, for the record, even endorses Mills or Shenna Bellows, the two women in the race. Her Bold Move is basically choosing the biggest mess up the left has made – and they're using it to advertise for themselves. They're not even backing a candidate in Maine this cycle.

The bigger issue I had – and one that inspired this post – was one I received this week. It said, "Can we trust progressive men with women's issues?" The post was more or less a slam on Ruben Gallego.

Gallego was elected to the Senate from Arizona two years ago, taking the seat of Krysten Sinema who for most of her term had been attacked by the left as to moderate. She'd eventually shifted from Democrat to Independent before choosing not to run for reelection. Gallego was one of the few major victories for the Democrats in 2024.

However like most elected officials Gallego started moving to the center when he was elected. As Google states, he has adopted a tougher approach to border security, start to emphasize cost of living and economic stress, and has positioned himself by saying Democrats must adjust their platform on public safety and border enforcement to win competitive swing states.

So just as the left always does when a progressive decides to govern for the center where the votes are Her Bold Move chose to attack Gallego as not being trustworthy. Their arguments were specious at best, saying that Gallego was a protector of Eric Swalwell in Congress and that Gallego was sexist because he'd introduced the State of Men's Health Act in Congress. Even worse he did so alongside Roger Marshall of Kansas who is not only man but – gasp – a Republican.

To put it very mildly Gallego only narrowly won election in Arizona over Kari Lake – a woman but because she's a Republican I suppose she doesn't count . He outperformed Kamala Harris in Arizona by nearly 93, 500, many of whom I can only assume were men. So it's clear who the voters of Arizona wanted as their Senator and who they wanted as their President. This was clearly done to slam Gallego.

More to the point Her Bold Move didn't even use this as an opportunity to push for two of their own candidates who are running for the Arizona House of Representatives: Mariana Sandoval and Deborah Howard. For that matter they didn't use it to grant support Katie Hobbs, whose running for reelection as Governor in Arizona. The post was done solely to argue that Gallego – and by extension all male candidates who ran under the label of progressive – could not be trusted when it came to women's issues.

These posts, I need to be clear, were among the mildest of the ones I've received from Her Bold Move over the past years. Almost all of them spend more time attacking elected men in office – sometimes Republicans, though as you can see that's not a given – then they do lifting up female candidates on the major issues they talk about.

At best, this is the kind of reductive thinking I see among the progressive all the time to the point that if taken to its natural extension argues that female candidates are only supposed to run for office to help women in their states or districts. By extension if Kamala Harris had won the Presidency in 2024 Her Bold Move would have wanted her to devote her administration solely to helping women and/or people of color and if she tried to do anything to help anyone else, it would have justified primarying her in 2028.

At worst, the position of Her Bold Move plays entirely into all of the arguments that right-wing media, conservatives, Republican office-holders and of course You-Know-Who have been making about the Democrats catering to the radical left who don't have the interests of 'real Americans' and heart. The Democratic Party is notorious for its problems with white working class voters: Harris' receiving barely 32 percent of them was an all-time low and its been our party's Achilles Heel in the 21^st century, if not longer.  Her Bold Move plays into the right's narrative so perfectly that were it not for the fact that it does endorse candidates and has had quite a few wins, one would almost think it was a false flag for the Republican party.

Last month I wrote an article where I directly asked a question I've wondered about since at least 2024: do left-wing candidates actually want to win elected office? As I put it

A huge part of the reason I take the far left in American politics far less seriously then everybody in the media and both parties do is because the last decade has done much to convince me that to them the one issue that is the only one that counts to both parties – can they win? – is at the bottom of priorities for the overwhelming majority of left-wing voters…The left has always believed far more in principles as a litmus test for candidates then electability. There's a joke in there about because they've never managed to have any real political power, the principles are all they have.

Her Bold Move is not the worst example of this contradiction but it's by far the most frustrating. On the one hand they have a very clear and simple goal that is worthy and should be accomplished. But on the other, their approach for achieving  it in their email blasts makes it clear that they care far more for that litmus test and arguing in the angriest way possible, even if it ends up pushing opponents into the enemy camp and making it all the harder to realize their own goals. With friends like them, the Democrats don't need enemies – and we've already got quite a few.

But I do support women holding elected office and even if Her Bold Move views me as suspect I'm still going to help women get there. I'm going to vote for Hochul for reelection as well as whatever women are running for state legislative office. And I'm already working to try and help Mary Peltola win the Senate in Alaska. I honestly don't know if Her Bold Move will go that far. Not only is Peltola a Blue dog Democrats she's got a history of reaching across the aisle. In fact one of her first jobs in politics was running Lisa Murkowski's write-in Senate campaign in 2010 which helped her after she was primaried by a Tea Party opponent.

Peltola, you see, actually does  support women holding elected office, whether they're progressive or not. Meanwhile Her Bold Move isn't running any candidates in Alaska this cycle. Maybe they should have asked Peltola who probably could tell her where to find them – and more importantly, how to get them elected.