Political Director of Emerge America A’shanti Gholar spoke to LIVE’s Molly O’Brien about the growing number of women who are running for office nationwide.
“The fact is, this is not a wave, this is absolutely without a doubt a movement,” Gholar says, “women know that our voices need to be at the table.”
Since the 2016 election, Gholar says they’ve seen an uptick in the number of women reaching out to Emerge for assistance or information on running for office. Emerge America is a training program for Democratic women who want to run for public office, and Gholar says in some locations, their class size has doubled.
Research done by Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University shows more women are running for office on both sides of the aisle. As of December 2017, there were just over double the number of women running for Congress (427 women) as of the same time in 2015 (219 women).
Gholar says over the next year what we’re going to see is “women stepping up, stepping out, and basically saying we need to have our voices heard to make sure we get our country back on the right track.”
Prior to Emerge, Gholar served as the National Deputy Director of Community Engagement and Director of African American Engagement for the Democratic National Committee.
She also served as a political appointee in the Obama Administration at the U.S. Department of Labor and as the Director of Public Engagement for the 2012 Democratic National Convention Committee.
Related Slideshow: GoLocal: Benchmark Poll, October 2017
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