Good morning from a very snowy New York!
Chris Jansing joined our regional director, Amanda Clarke, on a trip to Indiana, where she met with a number of our amazing women candidates in the Hoosier state, including Ali Brown and Tai Adkins.
After this piece aired, two good things happened: (1) 150% of the usual number of folks signed up to say they want to run for office and (2) this:
In the story, Chris discusses some amazing research we did in partnership with the Pipeline Initiative on why people run, what challenges they face, and what help they need — per usual, we’ve put it all online for you to peruse. This research is directly informing our programming in 2019–2020; I hope you’ll take a look through it.
In other good news: We had 17 candidates in elections last Tuesday and 8 either won outright or are moving on to a runoff/general election. Congrats to city council candidates Daniel La Spata, Michael Rodriguez, & Maria Hadden (the first queer black woman on the city council!!) for winning outright, to Nicole Jeanine Johnson, Marianne Lalonde, Matt Martin, & Michael Negron moving on to run-offs, and to Aaron Chess for moving on to the general election for the Peoria City Council.
It’s worth noting: Two of our winners beat out incumbents and Marianne is taking her incumbent into a runoff.
In alumni news: Nearly a quarter-million low income Virginians now have health insurance thanks to the work of RFS alum like Danica Roem, Jennifer Carroll Foy, Chris Hurst, Kelly Fowler, and Schuyler Van Valkenburg, all of whom we helped elect in 2017. In Pennsylvania, Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta is introducing massive bipartisan criminal justice reform. New York state Senator Andrew Gounardes helped pass a bill penalizing revenge porn here in the very cold Empire state.
We’re running full-steam ahead — nearly a third of our 2019 endorsed candidates have already gone through elections, and we’re going to be adding more to our team every month. Thanks for making all this possible!