Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 inspired a surge in political activism among Democratic women. Six years later, that energy remains mostly intact — and has spread to the Republican Party as well.
Beginning with the Women’s March in 2017, held on Trump’s first full day as president, the anti-Trump “resistance” movement spoke with a distinctly female voice. Scholars and journalists who examined grassroots liberal politics during the Trump years observed a proliferation of women-led citizen networks dedicated to defeating the president and his Republican allies.
One way they did this was by deciding to become candidates themselves. The share of Democratic nominees for the U.S. House of Representatives who were women jumped from 29% in the 2016 election — a record at the time — to 42% in 2018, rising again to 48% in 2020. And as more women ran for office, more women won. The number of Democratic women increased from 62 to 89 in the House, from 14 to 16 in the Senate, and from 3 to 6 in state governorships over the four years of the Trump presidency, according to data compiled by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
