This is second in a series of AEIdeas posts to celebrate Women’s History Month. The posts look at the progress women have made.
On November 7, Donald Trump named his campaign manager Susie Wiles his White House chief of staff. Wiles will be the first woman to hold that influential post, although she is not the first woman to run a modern campaign. That honor goes to Susan Estrich, who managed the campaign of Michael Dukakis in 1988. Dukakis lost to George HW Bush. Estrich can claim another first: She was the first women elected president of the Harvard Law Review.
Women have played major formal roles in many political campaigns. They ran the campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry. In 2016, Kellyanne Conway became the first woman to run a successful presidential campaign (for Donald Trump). Wiles did that as well. And Jen O’Malley Nixon was the first woman to do so on the other side of the aisle when she ran Joe Biden’s successful White House bid in 2020. She became his deputy chief of staff and Conway became a Counselor to the President.
In his campaign for president in 1988, Senator Gary Hart named Dottie Lynch his chief pollster, a first for a woman in the modern era. The political gender gap was relatively new at that point having appeared for the first time in the 1980 campaign, and Lynch devised a “women’s strategy” to exploit it for her candidate. Since that time, women have been the lead pollster for several presidential campaigns.
A huge posse of women are now key to campaign coverage and coverage of administrations. This wasn’t always the case. Timothy Crouse’s rollicking 1973 campaign chronicle The Boys on the Bus provides the evidence of a largely male campaign press entourage.
As for coverage of administrations, CNN reported in 2021 that “at least six major networks had assigned women to lead coverage” of the Biden administration. The president’s communications team was also staffed by women. On a larger canvas, by 2023, women were in charge of the news divisions of ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and Fox.
The National Press Club, the nation’s premier organization of journalists, excluded women until 1971. So women formed their own association, but the two eventually merged. The first female president of the Club was sworn in in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan.
Women have made enormous strides in campaigns, in political office, and in the coverage of politics. It’s time to take a victory lap.
The post Women Making History: Women in Campaigns and Campaign Coverage appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.
