Run to Win: Lessons in Leadership for Women Changing the World - Hardcover

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Raised in the copper-mining town of Butte, Montana, Stephanie Schriock has been working to get Democrats elected for twenty-five years. Since Schriock became president of EMILY's List in 2010, she has overseen a decade of phenomenal growth in the organization, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, helping elect record numbers of women to the House and Senate, and recruiting and training hundreds more. EMILY's List is now nearly five million members strong.

Christina Reynolds grew up in and around Marine bases across the country but considers herself a Tar Heel. For two decades she has worked for Democratic officials, from five presidential campaigns to Democratic campaign committees to the Obama White House. She currently serves as the vice president of communications for EMILY’s List.

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Chapter 1

Getting Started

What You Need to Know Before You Start and What You Can Learn on the Way

If a journey of one thousand miles starts with a single step, the journey to elected office starts with a single decision. That first step is deciding you are going to run for office. So, let's talk about how to make that decision.

How many of you have looked at a job description and thought, I am not qualified because I don't have one hundred percent of the qualifications listed? Come on, be honest. I am the president of the nation's largest resource for women in politics and even I did it with this job before I threw my hat in the ring. I saw what EMILY's List was looking for and I didn't have all the qualifications. I had been the staffer behind the powerful leader. I had been the finance director, the campaign manager, and the chief of staff, but I had never been the one out front. EMILY's List was looking for a strategist (check) who could raise money (check) and be the head spokesperson with the press and public (UGH-PRESS???). I was so afraid to talk to the press I almost didn't apply for the job.

But that would have been the wrong decision. Because whether you already have all of the qualifications is the wrong question. The right question is whether you are ready and willing to learn on the job. To make the decision to run and take that jump, the first step is to convince yourself that you can do it. You have so much to bring to the table, and you can learn the rest. More on that later. PS: I talk to the press quite a bit now and I am pretty good at it most of the time.

At EMILY's List, we spend a lot of time convincing women to run for office. Recruiting is one of my favorite parts of the job and something we do a lot of. My team and I have talked to thousands of women around the country in the last ten years. We've heard every concern and excuse a potential candidate might have for not running. Some of those concerns are very valid, and we will talk about those in the next chapter. But most excuses are just that-excuses, masking a lack of confidence.

I assumed for a long time that there was a magic gene that candidates had, one that gave them the underlying confidence to run for office. I figured most elected officials had been dreaming of running since they were kids. I thought that some people were just made to do it. There are, after all, people who are naturally gifted at public speaking, great debaters, policy wonks, people who are effortlessly charismatic, charming, and well connected. I assumed these people with the innate gifts became the candidates, because they knew how to do it, because they were somehow meant to run.

I suspect we've all been around people like this. They are typically men, and they carry themselves in a way that makes it easy to assume there is a secret playbook the rest of us don't have access to. You know who I'm talking about. The person in the meeting whose confident answer makes you believe yours must be wrong, despite the research you've done and the facts backing you up. The coworker who offers opinion as fact. The person who has been on the job far less time than you but gives off the vibe of having mastered the work years ago. Clearly, they know something we don't, right?

Wrong.

What I've learned in years of doing campaigns, and what I've tried to share with the women who doubt their abilities, is that there is no secret playbook or magic gene. There's no mystery to it. There's just a hunger to learn what you need to know and a willingness to do the hard work of building confidence in yourself. It can still feel impossible. And there's a good reason why.

For one, the Old Boys' Club is a very real thing. The smoke-filled back rooms are still around, albeit with less smoke and perhaps just a little more diversity than in days of old. In politics and campaigns, as in nearly everything, there's an "establishment" that the rest of us are up against. Those are the people who decide who gets the promotions, the best jobs and projects, the opportunities to chase bigger and better things. The establishment is exactly what we are challenging, thanks to decades of knocking down the door of that smoke-filled room and helping women carry in their own chairs when they are told there's no room at the table.

Today, I work with party leaders to recruit women and help more of them achieve victory every day. I'm proud to say it's a very different place from where we started.

EMILY's List was created thirty-five years ago to tear down the Democratic establishment's Old Boys' Club. As of 1984, no Democratic woman had ever been elected to the Senate in her own right. My friend and Minnesota Senator Tina Smith's favorite fun fact: In the history of the United States, there have been almost as many men named Charles elected to the Senate as there have been women.

EMILY's List founder, Ellen Malcolm, had watched as Harriett Woods ran a great race for a United States Senate seat in Missouri in 1982 despite being dismissed by the Democratic establishment as not being a viable candidate. They told her she would never be able to raise enough money to run a successful campaign. Of course, the fact that the party wouldn't support her further undercut her ability to raise money and meant she had to pull her ads off the air at a key moment. In the end, even with the deck stacked firmly against her, Woods lost by less than two points.

With that loss, Ellen had had enough. She pulled together a group of her women friends who were working across the political field and were equally frustrated by the lack of electoral success by women. Ellen knew that the core of the problem was that the party didn't believe women candidates could win elections. In Washington, the one thing above all that catches people's notice is money-so Ellen knew what women needed to be taken seriously: a funding source.

Of course, this was unheard of at the time. Women donors were few and far between. It was a time when the wealth held by women was significantly less than it is today-and the wealth gap between men and women is still significant. Women in office were also, sadly, few and far between, with only twenty-four women in Congress total, in both houses and from both parties. But Ellen and her friends were determined to change things for women running for office.

They didn't have all the answers or all the power, so they used what they did have access to-time, contacts, and a willingness to help-and they went to work. Armed with their Rolodexes, they sat together in Ellen's basement and worked their own networks. They each wrote their friends, families, and like-minded contacts, asking them to give $100 to this movement to elect more women and $100 each to the first two candidates: Barbara Mikulski, for her 1986 Senate run in Maryland, and Harriett Woods, running for a second time in Missouri. Those friends of Ellen's friends sent checks that were then bundled together for both campaigns, boosting their finances and their chances. Though Woods lost, this effort ultimately helped Barbara Mikulski in Maryland become the first Democratic woman elected to the Senate in her own right. She became the longest-serving woman in the Senate.

Ellen decided to name that effort EMILY's List because she knew that Early Money Is Like Yeast: It makes the dough rise. Yes, we are named after a baking joke. Our first logos were based on the Fleischmann yeast packet.

In the thirty-five years since that first success, we've helped elect hundreds of women and hopefully begun to neutralize the boys' club a bit. More and...