America's record year for women governors, and the question Kenya must answer
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton speaks following her victory in the US midterm elections at a Democratic Election Night rally, in Columbus, Ohio, US, November 3.
What you need to know:
- Voters will elect women when given the chance. The real question is whether parties will let them run for the seats that matter.
Women won governor races in 17 US states this week, more than in any election before. The record is impressive, yet the women who set it are the more interesting part. One, a former mayor of a major city, beat a billionaire businessman. In several states, a woman will now lead for the first time. Another was already a senator, and another had served in the president’s cabinet before returning home to run for governor. Two of the women who won Senate seats had been deputy governors of their states.
What these women share, besides their gender, is a record. Most had already held demanding public office before their parties gave them a bigger contest. Their parties had watched them work and decided they could carry a state-wide race.
The two major parties nominated 26 women for governor, more than ever before, and 17 of them won. They were Democrats and Republicans alike. That suggests the change began inside the parties, when someone decided a woman could carry the flag.
The same results also show that progress in one place can sit beside a loss in another. The number of women expected in the next Congress is projected to fall from 152 to 139. A record at the top of the ticket does not guarantee gains everywhere beneath it.
Kenya has a version of this question to answer. In 2022, seven women were elected governor, the most the country has ever had, yet that is seven out of 47 counties. Where will the next ones come from? Many Kenyan women enter politics through the seats the law reserves for them, such as Woman Representative, and those seats have given a generation of women their first public mandate. They deserve credit for that. But a reserved seat exists because the law says women must be there. A governor’s seat exists because a party chose a candidate and voters agreed. The women who won in America moved from the first kind of position to the second. A fair question is whether a Kenyan woman representative who has served well for two terms can expect her party to back her for governor, or whether she will be asked to stay where she is, because the bigger ticket has already been promised to someone else.
Women who have sought party tickets describe being asked to step down in the name of unity, or to accept the deputy’s place on a man’s ticket. These requests are rarely made in public, and they are hard to refuse when the party controls the nomination.
Money adds to it. A governor’s race needs posters, vehicles, weeks of travel across a large county, and agents at every polling station. Donors usually give to the person they expect to win, so the party’s choice of candidate decides who gets funded. A woman without the ticket is asking for money before anyone believes she can win. A woman who has not yet been handed the ticket has to raise money without the promise that attracts it. A woman in the American South faced a billionaire and won, which is encouraging, but it was one race. Most women in Kenya will meet the same imbalance on a smaller scale, against rivals who can pay for rallies, vehicles and agents in every ward.
Young women will form their idea of politics from whom they see on the posters. Picture a girl growing up in a county where every name on the governor’s ballot belongs to a man. Nobody needs to tell her that governors are men. She will work it out for herself. If some of those names in 2027 belong to women, she will notice that too, and it may stay with her longer than anything said from a podium. Voters usually get the blame when women lose. Yet in 2022, seven women asked Kenyans for the top county job and were given it.
Yet in 2022, seven women asked Kenyans for the county’s top job and were given it, and this week voters in 17 American states did the same. Whether voters will elect a woman has been answered reasonably well. What remains open is whether parties will let her run for the seat that matters.
So, when the parties publish their tickets next year, it may be worth reading them differently. Rather than counting how many women were nominated, ask which seats they were nominated for, and whether the woman who has represented her county for 10 years is finally being offered the governor’s ticket. That answer will say more about a party’s intentions than any statement on inclusion.
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