Did you notice that when we went to the polls this month, voters in New Jersey and Virginia elected female candidates for governor?
Big news! Come January, America will have women running 14 states and they. …
Hey, wait a minute. We’re going to celebrate the fact that this country has reached the historic moment when 28 percent of its governors are female?
That’s actually kind of depressing.
I started my journalistic career in Connecticut covering Ella Grasso, who in 1974 became the first woman not succeeding her husband ever elected governor in the United States. She was nationally known for her motherly demeanor in public, and I always cherished the story about a minor bill she opposed that contrasted with that image. The bill, to allow bow-and-arrow hunting on Sundays, somehow passed, and shortly after, Grasso came up behind one of the sponsors at an event and whispered in his ear: “If I go walking on Sunday and if I get an arrow in my ass, I know who’s going to come and pull it out.”
Always figured Grasso would be followed by a flood of talented women chosen to run their states. Sigh. Well, it’s been more like a high-quality drizzle. But the story got a couple of new pages this month when in New Jersey Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, beat the Republican Jack Ciattarelli for governor by a whopping 57 percent to 43 percent, and in Virginia, another Democrat, Abigail Spanberger, won and will become the first female governor in the state’s history. Her election was pretty much preordained, given that Virginia’s citizens were reeling from President Trump’s reign of terror when it comes to laying off federal workers.
In Virginia it was actually an all-female contest. In another era we might have been excited about the Republican, Winsome Earle-Sears, who’s the first female lieutenant governor and first Black woman elected to state office there. But truth be told, she didn’t run a terrific campaign and she had to do it under that Trump cloud.
New Jersey was way more interesting. Sherrill had a theoretically tough opponent in Ciattarelli, a former state legislator who’d been the Republican nominee in 2021 and ran a very close race against the incumbent governor, Phil Murphy.
Ciattarelli had a very well-funded campaign, centered on the inevitable promise to reduce property taxes. But he ran into disaster during a debate in October when asked to rate the Trump administration. Sherrill’s heart must have been singing when Ciattarelli volunteered that he’d give the president an A.
Shudder.
Sherrill ran a very good campaign. Unlike many, many major political candidates of both sexes, she actually could boast about her military service, and a picture of the naval helicopter she once flew showed up pretty much everywhere.
But her biggest boost came from Trump, who didn’t seem overly concerned about promoting Ciattarelli’s chances. Imagine how the Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey must have felt when — soon before the election — Trump announced he wanted to cancel a long-awaited, in-progress rail tunnel under the Hudson River that would make life easier for many, many New Jersey commuters.
Really, just to show he doesn’t like Chuck Schumer or New York City’s incoming leftie mayor? What a guy. Thanks in part to the president, Sherrill, as governor-elect, has helped make history.
Americans chose the first female governor in 1924. Two, actually.
Nellie Tayloe Ross was the wife of the governor of Wyoming, who died suddenly while in office. She was deeply unenthusiastic about stepping into her husband’s shoes, but the Democrats wanted to keep control of the government by getting her to fill out the term.
Kind of interesting, isn’t it, that the story of women fighting prejudice against their running for office begins with a woman who fought the people who wanted to give her one? But after winning a special election, Ross really got into being governor — especially having the chance to help poor farmers, miners and female workers. She ran for re-election in 1926, but lost.
She was later named the first female director of the U.S. Mint. Ross died at 101 in 1977. Just saying.
And then there was Miriam Ferguson, who got elected governor of Texas at the same time Ross was taking over Wyoming. Ferguson, who was known as Ma, also succeeded her husband, but she had a slightly different story, since James Ferguson was still alive, just impeached.
Ma Ferguson dedicated her term to pardoning criminals — an average of 100 a month. This was either a very early example of American women’s attempts to reform the penal system or a series of rewards for convicts who managed to come up with large enough bribes.
Probably the latter, and if so, not one of the shining chapters in our story about women’s road to the White House. The Ferguson campaign did promise that if Ma was elected, voters would be getting “two governors for the price of one.” Which is eerily similar to what Bill Clinton said in 1992, when his presidential campaign marketed his then-very-popular wife, Hillary, and promised voters they’d be getting, yeah, “two for the price of one.”
Anyhow, about our new female governors. Sherrill won’t be the first woman to run New Jersey — remember Christine Todd Whitman — but she’s already been mentioned in predictions about presidential candidates in 2028.
Yeah, yeah, it’s a long time away. But we’ve got a lot to think about as we prepare. How do we squash the prejudice against female presidential nominees, which has always been with us, but became even worse after Kamala Harris got whomped by Donald Trump?
(By the way, who would like to be the first person to tell Harris to drop all her fantasies about running again? Do I see a show of hands?)
Don’t worry — since there will be real primaries next time around, voters will get to see lots of possibilities among the smart, hard-working and principled governors, members of Congress and other strong female politicians.
Can’t wait to see who else pops up near the front. It can’t come soon enough.
Gail Collins, a contributing Opinion writer, worked for The Times for 30 years, as a member of the editorial board, as the editorial page editor and as an Opinion columnist from 2007 until earlier this year.
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