Georgia’s WINning Women Lead the South
By Melita Easters – WIN List Founding Chair and Executive Director
As we celebrated the 15th anniversary of Georgia’s WIN List last year, it was exciting to announce that WIN List had helped elect and re-elect more than 50 endorsed women to the Georgia General Assembly, 30 of whom still serve.
Digging deeper into state-by-state statistics maintained by the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University, there is much more to our WINing story.
To place the accomplishments of Georgia’s WIN List into perspective, one must compare the percentage of women in Georgia’s General Assembly to the percentage of women in other Deep South states. By all measures, Georgia leads the Deep South (Florida not included) not only in the percentage of women serving but also in the percentage of those women who are Democrats and African American.
Even as Georgia Democrats lost control of all statewide offices and the House and Senate turned from blue to red, the number of Democratic women in the Georgia General Assembly has increased during the past 16 years – despite Republican drawn maps which forced several popular woman legislators to retire after reapportionment.
Georgia not only has the highest percentage of women in any Deep South legislature, but a far greater percentage of those women are Democrats. In the senate, Democratic women outnumber Republicans four to one and in the House, Democratic women outnumber Republicans three to two. By contrast, Democratic women and Republican women are more evenly matched in most other Southern states and even in Florida.
Georgia’s high percentage of women legislators has been particularly fortuitous for African American women. With six African American women in the senate and 22 African American women in the House, Georgia has the highest number of African American women legislators holding office in ANY legislative body nationwide – including Illinois, New York and California among others. Maryland has fewer African American women Senators, but they comprise a higher percentage of a smaller senate giving them the only national percentage of African American women in a legislative body which tops Georgia figures.
With the election of WIN endorsed Brenda Lopez in May, Georgia now has its first Latina to serve in the General Assembly. Latinas serve as legislators in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee, but they are all Republicans and thus not as likely to be pro-choice or progressive when it comes to a voting record.
Georgia’s WIN List was the second state to adopt the EMILY’s List model for a Political Action Committee, following North Carolina where Lillian’s List was founded in 1998. California List was established in 2002 and Texas founded Annie’s List in 2003 with me as keynote speaker for kickoff events in Houston and Dallas.
Both Florida’s Ruth’s List and Virginia’s The Farm Team were founded in 2008 and Women for Tennessee’s Future was founded in 2012. Other Democratic women’s PACs operate in the states of Arizona (since 2004), New York, Michigan, Montana, Iowa, New Jersey, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Oregon.
Georgia’s WIN List has raised more than $1.5 million to support electing women candidates and has trained more than 1,000 women to run for office or work in campaigns.
For those who wish to see the numbers behind these assertions, the two charts below compare Deep South States with the nationally top ranking states and a few other states with Democratic women’s PACs both in terms of the current legislative body makeup and for the rankings and percentages of women in 2000, when WIN List was founded, and the current year.
We are grateful to all of the donors, candidates and campaign staffers who have helped us elect and re-elect women in Georgia. We have a strong foundation for our continuing efforts. As much as we have accomplished, equality of representation for women in Georgia is still many election cycles away.
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Click Links below to see charts
