The "Follow Hillary's Lead" Campaign Reveals Clinton's True Legacy, Whether She Becomes President or Doesn't

By LAUREN HOLTER
@LAURENHOLTER

Whether or not Hillary Clinton becomes the next president of the United States (but fingers crossed she does), one thing’s for sure: Clinton’s already left an inspiring legacy. Simply by being a serious contender for the highest office in the country, she’s proven that women are capable of leading and leading well. Her inspiring example is already being used to persuade more women to run for political office — a nationwide campaign called “Follow Hillary’s Lead” wants to get more Democratic women on the ballot in 2016. The campaign’s website reads: “2016 isn’t just the year of one woman — let’s make it the year of many women!”

Launched by Emerge America, a training program for Democratic women running for office, the Follow Hillary’s Lead campaign hopes to use the momentum of Clinton’s campaign to increase the number of women candidates next year by 20 percent. It’s specifically focusing on law enforcement positions like district attorney, which usually go unopposed. According to the Women Donors Network, 71 percent of elected officials in the U.S. are men. Even fewer women hold elected prosecutor positions — just 17 percent, while 79 percent are held by white men. It’s time to put more women (including women of color) on the ballot and in office, and not just the Oval Office.

Having more women in office making decisions for America’s communities is a surefire way to make progress on women’s issues. Andrea Dew Steele, founder and president of Emerge America said in a statement sent to Bustle:

Prosecutors make decisions that impact women’s lives every single day, from domestic violence, to abortion rights to child abuse, and beyond. Women should be at the table making these decisions.

Clinton’s presidential campaign is a historic moment for women in politics, even if she doesn’t win. She’s proven that it’s possible for a woman to have an influential political career and has helped change the archaic public perception that the president should be a man. She wasn’t satisfied just being First Lady, or even a U.S. senator or Secretary of State — she kept going one step further. Her story is already inspiring organizations and women across the nation to change the disproportionate gender ratio of elected positions in 2016.

No matter who’s elected president in 2016, Clinton’s legacy will continue to empower women and girls to make their voices heard and fight their way into male-dominated fields just like she has. Politics is still very gender biased, but Clinton’s campaign is helping change that and will continue to do so for the next 16 months, if not much, much longer.

New Campaign Aims to Recruit and Elect More Women Prosecutors

Although there are 400,000 women lawyers in America, women make up just 17% of prosecutors nationally – and of that, just 1% are women of color.

A new campaign aims to change that, arguing that elected law enforcement positions such as prosecutor roles have some of the most power to impact the lives of women.

Emerge America, a group that trains Democratic women to run for office, launched last week their“Follow Hillary’s Lead” campaign, which aims to recruit and train more women to run for elected law enforcement positions in 2015 and 2016.

“There are nearly 400,000 female lawyers in this country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Many of them should be running for offices in law enforcement, especially since 85% of incumbent prosecutors go unchallenged year after year,” says Andrea Dew Steele, Founder and President of Emerge America.

Steele emphasizes that prosecutors wield significant influence in their communities, noting: “Prosecutors make decisions that impact women’s lives every single day, from domestic violence, to abortion rights to child abuse and beyond.  Women should be at the table making these decisions.” There are currently 2,437 elected prosecutor positions across the country.

Emerge America says the “Follow Hillary’s Lead” campaign will recruit Democratic women to run for elected law enforcement positions across the nation, offering hands-on campaign training and connecting them to a network of supporters.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris also showed her support for the campaign in a press release, saying: “I applaud Emerge America for working to get more women in law enforcement positions. Having served for eight years as San Francisco’s District Attorney and now as the Attorney General of California, I can tell you that women’s voices are desperately needed in the criminal justice system. So many of the issues and cases I have pursued have directly impacted women and their families. We need the best and the brightest in these law enforcement positions and I would love to see more women putting their names on the ballot.”

Emerge America Calls on More Women to Run for Elected Law Enforcement Positions as Part of “Follow Hillary’s Lead” Campaign

New Study Released Shows 85 Percent of Prosecutors Go Unchallenged

Hosting Webinar for Women Interested in Running for Law Enforcement Positions

San Francisco – July 9, 2015 -- Emerge America (www.emergeamerica.org) launched a national effort to identify, recruit, train and support Democratic women to run for key law enforcement positions in the 2016 election cycle. The push is part of Emerge America’s “Follow Hillary’s Lead”  (http://followhillaryslead.org) campaign to increase the number of women candidates in 2016 by 20 percent by focusing on down-ballot elected law enforcement positions like district attorney. These are positions that often go unchallenged.

“There are nearly 400,000 female lawyers in this country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Many of them should be running for offices in law enforcement, especially since 85% of incumbent prosecutors go unchallenged year after year,” says Andrea Dew Steele, Founder and President of Emerge America. “Prosecutors make decisions that impact women’s lives every single day, from domestic violence, to abortion rights to child abuse and beyond.  Women should be at the table making these decisions.”  

California Attorney General Kamala Harris, one of only a tiny fraction of women of color who are serving in key elected prosecutor positions nationwide and the only woman of color serving as a state attorney general, strongly endorsed Emerge America's effort:

"I applaud Emerge America for working to get more women in law enforcement positions. Having served for eight years as San Francisco's District Attorney and now as the Attorney General of California, I can tell you that women's voices are desperately needed in the criminal justice system. So many of the issues and cases I have pursued have directly impacted women and their families. We need the best and the brightest in these law enforcement positions and I would love to see more women putting their names on the ballot." 

Just this week the Women Donors Network (WDN) released a report entitled “Justice for All*?” that highlights the lack of diversity in law enforcement offices.  Women make up only 17% of prosecutors nationally, with women of color comprising only 1%.  Most surprising, was the recognition that 85% of incumbent elected prosecutors run unopposed. 

Emerge America’s “Follow Hillary's Lead” effort around law enforcement positions will seek to target those races, with an effort nationally and among its 14 state affiliates to recruit Democratic women to run for the 2,437 elected prosecutor positions in the US.

Emerge America's efforts will include:

• Follow Hillary's Lead Recruitment Webinar on August 5th, 2015:  Emerge America will host a webinar with Brenda Choresi Carter, Director of WDN’s Reflective Democracy campaign, and Maeghan Maloney, an Emerge alumna and district attorney in Maine, who will share their insight into why we need more women in these offices, and how you can run for them.
• Targeted State-by-State Recruitment Efforts: Emerge America's affiliates will carefully identify seats that are up for re-election in 2016-2017 and actively recruit competitive Democratic women to run for those positions. Emerge America will initiate targeting in July 2015 and release targeted positions before January 2015.
• Hands On Law Enforcement Campaign Training: Emerge America will add a special law enforcement module to its candidate trainings — the law enforcement focus will distill advice and strategy from Emerge America alumnae to share with prospective candidates.  This specific training will be developed in the fall of 2015.
• National Network of Support for Women Challengers: Emerge America will redouble its outreach and coordination with groups in law enforcement and associations representing women attorneys to encourage more women to decide to run.

In addition, Emerge America will continue to encourage women to run through its Follow Hillary's Lead website (http://followhillaryslead.org) and social media campaign aimed at helping women take that first critical step: "making the decision to run and believing they can win with Emerge America at their back."

New York Times: A Study Documents the Paucity of Black Elected Prosecutors: Zero in Most States

WASHINGTON — Sixty-six percent of states that elect prosecutors have no blacks in those offices, a new study has found, highlighting the lack of diversity in the ranks of those entrusted to bring criminal charges and negotiate prison sentences.

About 95 percent of the 2,437 elected state and local prosecutors across the country in 2014 were white, and 79 percent were white men, according to the study, which was to be released on Tuesday by the San-Francisco-based Women Donors Network. By comparison, white men make up 31 percent of the population of the United States.

The numbers are being released as debate continues about racial imbalances in the criminal justice system in the wake of police-related deaths in Ferguson, Mo.; Staten Island; and Baltimore.

While the racial makeup of police forces across the country has been carefully documented, the diversity of prosecutors, who many law enforcement experts say exercise more influence over the legal system, has received little scrutiny. Prosecutors decide in most criminal cases whether to bring charges. And, because so many criminal cases end in plea bargains, they have a direct hand in deciding how long defendants spend behind bars.

“What this shows us is that, in the context of a growing crisis that we all recognize in criminal justice in this country, we have a system where incredible power and discretion is concentrated in the hands of one demographic group,” said Brenda Choresi Carter of the Women Donors Network, who led the study.

The data was compiled and analyzed by the Center for Technology and Civic Life, a nonpartisan group that specializes in aggregating civic data sets. The Women Donors Network, which undertook the project, is composed of about 200 female philanthropists who promote a variety of causes, including diversification of elected officials by race, class and sex.

Researchers looked at all elected city, county and judicial district prosecutors, as well as state attorneys general, in office across the country during the summer of 2014. Kentucky had the most elected prosecutors, 161, and four states — Alaska, Hawaii, New Hampshire and New Jersey — had none that were counted by the study.

The study found that 14 states had exclusively white elected prosecutors: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington and Wyoming. In Kentucky and Missouri, which also has more than 100 elected prosecutors, all but one was white, according to the analysis.

The study also found that 16 percent of elected prosecutors were white women, 4 percent were minority men and 1 percent were minority women.

“I think most people know that we’ve had a significant problem with lack of diversity in decision-making roles in the criminal justice system for a long time,” said Bryan A. Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a group that offers legal representation for poor defendants and prisoners. “I think what these numbers dramatize is that the reality is much worse than most people imagine and that we are making almost no progress.”

Mr. Stevenson said that while African-Americans had increased in number in mayoral positions and police forces in recent decades, the numbers suggested that the prosecutorial field had not kept pace.

Melba V. Pearson, a Miami lawyer and the president of the National Black Prosecutors Association, said a “long stain” caused by the imbalance was responsible for mistrust in the system by African-Americans and other minorities.

“They have to see someone that looks like them,” she said. “When you walk into a courtroom and no one looks like you, do you think you are going to get a fair shake?”

Ms. Pearson said she tried to show African-American lawyers that they needed to be represented in all roles in the criminal justice system, including as prosecutors, a role traditionally stigmatized in the black community, to ensure fair outcomes.

Mr. Stevenson questions whether it is possible to diversify the ranks of prosecutors, given that most of them are elected and incumbents often serve long tenures. With 85 percent of incumbent prosecutors re-elected without opposition, according to a study, sitting prosecutors will either need to start making diversity a priority in vetting their successors or the system will need to be significantly altered to give state bar associations and other legal entities more of a say, he said.

The new study did not look at federal prosecutors, who are appointed, or other state or local appointees. The Women Donors Network planned to make a database of all elected prosecutors available on its website later on Tuesday.

Correction: July 7, 2015 

Because of erroneous information in the Women Donors Network study, an earlier version of this article misstated the number of states that the study said did not have elected prosecutors. It is four, not three. Also because of information from the study, the article misstated the number of states that had exclusively white elected prosecutors. It is 14, not 15.