Wilson is an associate professor of political science at the University of Indianapolis and a public voices fellow at The OpEd Project.
Start your engines, organize your campaign and submit your filing paperwork, ladies, because now is the time to run. Women are critically underrepresented in government, regardless of the level or branch.
We are mere months away from the congressional midterm elections, which gives us the opportunity to vote on federal races, but there are many statewide elections that coincide with the Senate and House candidates at the top of the ticket. Even with the presidency not up for election this year, the Covid pandemic, rampant inflation, and Russia’s involvement in Ukraine give voters plenty of motivation to get to the polls.
Female candidates should be motivated, too. The last two election cycles marked record-breaking numbers of women running for office and ultimately winning. Research in political science (like the work of Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox) shows that when women run, they win — but they do not run as often as men do. This disparity in declaring candidacies leads to the gender gap in politics.
Women are substantially underrepresented. At the federal level, women account for just 27 percent of members of Congress and are one-third of the Supreme Court. Though we have our first female (and person of color) vice president, our country still has never elected a female president. State government fares somewhat better in terms of women in public office, with 30 percent of state legislative seats occupied by women and nine states having female governors. Some politicians begin their careers in state government and then climb to the federal level, giving hope to the difference that could serve as a pipeline.
If these numbers alone are unconvincing in the need to cultivate more diversity in public office, the statistics only get worse when racial and ethnic differences are added. Women of color comprise a much smaller subset of elected officials. According to the Center for American Women in Poltics at Rutgers University, there are three women of color currently serving in the Senate (and five ever historically), one woman of color is governor of her state (Michelle Lujan Grisham, the first Latina to hold that office) while four hold the office of lieutenant governor. A record-breaking number of women of color ran in 2020 and projections based on candidate declarations show that record will again be broken in 2022. But the disparity still remains.
This gap is often the topic of conversation immediately before and following the election itself. While there is never a bad time to analyze underrepresentation and consider the causes and consequences, nothing can be done then about attracting more candidates. Candidates need to file with their elections manager (usually the secretary of state) by their state deadline in order to be listed on the ballot. Write-in candidacies do not require filing but they are largely unsuccessful. Filing opened up across the country this month and the window to declare a candidacy is slowly closing, with most state deadlines set for February and March.
To file, a prospective candidate must meet state qualifications (usually including age minimums and residency requirements), organize a campaign committee (notably a campaign finance chair who will need to navigate complex but critical laws), and, in some cases, pay a filing fee. These fees were used historically as a way to deter candidates who weren’t serious in their pursuits, though “indigent” candidates who cannot afford the fee can collect signatures as dictated by state law to forgo the financial barrier.
Traditionally, parties and political organizations led the charge and still play a large role in the recruitment, training and campaign organizing for candidates. In an era of candidate-centered elections and where primaries, not conventions, select the names that will be on the ballot in November, prospective candidates should consider running, regardless of whether they are approached or groomed by a party. Waiting to be tapped on the shoulder is not going to cut it. If you are thinking about running, you can start by yourself.
In most arenas of public service, women are the minority. And, despite two great record-breaking cycles leading up to this election, they remain the minority. From a symbolic representation perspective, this can be harmful. But it is even more damaging when considering substantive representation, where differences of experience and perspective can have on an actual impact on policies. Research has shown that women contribute in different ways than their male counterparts, confirming the value of their presence in leadership. Having institutions that resemble the people they represent is essential to an effective democracy.
If our democratic institutions do not reflect their own constituencies, one has to question the extent to which they are truly democratic with regards to representation. After all, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” must include the people who aren’t men.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.