Originally published by The 19th.
A Seattle-based fund is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into recruiting women to run for state legislative seats in three states, part of its effort to close the gender gap in American politics.
The group, called the Ascend Fund, announced Tuesday that it has awarded $600,000 to 13 nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations that will work to recruit and train candidates from across the political spectrum in Michigan, Mississippi and Washington. The groups will receive grant funding of $15,000 to $100,000, with an average award of $50,000.
Women make up more than half of the American population, but they are just 31 percent of the country's state lawmakers . Only the Nevada legislature has reached gender parity in both of its chambers.
Abbie Hodgson, director of the Ascend Fund, said lack of equal representation has had a ripple effect on issues including reproductive health, child care and voting rights.
“Recent events have proven that the underrepresentation of women in policy making spaces has led to not only poor public policy outcomes, but ramifications on women's everyday lives," she said.
The Ascend Fund is an initiative of Panorama Global, an organization founded in 2017 by philanthropist Gabrielle Fitzgerald. The fund has a goal of achieving 50 percent representation in statehouses in all 50 states by 2050.
The Ascend Fund has emphasized state legislative representation in previous award rounds, but the focus on Michigan, Mississippi and Washington is part of a new pilot initiative aimed at rethinking ways to close the gender gap in vastly different areas. The fund has deemed the three states “geographically, demographically and politically diverse."Democrats control the legislature in Washington; Republicans control the Mississippi legislature; and it's split control in the Michigan Legislature with the governor's office.
In Michigan, women make up 35.8 percent of the 148 state seats; in Mississippi, it's about 15 percent of 174 seats in the legislature; in Washington, 41.5 percent of 147 lawmakers are women. These states also have different rules for running elections, including a top-two primary system in Washington, no campaign finance limits in Mississippi and term limits in Michigan.
“With this pilot program, we are laying the groundwork for testing strategies under different circumstances and environments, and hope to apply what we learn in these three states to other states as we expand," said Hodgson, who added that additional award money is possible in the future.
In Michigan, Rebecca Thompson hopes that Mothering Justice, an organization that advocates for women of color and one of the grantees, will use its $100,000 in funding to make a difference for Black women candidates. Mothering Justice will partner with Michigan United, Detroit Action, and MOSES to form Black Womxn Win – Michigan, a three-month leadership development program that will train 30 Black women to run for state seats in 2022.
Thompson, a consultant for Mothering Justice, ran unsuccessfully for a seat in 2014. She said that she has participated in several candidate recruitment programs over the years and that the new coalition's focus on Black women could have made a difference in her race.
“This program will be grounded in self care. There's this notion that campaigns have to be brutal and grueling and you can't take care of yourself, and we really want to reject that and build up a new generation of political leaders who tend to their wellness, particularly their mental and emotional health," she said. “Those are all components that, again, when I sort of think about what I needed when I was running, like we don't need Black women candidates running like White men. We need them running as the Black women that they are — they are nuanced. Their life stories look and sound and feel different. And we can be unapologetic about that, as opposed to sort of creating what exists in the status quo."
Chanley E. Rainey helps oversee NEW Leadership Mississippi, a civic engagement program at the Mississippi University for Women that works to teach college women about politics. Rainey hopes the $50,000 award will expand the scope of its program to include more trainees.
In a state with such low women's representation in the state legislature, Rainey said, recruiting conservative women will be crucial. Several candidate recruitment groups have focused on Democrats, who have a minority in both of the state's legislative chambers.
“We are trying to create a program that encourages both conservative Republican women and Democratic women to run," Rainey said. “In a state like Mississippi, the goal of gender parity will not be reached unless conservative women are part of the equation."
Bre Jefferson is the acting director of Sage Leaders, a training program under Puget Sound Sage, one of the award recipients. Jefferson hopes to use the $50,000 grant to expand its support, mentorship and training of BIPOC women candidates in Washington state.
Jefferson, a Black woman, said she's worked within the state's political circles for years and has seen the isolation that talented women of color face as they seek office.
“Bringing in voices into the rooms that have been traditionally left out of politics, left out of the conversation, is really crucial if we want to create the political atmosphere that is representative of everyone, not just the folks who have been traditionally given a seat at the table," she said.
Hodgson said diverse candidate recruitment was a priority in funding. Women of color make up 26.5 percent of current women state legislators who have shared their race and ethnicity.
“Obviously the stated goal of our programming is to elect women, but we think women are just one aspect of building a reflective democracy," she said.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.