Harnessing the Power of Women Voters

Harnessing the Power of Women Voters
9/20/2022 by Roxy Szal

In 2017, a year into the presidency of Donald Trump, three notable women—Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, former Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards, and executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Ai-jen Poo—looked to harness the sudden rage and confusion felt by women across the U.S. Garza, Poo and Richards announced the start of a women’s equality organization called Supermajority, a multiracial coalition of women organizing around issues like paid leave and affordable healthcare. The group’s name hearkens to the fact that women make up more than half of the U.S. population. These days, Amanda Brown Lierman is the executive director of both Supermajority and the Supermajority Education Fund, a sister nonprofit organization for research, education and development programs that prepare women civic leaders. And Lierman and her team have their eye on the prize: the 2022 midterms.



Executive director of Supermajority Amanda Brown Lierman speaks during a Mother’s Day rally in support of abortion rights on May 8, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Jemal Countess / Getty Images for Supermajority)

To register and turn out voters, Supermajority works on a membership model, capturing key messengers in individual communities and enlisting them for phone banking, texting, letter-writing and door-to-door canvassing. The organization aims to reach individual women voters “four or five times before the election,” Lierman told Ms.—“just to give them that extra reminder … about what’s at stake, not just for them, but for the people that they love.” In previous elections, COVID derailed Supermajority’s plans to penetrate communities from the ground up. “When Supermajority first got started, our intention was to build this organizing ground game and build up the power of women at the very local level to influence elections up and down the ballot. Organizing happens around kitchen tables, at school pick-ups, at these very local spheres,” said Lierman. “COVID forced us into running a large-scale, national, digital program, which was awesome. But it feels like this year, we’re getting back to that sort of true, original intention and idea of ‘building up the supermajority.’”


Supermajority’s work targets two key battleground states—Michigan and Pennsylvania. The group maintains smaller footprints in three more purple states: Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia. In her work across the nation, Lierman has seen a clear throughline: Women voters are paying attention. And they’re full of rage about the loss of abortion rights, perpetuated by the right-wing faction of the Supreme Court in the Dobbs ruling. “Righteous rage … can fuel all of us to do the very important and necessary work ahead to defend our democracy and our basic rights,” Lierman told Ms. “Women are historically overlooked and dismissed in the political process. One of the founding missions with Supermajority, is to actually change the narrative around the perception of women’s political power. … This is a conversation now about power and who has power over your body, and the fact that somebody is trying to take that power from you as an individual.” The rage Lierman is seeing on the ground took root before Dobbs, she said. “Women have always had the job of holding up everything in society essentially, and then the pandemic decimates us.” The effects of COVID-19—remote work and learning, family caretaking pressures, job insecurity—fell hard on women, who are still picking up the pieces of their careers and their families’ futures.

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https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/ZOsWcdvPTEyHCtFw0M0xevDfH_95mpoOzg54GntAt8mdnQ5tqOf3b6Fvg06bvvmC7mO3-uehg1dvcRUtG4p8nkUnGXnuTv9EcWHlEpGiOtEsSx72J4CILbLxkx5UrHowo4XPx28pJ8cZC7XdPRx1juGpxDhWad-uRjW6RIqVxGU_G7q4RA0qxr1HJw
Barbara Kruger’s “Rage + Women = Power” cover of Ms. magazine in January/February 1992.

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Lierman also gave credit to local election administrators, including county clerks, secretaries of state, poll workers and the like—90 percent of whom are women. “I call them democracy defenders.” “Having seen what we saw and so many lessons to learn from the 2020 cycle, the fact that our very democracy itself and the functions of our democracy can be called into question, is such a threat,” she continued. “Having good people in those positions, having people who respect our democracy, having people who respect elections, and how elections are run and respect the process and are ready to uphold that and not abuse that power—those are the folks that we need to be sitting in those positions.” Over 60 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, with higher rates of support among young people, women and people of color. As the election season kicks off in earnest and with the consequential midterms fast approaching, Lierman had some advice for voters: “Do your homework. Do your research. Understand who’s on the ballot, and make sure that you’re putting somebody in those seats who you trust to represent you and the values that you hold.”

https://msmagazine.com/2022/09/20/midterm-elections-women-voters-supermajority-amanda-brown-lierman/