Congressional candidate Liuba Grechen Shirley takes a break from shooting her campaign ad to share a moment with her son, Nicholas, on July 24 in her Amityville, N.Y., home. (Michael Noble Jr. for The Washington Post)
By Helaine Olen
Opinion writer
Last week, a clip from the second debate between New York Republican Rep. Peter T. King and Democratic challenger Liuba Grechen Shirley went viral on social media. To describe King as dismissive of his opponent is to be charitable. He interrupted Shirley and appeared to be furious he needed to deal with a challenger at all. At one point King said Grechen Shirley was not a “legitimate” constituent. For the record, Grechen Shirley, 37, lives in the house she grew up in, with her mother, her husband and two children. (She’s still breastfeeding one.)
It’s hard to imagine any female candidate would find much in the way of support after acting the way King did. But Newsday merely described the debate as “spirited” and went on to endorse King’s reelection a few days later. “Experience and bipartisanship are needed,” the paper declared. The New York Daily News did not endorse King, but its editorial had a regretful tone, describing King as someone the editorial board members “admire” and were passing on only because of the need for a Democratic-controlled Congress to check President Trump.
In politics, as in much of life, men get plenty of leeway, while women are dinged for every minor mistake. Anger over this imbalance is one of the major factors in Tuesday’s midterm elections. A record number of women are running for Congress, and many more women are volunteering. Together they are changing the face of institutional Democratic Party politics across the United States. Yet despite this wave of activism, men still set the norms for politics. Grechen Shirley’s insurgent campaign against King is a good prism to view this through.
Grechen Shirley’s campaign started as a long shot, as the New York Democratic establishment expected her male primary opponent to win. And there was another obstacle: Early in her campaign, Grechen Shirley realized that she couldn’t run for Congress if she began each day at 3:30 p.m., when her mother returned home from work and could watch the children. So Grechen Shirley petitioned the Federal Election Commission for permission to use campaign funds for child care. Despite initial opposition from her rival for the Democratic nomination — who called it a “slippery slope” — female Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, supported Grechen Shirley’s position. Ultimately, the FEC backed her, in a ruling that drew national attention.
In many ways, Grechen Shirley’s district is not where you would expect to find this sort of feminist rising. New York’s 2nd Congressional District runs along the south shore of Long Island, encompassing conservative suburban towns, not to mention Bill O’Reilly’s hometown of Levittown. A few of of MS-13’s most widely publicized crimes have taken place here as well. Not surprisingly, Trump took this district in 2016 and until recently most political observers thought King’s reelection was a sure thing. Now FiveThirtyEight gives Grechen Shirley a 2-in-7 chance, and other forecasters have increased her odds as well. The reason they are giving Shirley a chance at all? She raised $1.3 million in the last quarter — despite refusing to take corporate PAC money. Less frequently mentioned but also relevant: A progressive female Democrat unexpectedly won a special election last year in a state assembly district that overlaps parts of the 2nd District. Finally, thanks to redistricting after the last census, there is a slight — very slight — Democratic edge when it comes to registered voters.
When I visited Grechen Shirley’s campaign headquarters on a recent Thursday evening, her office was crawling with volunteers, many of them female. One of them is Donna Kimick, 55, a lactation consultant and mother of three. Until this year, she voted for King. She’s now so enthusiastic about Shirley that not only does she canvas several times a week for her, she’s appearing in a television commercial for her. “I have a young daughter, and we should not be going backwards,” she told me.
But it’s also true that women don’t automatically support women. While in Massapequa, a few miles from Shirley’s campaign headquarters, I met Mary Vehlies, 55, an administrative assistant who voted for Trump in 2016 and now has “very mixed feelings” about him, partly because of his treatment of women and partly because “he had promised to get health care under control and it hasn’t happened.” She watched part of King’s most recent debate with Grechen Shirley. King’s “Trump-like” rudeness horrified her, she said. Her three adult children would not have health insurance if it weren’t for the Affordable Care Act, which King has voted to repeal multiple times. She’d even like to see Medicare for All one day, if the United States can afford it. Medicare for All is part of Grechen Shirley’s platform. Yet even though one of her daughters is begging her to vote for Shirley, Vehlies says she’s unlikely to do it. King’s a moderate, and he has been good for the district, she tells me. And one other thing: “I don’t think she has any experience,” Vehlies says, saying she’d like to see Grechen Shirley run for another elected office first.
When I tell the story to Grechen Shirley later in the day, she’s not surprised. She has heard it before. “Men never get asked why they don’t start at the school board. Women always do,” she says. That’s true. Studies of the workplace show men are lauded for their potential, while women often fall by the wayside unless they’ve checked off every last career box.
But there’s a bigger point, too. What do we mean by experience anyway? One reason, it has long been argued, that there are still so relatively few women holding political office is because there are many institutional barriers against them. One of them happens to be society’s expectation that women should be the primary caretaker of their children. In that sense, by taking her case to the FEC, Grechen Shirley is already responsible for transformative change, one that will likely result in more female candidates going forward. More conventionally experienced candidates did not think to tackle it. It took an outsider. “These are issues that people in Congress right now are not understanding. They don’t live these issues every day. They don’t understand what it’s like not to be able to find quality, affordable childcare,” Grechen Shirley told me. It’s hard to disagree with that analysis. And the more women we elect to office, the more likely we are to make their needs and positions the standard for how we judge our political candidates. One might even say we’ll deem them legitimate.