Vote Run Lead, a nonpartisan organization that trains women to run for public office, aims to achieve 51 percent female representation in state legislatures. This year, the decade-old nonprofit says that goal could be achieved in at least three states for the first time, despite a growing backlash to diversity efforts.
With a strategy pivot that has re-energized staff and helped the organization win more than $6 million in funding from the likes of MacKenzie Scott, Melinda French Gates, and the Skoll Foundation, Vote Run Lead and its 501(c)(4) affiliate, Vote Run Lead Action, are laser-focused on getting women elected in states close to gender parity: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, New Mexico, and Washington. The group also wants to maintain 51 percent women majorities — to match the share of women in the U.S. population — in Colorado and Nevada.
Women currently occupy approximately 33 percent of seats in state legislatures, according to data from Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. They hold less than 30 percent of 1,973 state senate seats.
Vote Run Lead’s strategy for boosting those numbers required some big risks from the organization, which until recently was scraping by on small grants and a broader vision. The wheels were put in motion four years ago when CEO Erin Vilardi flew to Seattle to meet with an influential funder to pitch RUN/51, the project to make women a majority in all 50 state legislatures. In doing so, Vilardi helped turn around the group’s finances, allowed it to staff up in priority states, and achieve some remarkable gains.
Since 2021, RUN/51 has trained more than 200 people annually to seek office. Three of its alumni — Zaynab Mohamed, Erin Maye Quade, and Clare Oumou Verbeten — became the first three Black women ever elected to the Minnesota State Senate in 2022.
This year, Vote Run Lead Action has trained 335 candidates on state legislative ballots across the country. Among them is Mai Xiong, who was born in a Thai refugee camp and immigrated to the United States at age 3. She is running for the state house in Michigan. Imani Barnes, a mother and biomedical researcher, is running for the Georgia House of Representatives on a platform advocating expanded health-care access and affordable housing.
RUN/51 graduates have had an overall primary win rate of 82 percent, according to the organization.
Ninety percent of the Vote Run Lead alumni running for office in states this year are Democrats. Vote Run Lead Action endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. However, the training courses are open to all women regardless of party affiliation. Four Republican alums are currently serving in state legislatures, including Selina Bliss of Arizona and Ember Oakley of Wyoming. An additional four held state office in the past, according to Vote Run Lead.
“We shouldn’t have to make the case for our own leadership in a country where we are citizens paying taxes, voting, and providing the economic force and engine of the United States,” said Vilardi. “It is simply a fair thing for us and for women of color to be in office.”
Training — and Funding — to Win
Among the reasons Vote Run Lead largely focuses on state and local elections is that they are less expensive than federal campaigns. In 2020, the average state senate campaign cost approximately $120,000, while the average cost for a state house or assembly seat was about $72,000, according to the National Institute on Money in Politics. By contrast, median campaign spending by the average newcomer to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022 topped $2 million.
Yet research has shown that women candidates for any level of public office can face obstacles such as sexism, lack of donor support, and the inability to secure child care that would allow sufficient time to campaign. Vote Run Lead tries to prepare candidates for these obstacles, offering a range of in-person and online seminars on public speaking and storytelling, nonprofit and campaign leadership, fundraising and canvassing safely amid threats, especially to women of color and LGBTQ people.
Over the past decade, Vote Run Lead has worked with more than 56,000 potential candidates and campaign staffers and has trained more than 7,000 to run for local and state office. Some, such as U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, have gone on to hold national office.
Despite that, things were dire for the Vote Run Lead team back in 2019. It had been five years since the organization was spun from the White House Project, a women’s leadership nonprofit that shuttered in 2013 due to lack of funding. At that time, Vote Run Lead had received funding from big names such as Abigail Disney, Barbara Dobkin, and Craig Newmark and from foundations such as the Omidyar Network, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Roddenberry Foundation.
None of the grants surpassed $250,000 and Vote Run Lead was struggling, according to Vilardi. Then in 2019, the organization was invited to apply for a competition with the Audacious Project, a new funder collaborative raising $250 million for selected nonprofits to catalyze “social impact on a grand scale.”
“It was at a low resource point for me,” Vilardi said, referring to her previous funding efforts. “I was personally depleted.”
While Vote Run Lead wasn’t among the prize winners that year, Vilardi said the application process allowed her team to pause long enough to come up with an idea to increase their impact and efficiency. That idea was RUN/51.
Vilardi began looking for other funders to back RUN/51. She started with the Ascend Fund — which is operated by Panorama Global, a nonprofit that manages donor collaboratives — and was launched with a 2020 gift from French Gates. Panorama Global was founded by Gabrielle Fitzgerald, who had previously worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and led a $100 million anti-Ebola program at the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.
Following the Audacious competition, Vilardi booked a flight to Seattle and reached out to Fitzgerald to set up a meeting.
“I have since told [Fitzgerald] this story, but I lied and said I had meetings in Seattle, and I would be out there for a window of time,” Vilardi said. “I did not have any other meetings in Seattle.”
She pitched her idea to Fitzgerald and ultimately secured support. Vote Run Lead was one of Ascend Fund’s first two grantees, receiving a three-year, $1.5 million award in 2020. It also received a one-time award of $500,000 from the fund last year.
“What impressed me about Erin and Vote Run Lead was that she really saw a pathway for how that organization could work nationally to get to gender parity in elected office,” Fitzgerald said.
Since 2020, Vote Run Lead also has received support from the Skoll Foundation, which has provided three grants totaling $2.4 million. In March, MacKenzie Scott selected Vote Run Lead for a $2 million prize, after her Yield Giving announced its first open call for proposals last year. Pivotal Ventures, the organization that oversees much of French Gates’s giving, also has provided awards of undisclosed amounts to Vote Run Lead since 2023 and is expected to deliver more funds to the group for the years 2025-27, Vilardi said.
This influx of cash has been a game changer for Vote Run Lead, Vilardi said. Since Vilardi and her team launched the organization in 2014, the group’s annual budget has more than quadrupled from under $500,000 to $2.3 million.
Vote Run Lead also has created a 501(c)(4) sister organization called Vote Run Lead Action, with funding from Pivotal, to provide election-related training to specific candidates, Vilardi said.
Vote Run Lead Action has a budget of $5.3 million. Last year, it also started a campaign manager training program that has since graduated nearly 200 campaign managers and staffers.
In recent years, and particularly in the lead up to the 2024 election, Vote Run Lead has added staff. New hires include senior leaders to work in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington and the western region of the country. It also has brought in administrative staff in its New York City headquarters and throughout the country for a national total of 24 employees.
“Vote Run Lead is proud to share that even with substantial growth over the past 18 months, the organization has 100 percent retention of new field staff,” the group said.
Gender Barriers
Gender parity is an ambitious goal for most countries. It is especially challenging in the United States, said Saskia Brechenmacher, a senior fellow of democracy, conflict, and governance at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Brechenmacher’s research shows the United States is an outlier among liberal democracies when it comes to women’s representation in politics. One of the reasons is that, unlike in other and especially European countries, U.S. political parties don’t run multiple candidates per district, with the result that candidate pools are less inclusive of women and other marginalized groups, she said.
Also, U.S. candidates are chosen by primary votes rather than internally by the party and there are no gender quotas.
“Some countries have done that, but in the U.S. there is a strong culture against that type of affirmative action measure,” Brechenmacher said.
Child care is another challenge disproportionately felt by women. An estimated 85 percent of women become mothers by the age of 45 — yet only 25.3 percent of state legislators are mothers, according to a study from the Vote Mama Foundation, which provides research and analysis about the political participation of moms.
Vote Run Lead encourages parents to run for office. About 47 percent of Vote Run Lead alumni are parents, and about 47 percent also are women of color or gender nonconforming people. Vilardi, herself a mother of two small children, said she has felt her passion for the work surge since becoming a parent.
“I was pregnant with my second daughter during the pandemic, and it was such a powerful experience wrestling with all this change while fighting for women’s political power,” she said.
At the same time, she worries that backlash against diversity efforts could harm initiatives to get women more involved in all forms of civic leadership, not just running for political office. She hopes philanthropy will seize on more opportunities to advance women and show why it’s important for them to influence policy in their communities.
National women’s political action committees like EMILYs List, a Democratic 501(c)(4) founded in 1985, have raised millions of dollars to support women candidates. However, overall funding for women’s civic groups, from which many candidates rise, has remained low over the decades, Vilardi noted. The dearth of funding has kept many of the groups and their effort small-scale, she said.
“The investment that we’re getting from Melinda French Gates is monumental, but it is only one investment,” she said.
Fitzgerald, a seasoned policy wonk and former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, said she was “shocked” by how little money was being directed to women’s civic engagement groups when Ascend Fund started. The positive narratives created around 1992’s “Year of the Woman,” when a record number of women were elected to the U.S. Senate, and the 2018 election cycle — when 103 women won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives — have masked the continuing inequities in women’s representation in U.S. politics, she said.
“While I had been in politics for a long time, I hadn’t really studied the issue around women in politics,” Fitzgerald said. “As we started talking to all of our partners, I was impressed by how much they were doing with how little money they had. But when you don’t have a lot of money, it can be hard to have a long-term vision.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
