Sally's List - Pioneering Women in Oklahoma Politics

Last week, Claudia Griffith announced that she is running for Senate District 15.  We met Claudia at a campaign training in 2011 and are thrilled that she has taken the next steps to running for office.

Click her to learn more about Claudia.

Claudia and her husband, Jim, have lived in Norman for over 40 years and have proudly raised their children there. Claudia is a Registered Nurse with a Masters in Public Health from the University of Oklahoma. She has always valued community service and has been active in the Boys Scouts of America, Center for Children and Families and is currently on the Board of Middle Earth Day Care, a non-profit early child care center.  She has worked for the Cleveland County Health Department and Health for Friends.  She is also a graduate of Leadership Norman and the Oklahoma Community Institute.

Political candidate training/readiness is an old concept, but in recent years women’s groups have recognized the value of preparing women leaders to run for public office.  National and statewide organizations are training women year-round and providing the keys to election success….just for women.  Bottom line; training and preparation are extremely important for women candidates.

……”training can lead to feeling empowered and confident in her ability to run successfully,” says Kathy Groob.

With so few women serving in Congress, just 17 percent, it’s apparent that something is holding women back.  Whether it is knowledge, training, money or time, women aren’t running for office in the numbers needed to move the needle in terms of having an equal voice.

Check out this note from Noel Isom, one of our fall semester Sally's List interns.  Her service to our organization is invaluable.

Interning with Sally’s List, these past months, have been great. I was able to join them for a Campaign Training in Muskogee where it really opened a lot of ladies’ eyes to the reality of running a campaign. Details over topics such as paid media, organizing a campaign team to support the candidate, and messaging are discussed on a Saturday morning to a group of interested ladies. These ladies vary in their intentions; they either come because they want to know more about politics, want to help a campaign, are thinking about running, or didn’t have anything else to do on a Saturday morning. The ultimate goal is to reach out to someone who thinking about being a candidate. However, if Sally’s List comes across someone who was only interested in learning about politics, yet can relay a message to someone who is interested in running for the House or Senate that there is an organization that can help her, than this is also very beneficial. Plus, it’s just good to raise awareness to ladies who think that getting into politics means that you have to have special classes and know special terms to know what’s going on. The Campaign Training in Muskogee was very engaging and a lot of women had questions that ranged from personal experience or general curiosity.

In the run-up to 2008, there was no end of speculation about the so-called Bradley Effect or Wilder Effect — the theory that polls tend to underestimate the vote share of black candidates — and what it meant for Barack Obama. But the actual evidence for this effect is weak. Whatever effect may have existed when Tom Bradley and Douglas Wilder were running for office does not exist now.

But the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections also raise a different question: do polls accurately assess the electoral prospects of women candidates? New research by the political scientists Christopher Stout and Reuben Kline suggests they do not:

Looking at Senate and Gubernatorial candidates from 1989 to 2008 (more than 200 elections in over 40 states), we analyze the accuracy of pre-election polls for almost the complete universe of female candidates and a matched sample of white male cases. We demonstrate that pre-election polls consistently underestimate support for female candidates when compared to white male candidates. Furthermore, our results indicate that this phenomenon — which we dub the Richards Effect, after Ann Richards of Texas — is more common in states which exhibit traits associated with culturally conservative views of gender issues.