8 Women Activists on Campaigning For Harris-Walz

With less than three weeks to go until Election Day, millions of Americans are mobilizing to get out the vote for the political candidates and causes they care about.

That includes some of the nation’s top women leaders — and, on a recent weekday, PS convened eight of these women virtually. They’ve been door-knocking, making calls, and doing in-person appearances with Vice President Kamala Harris to rally around issues like paid family leave, reproductive rights, gun safety, and more.

We gathered together some of the most influential leaders in their respective fields: Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance; Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action; A’Shanti Gholar, president of Emerge; Dawn Huckelbridge, founding director of Paid Leave For All; Glynda Carr, president and CEO of Higher Heights; Jessica Mackler, president of EMILYs List; Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of MomsRising; and Regina Davis Moss, president and CEO of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda.

Here’s what they want voters to know ahead of Nov. 5.

On How They Got Into Their Advocacy Work

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner: We all have a story about the crisis of care that we’re in right now. My story is that when I had my son, he was born with a primary immune deficiency and he didn’t have the ability to withstand getting a minor cold; that meant a hospital trip. I didn’t have any paid family medical leave, like hundreds of thousands of people in the United States of America.

I lost my job just when I needed it the most, when I had a sick infant. And I was raised by a single mom who was a child-care worker. And I started thinking, what is happening in our country where luck alone determines if a family can thrive or not? That really started my journey into working on these policies and looking at the fact that I’m not alone. I’m not alone in not having access to paid family medical leave. I’m not alone in not having access to affordable home — and community-based services for people who are aging. I’m not alone in terms of having child care be unaffordable and inaccessible.

Because there are so many of us having the same type of problem at the same time, it’s not an epidemic of personal failures. It’s a structural issue that we can and must solve together.

Ai-Jen Poo: I’ve spent the last 26 years working with domestic workers, care workers, and family caregivers who are struggling to make ends meet to afford the care that their families need. And when you both have people who can’t afford to pay for care and then people who are providing care as family members struggling with all of these impossible choices between caring for their loved ones and working to pay the bills and then you have the professional care workers who are underpaid and undervalued, you know that there’s something broken in the bigger system. I’ve spent all of this time both walking alongside my family members who are struggling to find and afford care, and the workers who are struggling to sustain while doing the work — and realizing that we need leadership and we need policy change.

Regina David Moss: I grew up in Los Angeles, California, during the height of disinvestment in my community, and I’ve seen what it looks like, I’ve seen when those issues intersect, especially when you are a Black woman and you sit at those intersections of race, gender, and class and lower economic status. And for me, that starts from me being a health sex educator before I even knew what the term was, all the way up to present day when I have my own birth story where I did everything I was supposed to do and still had an emergency c-section and my son was in the NICU. And so this work is deep and personal for me because I need to make sure my community has all the things it needs so they can thrive. And then when they thrive, I thrive.

Dawn Huckelbridge: I grew up seeing my parents trying to navigate care for their own parents and their decline in aging and the struggle and stress of that. But it was really not until I became a mother myself, even though I’d worked in gender and policy for my whole career, that it just hit me in the face how much we’re failing parents in this country.

I always say I was a lucky one — I had a little bit of paid leave, I had a supportive family, on paper, we were healthy — it still nearly broke me. I went back to work well before my body had healed, well before my child or I was sleeping at all. And basically for over a year, I didn’t sit, I barely ate, and I did not sleep. And I just kept thinking, if it’s this hard for me, how do the majority of people in this country who have no paid family leave from their jobs survive at all? So that is what drives me. I know the answer to that question is a lot of them don’t. And I do believe that when we pass paid leave and invest in care, it will transform the whole country for good.

Jessica Mackler: I actually started my career at Emily’s List. I was an intern. And I came back to the organization just about three years ago, when we were on the cusp of many of these decisions that would ultimately end with the fall of Roe v. Wade and the stripping away of these freedoms and rights that so many women, particularly of my generation, took for granted.

And when I returned to Emily’s List at that time, it was after I myself had received abortion care when I had an early miscarriage. That experience at the time — while traumatizing, because it was very much my hope that I was going to have a baby — it was routine and I received really empathetic and standard medical care. So to be living through this moment where we see so many women being denied that care and the devastating consequences of that, it has really brought home the imperative that we have in this election cycle.

Glynda Carr: I was sitting in a Brooklyn cafe with Kimberly Peeler-Allen, my co-founder, just two girlfriends who work in the political space. But that day, it was two friends just literally complaining about not seeing ourselves in this democracy. And out of that vent session became the ability to write the words Higher Heights down. We didn’t have the words that day, but what we were seeking was a space that was uniquely designed for and by Black women.

It comes from the tradition of Black women dating back to before Harriet Tubman. Black women in this modern-day democracy are organizing around issues that we care about, organizing around elections. But what we found was that we were not getting our return on our voting investment in the forms of policies that center Black women, our families, and our communities. I think you would agree, and my colleagues would agree, that when you have a representative democracy, that democracy makes better policy decisions. Shirley Chisholm, who is one of the architects for this moment, once said, “At present, our country needs women’s idealism and determination perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.”

A’shanti Gholar: This is an extremely exciting time for us, as the vice president is so tied to Emerge — our organization came out of her very first race for DA. Our co-founders were good friends with her and they helped her set up her race and they realized there was not a place for good women like the VP to go to get the tools, the skills, the resources, but most importantly a network of support when they wanted to run for office. So we were born out of that.

We focus on recruiting and training Democratic women to run for office at all levels. And I have to say the vice president has been one of our best recruiters. Several of our alums have come to the program because the vice president recommended it to them. So she understands the importance of this. She’s a great mentor, but when it comes to running for office, she’s the ultimate girl’s girl. She knows that women have every right to run for office, that they can win and have their seat at the table.

Angela Ferrell-Zabala: I’ve done social justice organizing advocacy work for almost 25 years or so now. But living in the District of Columbia and seeing so many survivors of gun violence in this country, where right now over 56 percent of adults in this country have themselves or someone they love identify as a survivor or have been impacted by gun violence — it’s a public health crisis.

This is not an inevitability. This is something we actually have tried-and-true solutions that will save lives. I said, I got to get off the sidelines and do something to take action along with these incredible survivors that are doing it every day. And that’s from mass shootings to the daily gun violence mostly happening in Black and Brown communities that never even breaks a headline. And as a mother of four, it means a lot to me. This is the leading cause of death for kids in this country. It’s absolutely unacceptable.

On Why They’re Campaigning For Harris-Walz

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner: The members of Moms Rising are so excited by the Harris-Walz presidency and the campaign overall because they represent what we need. The choices have never been more clear. We have Harris-Walz not only supporting access to policies that we’ve long needed that most other countries already have in place, like paid family medical leave, child care, home- and community-based services, gun sense and gun safety, reproductive freedoms, all of the policies that we’ve long needed. We don’t want our daughters to have fewer rights than we’ve had. Nobody wants that. Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Libertarians. We do not want our children to have fewer rights than we’ve had.

A’Shanti Gholar: Yes. Besides just loving the vice president, she’s a phenomenal person, a phenomenal leader, you can see yourself in all of her policies, and I see myself in so many. I was born with a preexisting condition, so if I got pregnant, that would probably mean I would need an abortion. And I always knew that was something that I would be able to have that option. Now I don’t. I grew up in a neighborhood where gun violence ran rampant. I didn’t know it wasn’t normal until we moved to a different neighborhood, but unfortunately for so many children, that is still their norm. My grandmother, when she was a senior, the cost of medicine, she started rationing her medicine, had a silent stroke, developed dementia, and then my family had to take care of her. If insulin was $35, my grandmother would still be here.

The vice president understands what people go through. So much of that comes from her own lived experience, and this is probably one of the best policy agendas that I have seen in a very long time.

Jessica Mackler: Just to drill down for a second on reproductive freedom, we say every year that is the most important election of our lives. It keeps becoming increasingly true, but in this election, we don’t have to wonder what the consequences are of a Donald Trump presidency when it comes to reproductive freedom. We’re living with them right now. Women across America are dying. Women across America are being left in limbo, wondering if they are going to get the health care that they need. Women are having to calculate if they are going through fertility treatments, will they be able to access medical care if something goes wrong, will they be able to continue those fertility treatments if they invest in them today? Those types of questions are really scary, but they are our current status quo. It is not a hypothetical future.

And we know that in this election cycle — on so many of these issues, but in particular on this issue of reproductive freedom — that if we do not elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, that we are looking at a future in which millions more of Americans are going to be living with these life-and-death consequences.

On Memorable Moments From the Campaign Trail

Regina David Moss: I share my story of what happened to me, and a lot of Black women will just come to me and share that that happened, and thank me for my courage for sharing that story, but also thank me for doing this, for being in the fight. And I think that is one of the most powerful things you can do, because when things happen to us, people often feel helpless and that they don’t have a voice, but to know that you’re a voice for someone is so powerful. And so I just try to, when I get these stories, I try to hold them with the care that they need and to share them in the platforms that I am in that others are not, so that we can make sure that that’s reflected in policies that are lifesaving and timely and proactive.

Angela Ferrell-Zabala: I remember we were in Las Vegas and the vice president and I were at high school and we were having a conversation with young students, and she asked simple questions of them and they were really engaged, like how many people have been through a lockdown drill? How many people have had experience with gun violence or had a friend that had that experience? And to see how many people raised — almost every single hand went up in that auditorium. And those same young people now are eligible, and even if they’re not eligible to vote yet, they want to get out and help people that are eligible. And I’m seeing that all across the country.

Ai-Jen Poo: In a planning call with a woman for Harris in Georgia, I had called a woman named Jerry, who’s a single mom, a sandwich-generation caregiver also caring for her dad who has dementia at home, an Air Force veteran, and I was hoping that she would join this call to energize and recruit volunteers for canvassing. And I wasn’t sure if she would have time or even how involved she wanted to be. And when I asked her if she could join this call, she said, “Well, I just signed up for two canvass shifts that day. So it just can’t conflict with the time of the canvass shifts.” And so it just gives you a sense of how women caregivers, so many people, identify with the vice president and her leadership and her vision and are doing the work. And it is just unendingly inspiring to me, and I think is going to continue to inspire voters across battleground states and across the country to get more involved, which is actually what we need. We need every single ounce and hour of time, energy, and volunteerism that we can get to. It’s going to be tight, and we can do it if we do what we know how to do, which is do the work.

Lena Felton is the senior director of features and special content at PS, where she oversees feature stories, special projects, and our identity content. Previously, she was an editor at The Washington Post, where she led a team covering issues of gender and identity.