Message from National NOW President Christian F. Nunes
March 8, 2024
Greetings Feminists,
With Super Tuesday and the State of the Union, it’s been a busy week. The election results gave anti-choice, anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-equality extremists the boost they were hoping for. Their nominee for Governor in North Carolina, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, told an audience four years ago, “I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,” and said women who have abortions, even if they are just “245 hours pregnant” are murderers.
Elsewhere around the country, extremist candidates who want to take us back to their idealized dream of a 1950s America--where issues of diversity, equity, and intersectional feminism are never mentioned--won nominations for state, local and national office, making this fall a time of choosing for every voter.
From the race for the White House, Congress and Senate, to state races and school board contests at the local level, democracy is on the line in this election. Candidates who openly praise dictators and autocrats, and want to take away reproductive rights, voting rights, racial justice rights—everything we’ve worked for, everything we believe in—will be on the ballot this fall. But we can stop them.
That’s why I was heartened to hear President Biden’s strong affirmation of women’s rights and reproductive rights in his State of the Union address. He and Vice President Kamala Harris know that the extremist attacks on women’s bodily autonomy will motivate women to turn out in record numbers this fall, and NOW members will be at the head of the line.
Of course, NOW-endorsed candidates and other supporters of women’s rights won elections of their own this week. It’s never been more important to recruit and elect progressive women and pro-women candidates, but we’ve lost ground over the years.
According to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, the number of women running for the U.S. House in 2024 is down by 21.6% from 2022. And despite being more than half the U.S. population, women continue to be underrepresented in the pool of candidates. Only 24% of major-party House candidates are women this year, and 18.3% of Senate nominees.
We’re about to begin the longest general election campaign in history. With the presidential nominations decided, now is the time to frame the debate and focus attention on the core issues that mean so much to us as NOW members—and so much to our future.
In solidarity,
Christian
