Oh look. Women are pissed and they are organizing. Imagine that.
by digby
The Republicans are worried about liberal women:
In this bastion of Virginia-brand conservatism, dozens of Democratic women roared on a recent night as their organization’s leader crowed over their party’s historic electoral triumph.
For the first time since 1961, Chesterfield County backed a Democrat for governor — and the driving forces in this Richmond suburb included women who defiantly trumpeted a political label their party has ducked for decades.
“Are we done?” Kim Drew Wright asked members of the organization that she and her allies christened the Liberal Women of Chesterfield County after President Trump’s election last year.
“Noooooo!” the women shouted back.
Until Gov.-elect Ralph Northam (D) won Chesterfield County three weeks ago, the stretch of suburban and rural communities southwest of Richmond had been considered reliably Republican.
Yet voters infuriated by Trump, many of them women and Hispanics who have migrated to the county in recent years, are redefining Chesterfield and alarming Virginia Republicans who have depended on the area to make up for the support the party lacks in urban areas.
[...]
The Liberal Women of Chesterfield County is an example of a new breed of Democratic activism in the Richmond suburbs. The group, which says it has admitted nearly 3,000 followers to its private Facebook page, has established 13 neighborhood chapters and canvassed more than 50,000 homes in a get-out-the-vote effort. On Election Day, the group worked with the local Democratic committee to staff all 75 of the county’s polling places, something that the local party on its own had previously been unable to accomplish.
Besides championing Northam and the statewide ticket, they pushed local residents running for the first time, including the first openly gay woman elected to the House of Delegates ; a mental health administrator who came within 128 votes of defeating a Republican House of Delegates incumbent; and a British-born accountant who ran her first race and is Chesterfield’s newly elected commissioner of revenue.
“I wouldn’t have done this every day for the past year if I hadn’t gotten so angry about Trump,” said Wright, 46, a mother of three who observed politics from the sidelines before last year’s presidential election. “Once you wake up and see how important local elections are, it’s hard to go back to the shadows and stick your head in the sand. Now we have our eye on everybody, from dogcatcher on up.”
Wright and her allies insisted on including “liberal” in the group’s name, reviving a political brand that Republicans and even some Democrats have lampooned or avoided. “It was defiance,” she said. “My mission is to change that connotation of ‘liberal.’ ”
The group’s next target is Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), whose district includes Chesterfield and who earlier this year complained that “the women are in my grill no matter where I go” — a reference to the activists who protested against efforts by Brat and other House Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Three women and a man who are LWCC members are among the six candidates seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Brat in 2018, a group that includes a former CIA operative, an Army veteran, and a former Marine. “Everybody loves to hate Brat,” Wright said. “There’s something about his smug little face.”