What Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger’s Gubernatorial Wins Mean for Women in Politics

Last night, voters in New Jersey and Virginia elected two Democratic women to as governor.

In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill became the second woman ever to win the state's highest office, and Abigail Spanberger will be the first woman to lead Virginia.

Come January, when they take office, there will be 14 sitting women governors in the United States, a record that was briefly held for two weeks earlier this year.

Kelly Dittmar, Rutgers University-Camden associate professor of political science and director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, explains what these wins mean for women in politics

Sherrill is the second woman elected governor of New Jersey and the first for the Democratic party-following Republican Christie Todd Whitman, who was elected in 1994. Why did it take 30 years for New Jersey to elect its second female governor?

One thing that has been slow to change in New Jersey has been the power of what has been called the "old boy's network" whereby a small group of men have often had disproportionate influence on who would be the next gubernatorial candidate, particularly in the Democratic party. That is one of the reasons why there have been few women candidates.

Sherrill ran on her military record and Virginia Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger leaned into her CIA service. Sherrill even incorporated an image of a helicopter into her campaign logo in a nod to her experience as a Navy pilot. Do you think they were trying to draw on more masculine traits, and do you think women still have to do that to win an election?

It is true that when you emphasize expertise on areas of defense or national security, those are still deemed more masculine areas of expertise that are typically expected of men in power. In these cases, my sense was that these women emphasized those traits more because they were so essential to their professional background and proved their qualifications and competency, more so than the women were trying to prove they were "masculine enough" for this job.

Kamala Harris won NJ Jersey by 6 points, the smallest margin for a Democratic presidential candidate in decades, but Sherrill won by a commanding 13-point margin. Both were running against Trump or Trump-aligned candidates. Why did momentum shift?

One of the biggest reasons we see this across our history is because the party that holds power is often blamed for anything that voters dislike about what's going on at the moment. So even though Phil Murphy and the Democrats were in charge at the state level, our politics have become so nationalized that it's not surprising that Sherrill was able to capitalize on the unpopularity of Donald Trump, his administration, and the Republicans in Congress.

In 2024, by comparison, the blame was very much on Biden and his administration, and Harris - as a leader in that administration - was seen as an extension of that.

There is plenty of post-election analysis focused on backlash to the Trump administration as a significant factor in this election. Do you think there are other reasons why Sherrill was able to break through and become New Jersey's second female Governor?

I think that you also must have your own qualifications, agenda, and message that resonate with voters. So, what we saw not only in New Jersey but in Virginia and New York City was a message around affordability was really central to the concerns on voters' minds.

After two women on the Democratic ticket lost to Donald Trump in presidential elections, it seemed that it was getting harder for women to break through for higher office. Do you think the results in the New Jersey and Viriginia governor's race bring us closer to electing a woman in the White House?

Every time that we chip away at these sites of underrepresentation for women we also normalize women's leadership, particularly at these high executive levels. In addition, women governors are going to be part of the pool of potential candidates for president, not only in 2028, but for many years to come. So we are also building the pool from which presidential candidates are taken to include more women.