Emily’s List prides itself as one of the leading supporters of women running for office, helping elect pro-choice women candidates to Congress, governorships, and state legislative positions around the country. The group’s super PAC arm, Women Vote!, has become one of the largest outside spenders in American politics. Women Vote! is also one of the oldest among the Democratic Party’s super PAC allies, getting its start helping to reelect Dianne Feinstein to the Senate in 1994. Emily’s List/Women Vote! are well connected with the Democratic Party’s stable of big-money donors, and many of its top staffers are veterans of party offices, campaigns or former candidates themselves.
Women Vote! has had both good and bad years in the last decade, with a handful of tough losses that are common among super PACs spending heavily on media. The organization is relatively transparent about its shortcomings and has taken active steps to improve on issues like diversity in recent years.
Blue Tent recommends Emily’s List/Women Vote! to donors and believes giving to these organizations is a priority. (Explore our methodology.) While donors interested in supporting pro-choice women would likely have more impact giving to candidates directly, Emily’s List/Women Vote! seems to use money well compared to many outside spenders of comparable size. Donors with strong progressive loyalties should keep in mind that Emily’s List/Women Vote! is very much part of the Democratic Party establishment.
What are its core strategies?
Like many super PACs, Women Vote! uses most of its outside spending for media, both broadcast and digital, but it also consistently employs mailers and other types of voter engagement. Here are the ways it seeks to help candidates:
Supportive and opposition media. While many super PACs play the bad cop role by exclusively purchasing opposition media—allowing the candidate to focus on positive messaging—Women Vote! does both. Depending on the race, the super PAC will purchase traditional broadcast and digital media to influence a race, and typically, it will accompany the ad buy with mailers. Like many other top liberal super PACs, Women Vote! works most closely with vendor Waterfront Strategies to produce its ads.
Endorsements. An endorsement alone is valuable to a candidate, as Emily’s List’s picks typically get press coverage and attract the attention of donors. Emily’s List itself typically gives the maximum federally allowed contribution to the campaigns directly, and Women Vote! then supports campaigns with outside spending.
Mailers. Women Vote! has made mailers one of its main tools in the last two election cycles. The group went from devoting just under 10% of its expenditures on mailers in 2016 to around 20% in 2018 and 2020.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of those strategies?
Ad experts who spoke with Blue Tent told us traditional strategies are losing relevance as voters are saturated with more and more media each year. The conventional wisdom of pumping the TV ads late in the race—which is when voters start to pay attention—is having less of an impact as more people switch to streaming services and other media instead of traditional TV. Thus, a digital-focused but balanced approach that emphasizes creating an ongoing connection with voters seems to have the greatest impact. Women Vote! appears to employ this kind of well-rounded strategy. While there are examples of races where the super PAC spends a majority of its money on traditional TV, most of the races where Women Vote! spends heavily involve a combination of TV, digital and mailers. (See Blue Tent’s background brief: Political Advertising: What Donors Need to Know.)
What is its track record of achieving its goals?
Emily’s List does not regularly publish a list of endorsed winners for each cycle, but according to its website, it supported 16 governors, 26 Senators, more than 100 House members, and more than 1,100 lawmakers in state legislatures. OpenSecrets.org’s success metrics measuring Women Vote!’s spending record shows the super PAC has had ups and downs in the last decade. The most successful year was 2012, when Women Vote! had 84.2% success by money—Emily’s List did actually publicize its results that year, celebrating the wins of 12 out of the 17 candidates it fully endorsed; its worst cycle of the decade was 2020, with just 18.2% success by money. Women Vote! did not spend outside money in every race Emily’s List endorsed, appearing to target specific races instead. It’s unclear whether Women Vote!’s team measures its success internally based on how many endorsed candidates won or how many financially supported candidates won.
By and large, the success of Women Vote! seems to mirror that of the Democratic Party. Some of the super PAC’s most disappointing years, 2020 and the 2014 midterms, were also infamously underperforming years for the party as a whole.
Does it have strong leadership and governance?
Emily’s List recently went through a leadership transition. Longtime President Stephanie Shriock stepped down early in 2021 and the group named a new president, Laphonza Butler, in September. Butler, the first woman of color to lead the organization, previously led the biggest union in California, SEIU Local 2015, and was also a partner at SCRB Strategies, a political consulting firm.
The current executive director of Women Vote! is Melissa Williams, who previously ran independent expenditures for Emily’s List’s House and gubernatorial races in 2012. She worked as National Political Director of the Sierra Club before assuming her current role in 2015. In some places, Williams lists her title as vice president of independent expenditures for Emily’s List, indicating the group’s close connection to its super PAC arm.
Emily’s List is led by Executive Director Emily Cain, a former lawmaker in the Maine state House and Senate and two-time congressional candidate endorsed by Emily’s List. Cain took the job in 2017 after the previous director took the CEO job with the DNC.
The rest of the senior leadership at Emily’s List is mostly female, and nearly all previously worked for top Democratic Party lawmakers or their campaigns, or else for national liberal organizations. Outside of Williams, the website does not list other leadership members for Women Vote! specifically. The board of directors of Emily’s List includes two of the largest donors in Democratic politics: Karla Jurvetson and Donald Sussman.
Is its staff diverse and culturally competent?
Following the 2018 midterms, a New York Times article on Emily’s List highlighted the group’s ongoing need to improve support for candidates of color, and then-president Shriock noted her organization “absolutely” needed to do more. Emily’s List appears to have made improvements in the 2020 cycle.
The organization Democracy in Color conducted surveys and issued report cards on some of the leading liberal organizations of 2020, evaluating their transparency and diversity. The organization gave Emily’s List and Women Vote! a “B” for demographic targeting, noting that 35% of their endorsed candidates were women of color, and 47% of the bundled money contributed to House races went to candidates of color. Democracy in Color also applauded Emily’s List for its partnerships with POC-led organizations like BlackPAC and Somos Votantes. While there is still room for improvement, Emily’s List and Women Vote! have taken proactive steps to continue diversifying their work.
The group also appears to be committed to diversity within its board and staff. As mentioned, it recently named the first woman of color to lead the organization and its board is a diverse group. (At this time, Blue Tent doesn’t have demographic information on its entire staff.)
What kinds of donors support it?
Emily’s List and Women Vote! both attract significant donations each election cycle. As a traditional political action committee, Emily’s List’s donor rolls have a high number of small contributions—nearly 90% of individual donations in 2020 were $200 or less. Women Vote!, the super PAC, is able to accept contributions of any size, and has become a go-to spot for some of the biggest liberal mega-donors.
Consistent among the top Women Vote! donors at the start of the decade were investor Donald Sussman, media mogul Fred Eychaner, former NYC mayor and presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, and philanthropist Nancy Beeuwkes. As mentioned, Sussman is on the board of Emily’s List, along with another top Democratic donor, Karla Jurvetson. Unions and other liberal groups were also key donors for Women Vote! during the Obama years, including SEIU, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, America Votes and America’s Families First.
Women Vote! started taking in larger sums from peer super PACs in 2016. That year, Women Vote! quadrupled its fundraising total from 2014, with Priorities USA Action leading all donors by far with $14 million total in contributions that cycle—which makes sense, given Priorities supports the Democratic presidential nominee and Hillary Clinton was poised to become the first woman president. Women Vote! would continue to take in around $30 million the next two cycles, with groups like Senate Majority PAC and House Majority PAC becoming top contributors. In 2020, Women Vote!’s top donor was Emily’s List, which was not dark money since the PAC reports its donors, but it was the first time Women Vote! used its affiliated arm for a significant portion of its funding. This indicates the super PAC has taken to using some of the methods commonly used by other leading liberal super PACs more tightly connected to the Democratic Party.
How cost-effective and efficient is it spending?
From what we can tell, the group’s spending is guided by its endorsements, and although it had multiple disappointing election cycles over the last decade, its strategies do not seem inherently wasteful.
Compare Women Vote!’s outcomes between 2018 and 2020. According to metrics from OpenSecrets.org, Women Vote! had 62.5% success by candidate and 51.3% by money in the most recent midterms. Among the 12 candidates the super PAC spent at least $500,000 supporting or opposing, half were losses for Democrats, but only two losses by 10 points or more. In most of these races, Women Vote! bought broadcast and digital media, as well as mailers in certain races. The most expensive loss, Republican Josh Hawley’s Senate win over Claire McCaskill, in which Women Vote! Spent $4.36 million opposing Hawley, the differential was about six points.
By contrast, 2020 saw Women Vote! with less than 20% success by candidate and by money, and of the 20 campaigns the super PAC spent at least $500,000 on, only one was victorious—Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. What’s notable about Women Vote!’s largest losses is that the group’s spending appears thoughtful and covered many of the bases recommended by ad experts Blue Tent spoke with.
Again, it’s difficult to draw too many conclusions without a more thorough analysis, but take Women Vote!’s spending opposing Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, in Iowa, for example. The super PAC started its $3.9 million spending push in June with a large TV ad buy, continued to purchase media throughout the summer, then bought mailers in September and continued smaller media buys through to Election Day. Ernst won by about six points, but in an election where most Democratic Senate candidates flamed out, that isn’t proof Women Vote! had the wrong strategy. The super PAC’s most wasteful investment may be the $2.67 million opposing Republican Kansas Senate candidate Roger Marshall, who won his race by more than 10 points after Women Vote! spent all its money in the fall on media not specified in the FEC records, as well as mailers late in the race. Still, while the super PAC paid liberal IE regular Waterfront Strategies to develop its ads against Marshall, it also worked with vendor GPS Impact, which specializes in helping progressives win deep-red states. These records indicate that although Women Vote! did indeed spend significant money on bad losses, the spending appears to have been done strategically, and there may have been other factors more to blame for the loss.
What metrics and milestones does it use to measure its success?
Emily’s List has a primary goal of getting women elected, particularly those dedicated to protecting women’s reproductive and health rights. Based on the Emily’s List website and its press coverage, it appears the group measures its success solely on that metric, and does not seem to use other metrics to evaluate a particular election cycle, such as voters reached or money raised.
How transparent is it about its spending, results, and learning from its mistakes?
We were unable to find any public memo analyzing the super PAC’s strategic successes and failures after the 2020 race, or after any other cycle. In its super PAC report card, Democracy in Color gave Emily’s List/Women Vote! an “A” for transparency, citing the group’s website detailing its electoral goals and the staff’s responsiveness when asked for additional information.
As mentioned in the diversity section above, Emily’s List was also publicly honest about its shortcomings on diversity and has taken active steps to improve in recent years.
Does it have clear and realistic plans for the future?
Women Vote! has already dipped back into Congressional races in 2021, spending nearly $2 million on a Louisiana special election between Karen Peterson and Troy Carter. The super PAC made media buys supporting Peterson and opposing Carter consistently between February and April, but Carter ultimately won by more than 10 points. The effort was funded by large contributions from some familiar faces, including Michael Bloomberg ($600,000), and from the Emily’s List nonprofit ($1.77 million). Emily’s List/Women Vote! have not released anything publicly outlining specific plans for the 2022 midterms.
Conclusion
Emily’s List/Women Vote! appears to spend money carefully and efficiently. Its many years of supporting liberal women have built a formidable network that can quickly provide significant support to its favorite campaigns. Blue Tent recommends Emily’s List/Women Vote! to donors and believes giving to these organizations is a priority. (Explore our methodology.) Smaller donors looking to donate to a national organization might consider giving directly to Emily’s List, which has a maximum donation limit as a traditional political action committee, and larger donors could consider giving to Women Vote!.
All prospective donors should be aware that Emily’s List has historically been close to the Democratic Party establishment and has not been a reliable ally of women candidates from the party’s progressive wing. Donors interested in giving to Emily’s List/Women Vote! will want to look at past spending and endorsements to determine if they’re likely to be happy with how their donations are used. And, as always, donors should think about whether their gifts are best directed to an electoral group, as opposed to giving directly to campaigns they support. Donors interested in women’s issues should also consider whether their funds could be better targeted by supporting groups working in this space in other ways.