'If you're not at the table, you're on the menu': in the Trump age, women emerge determined to run for office

Woodbridge, New Jersey: On a rainy Saturday morning in suburban New Jersey, in a mostly empty office building, a small group of women huddle in a foyer on the 10th floor.

Waving handmade political placards, they cheer as Kristen Zadroga Hart steps forward to make a speech. "I am here today to announce my campaign," she begins.

Fomer presidential candidate Hillary Clinton launches Onward Together in New York.Credit: AP

Around her, a handful of women break into a chant: "Kristen has heart! Kristen has heart!"

This was not a real campaign rally – not yet. Hart, and the other 20-odd women who had come to Woodbridge that day were taking part in a training session with Emerge New Jersey, an organisation that recruits and prepares women from all walks of life to run for the Democrats. Today they have split into two teams, running competing campaigns to prepare them for the rigours of the real thing.

Celia King, chair of the board of Emerge New Jersey, talks to the new recruits at a training session.

One of their trainers, Safanya Searcy, an experienced local political operative, later compliments Hart's team on their catchy, clever slogan, which the group hears about 60 times over the course of the day. "It will be years from now, and I may see y'all again, and I may not see y'all again, but I will always remember Kristen has heart," she says.

Emerge America, the group's national parent organisation, has been enlisting women to get into politics for well over a decade.

But lately, their mission has taken on a new vigour. In the six months since the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the country's first female presidential candidate from a major party, and the election of Donald Trump, who has begun the most deeply divisive presidency in living memory, interest in Emerge's programs have boomed.

In a country where the number of women in government remains paltry, lagging behind Australia and United Kingdom, there is hope one woman's loss may lead to many more eventually gaining a seat at the table.

Kristen Zadroga Hart, a teacher from New Jersey, will contest her first political race next month.

"After election day, our phones were ringing off the hook, emails were going crazy," says Emerge America's political director, A'shanti F. Gholar​. Since then, there has been an 87 per cent rise in the number of women joining their program.

"A lot of women were saying if not Hillary, then what woman is going to represent us? They realised that it could be them."

Emily's List, another organisation supporting Democratic women running for office, has also seen a swell: they had 11,000 women register interest in running for office as of April this year, compared to 900 women the year before, according to The Washington Post.

The women joining Emerge aren't necessarily there with national politics in mind – many want to get involved at local or state level.

Hart is gearing up for a real tilt at state politics, and will contest a Democratic primary next month. She says in New Jersey: "Women have always been the lickers and the stickers – they've stuffed the envelopes, they've been on the sidelines," always being told "Oh it's not your time yet, it's not your time".

The 45-year-old is a school teacher and passionate supporter of public education, which she sees as under threat at a state and national level. She'd been considering politics before the November election but the result, and seeing her own Republican state governor, Chris Christie, play a key role in Trump's campaign, helped get her over the line.

"It's not coming from a place of anger or hopelessness … it's coming from a place of activation and motivation, that this [the election result] is what happens when you let your guard down."

Myra Terry watched on as the younger women were put through exercises like a mock campaign launch and debate. A former president of the state branch of the National Organisation for Women and a veteran of community organising, she also founded Emerge's New Jersey office.

Asked why, she simply replies: "The reality is that if you're not at the table, you're on the menu."

The US is ranked 101st in the world for the percentage of women in government, holding just under 20 per cent of the seats in Congress. In Trump's cabinet, women hold just five out of 28 positions, leading to several now-viral images of the president signing executive orders surrounded only by men – including one of several anti-abortion measures. Though they were better represented in former president Barack Obama's last cabinet, even then women only held one-third of positions.

Professor Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women & Politics Institute at the American University, says women are under-represented in US politics for a few reasons: women are actively recruited by the parties at lower rates, they're less likely to feel qualified to run than men who have the same levels of experience, and there are no gender quotas in the US, unlike many other countries.

Getting women to run was key to turning the situation around, she says. "When women do run for office, they win just as frequently as men and they raise the same amount of money," she says.

This fact was true for both parties, she says, though Republican women tended to run at even lower rates than Democrats.

Seizing the enthusiastic mood of civic engagement among progressive voters, Clinton herself launched a new political fundraising group on Monday, Onward Together, to support groups like Emerge America and another outfit trying to get people under 35 into politics called Run For Something. The latter group has adopted a wry pitch: "If Trump can be president, you can run for local office."

While Clinton's failed tilt served as an inspiration to some getting involved, it's also proved a cautionary tale - particularly when it comes to taking certain voters for granted. Her campaign has been roundly criticised for ignoring the grassroots and lacking a ground-game in rust belt states like Wisconsin and Michigan, which they seemed to believe, mistakenly, were a lock.

In a discussion at the New Jersey training session, one woman shared an anecdote about hearing some fellow white Democrats discuss their reluctance in a local race to doorknock a particular African-American neighbourhood "that always votes Democrat anyway".

"That's what Hillary Clinton said too," Terry interjects, somewhat witheringly.

"I know, that's what I told them," the woman replies, leading to a discussion about the need to knock on every door, and to do your homework so you can engage with different communities.

Lawless says the uptick in enthusiasm from potential women candidates and feeding them into the political pipelines might not necessarily be evident come the first major electoral challenge to the Trump administration, the 2018 midterm elections.

"If our expectation is that all of this renewed activism is going to translate into candidacies next time around, that just might be an unrealistic expectation," she says. "It just might take a little bit longer."

It was possible too the Trump presidency would energise just as many – or even more – Democratic men.

Even if the newest recruits might not be ready to contest a presidency in 2020, there are already a number of established women candidates being discussed as real contenders, including senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand.

Lawless says Clinton's candidacy was likely to have made it easier for the next woman to run.

"Obviously [Clinton] had many many assets, but she had liabilities. And the liabilities she had were ones that no other female candidate would carry," she says. "The fact that she won the popular vote makes it easier to make that case, voters were clearly willing to elect a woman."