It’s been nearly a year since we elected Donald Trump to our highest political office — and it still sort of seems like a bad dream. But it’s unfortunately all too real: every day Trump manages to sink below himself and continues to push his sexist, racist, radically conservative agenda. It would be easy to become completely discouraged by modern politics, but luckily there are individuals who are doing all they can to resist him and his policies. “She’s the Ticket,” Topic’s upcoming documentary web series, follows five of those people, all of whom are women running for political office.
“In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, the women’s political group EMILY’s List were astonished and deluged when they noticed more and more women were asking for information about how to run for office,” a press release for “She’s the Ticket” details. Between 2015 and 2016, 920 women came to Emily’s List to inquire about being a first-time candidate. In the months since then, that ripple grew to a groundswell with more than 16,000 women having reached out as of July to see how they can run. What we’re seeing is a movement.”
In six 10-minute episodes, “She’s the Ticket” will explore this movement through the eyes of five women running for office: Stacey Abrams, Laura Moser, Jennifer Carroll Foy, Christine Lui Chen, and Crystal Murillo. Abrams is campaigning to become the next governor of Georgia, while Texas-based Moser is challenging a Republican incumbent in the hopes of representing her district in Congress. Carroll Foy is running for Virginia’s House of Delegates and Chen is making a bid for New Jersey’s state senate. Murillo, meanwhile, is running for city council in her hometown, Aurora, Colorado.
“I’ve been on the women and politics beat for about a decade, and I’ve never seen anything like this outpouring and passion,” said “She’s the Ticket” producer, former MSNBC reporter, and “Notorious RBG” author Irin Carmon. “The fate of the country is in these women’s hands, and I’m thrilled to be part of a project that tells their stories as no one else has.”
The series is being produced by Left/Right (“The Circus”) in partnership with Topic, the narrative storytelling brand from First Look Media. Left/Right’s Mary Robertson, Anneka Jones, Ken Druckerman, and Banks Tarver are serving as exec producers.
“She’s the Ticket” will debut in November on Topic to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Trump’s election.
Check out the five candidates’ bios below, courtesy of Topic.
Stacey Abrams
Stacey Abrams is the Georgia House Minority leader who is mounting a historic run for governor. If elected, Abrams would be the first African-American female governor in the United States and realize Democrats’ hopes of flipping Georgia after years of Republican control.
As the first woman to lead either party in the Georgia General Assembly and the first African-American leader in the state’s House of Representatives, Abrams has begun to lead the charge on resisting President Trump’s agenda on the statewide level. She is focused on helping to build and rally a growing Democratic base in a state President Trump won with less than 51 percent of the vote. She’s also an award-winning romance novelist and an attorney.
Laura Moser
Days after Donald Trump’s election, Laura Moser sprang to action. “That was my moment when I was done sitting on the sidelines,” she said. Daily Action, a mobile activist effort the freelance writer promptly founded to organize the resistance to the president’s policies, managed to sign up 100,000 subscribers before Trump was even inaugurated.
Moser has now taken her engagement to the next level, uprooting her family in Washington to return to her native Houston and run for office. Though currently represented by a Republican, the district went to Clinton and is one of the best-funded Democratic congressional primaries in the country.
Jennifer Carroll Foy
If Jennifer Carroll Foy doesn’t have time to sum up why she’s running for office for the first time, she just says the word, “Trump.” The foster mom and public defender is now running for a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates, having won the Democratic primary by just 14 votes. During that time, she was also five months pregnant and went on to deliver twin boys prematurely.
The district is currently represented by a Republican but was won by Obama twice and went for Hillary by 56 percent. Her community’s experiences with ICE detentions and her passion for criminal justice reform have galvanized her campaign. She was the first African American woman to graduate from the Virginia Military Institute, whose refusal to admit women led to a landmark Supreme Court case.
Christine Lui Chen
Galvanized by the Women’s March in January and her husband surviving cancer, Christine Lui Chen is running for state senate in New Jersey. If the 36-year-old healthcare executive manages to unseat the Republican incumbent, a vocal Trump supporter, she would be the first Democrat to hold the seat in over three decades. She would also be the first Chinese-American woman in the New Jersey statehouse. The mother of two says her priority in office would be to champion affordable healthcare.
Crystal Murillo
Only 23, Crystal Murillo decided on the night Trump was elected that she would run for office for the first time. She’s starting with city council in her hometown of Aurora, Colorado, where she hopes to best the 79-year-old Republican incumbent. For Crystal, Trump’s election was personal, as she watches the impact on her immigrant community, including young people who registered for the now-rescinded DACA terrified of being deported.
