But the wave didn't just sweep women into positions of influence; it also carried a few out. In the House, Mia Love, a Republican from Utah, and Barbara Comstock, a Republican from Virginia, lost their seats. And in the Senate, it wasn't just Claire McCaskill; Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) was also defeated.
After decades of service, both leave the capital this week and prepare to return to districts that rejected their leadership. To some extent, the women are now in unchartered waters. So few women have ever won statewide offices and served in the Senate (a grand total of 52) that there's not much of a model for what happens next.
For Heitkamp, the first order of business is acceptance. Her race had been an uphill climb from the start, given that Donald Trump remains popular in North Dakota and won that state with ease in 2016. But Heitkamp insists she was not at all prepared for to be beat, not because she was delusional about the odds, but because she had made it a point to remain optimistic.
"Don't anticipate the blow. Don't anticipate failure. Push all the way through with the idea that this is going to work out."
She's worked with countless women in her political career; ambitious, smart women whom she's seen "gird themselves for defeat" before they've even exhausted their opportunities. "'Well, if it doesn't work out that's OK,' or, 'I'm not going to let it devastate me if I don't get this job,' and I think that's a mistake," Heitkamp says. If she has advice to offer anyone in a similar situation, it's this: "Don't anticipate the blow. Don't anticipate failure. Push all the way through with the idea that this is going to work out."
Heitkamp admits that her tactics can make disappointment "a little harder" to endure, but the work itself is easier when a loss doesn't feel inevitable. The world is hard enough on women who want to succeed, as Heitkamp puts it, and scores of people in positions of power who want women to doubt themselves. Don't make it easier on them.
Now of course Heitkamp has all the time she could ever want to dwell and to recover and, much to her amazement, to clean. Immediately following the election, she watched such mindless television she can't remember even what network it was on. "I was so tired. I had worked so hard," she says. When she regained some sense of equilibrium, she decided to take out her sorrow on...her closets. "It's cathartic," she says. "It’s like, OK, all of this stuff that you’ve collected now and haven’t paid attention to and just stored somewhere—it’s time clean that out. It’s time to get rid of stuff."
McCaskill, too, has decided to toss whatever she's collected that she doesn't need, although in not quite so literally. After she licked her wounds (pasta, wine, repeat), she tried to remind herself that, as she sees it, "it's impossible to be a victim and a leader at the same time." She could complain (and some would suggest that she has, at least in her most recent interview with the New York Times' The Daily), but she insists she'd rather hunker down and get back to work. She wants to mentor women who want to run for office. Her goal, she says, is to teach them "how to be better fundraisers, how to use a sense of humor, how to see themselves as winners." And she wants to dispense with the niceties.
