Gayatri Agnew, a 36-year-old millennial, looked for Arkansas’s political unicorns for a long time.
She was looking for, you know, that woman: The empty-nester who would run for office in her late sixties or the career woman whose kids are long done with potty training. She was looking for somebody who wasn’t the mother of a two-year-old and a four-year-old. She was searching for the candidate who wasn't her. But Agnew didn’t find the unicorn — so, she decided to challenge her local representative on her own.
Agnew, the senior director of a prominent corporate foundation, hopes her experiences as a mother to preschool-aged kids can bring something significant to the political table in 2018. Agnew is part of a small community of progressive candidates under 45 — including Kelly Scott Unger, Christie Craig, and Celeste Williams — who found themselves running grassroots political campaigns for the Arkansas State Legislature in Trump country.
“I can paint this profile of this unicorn woman in my mind who’s the perfect person to run and she's like everyone else who's ever run, and she'd do a great job, right? But I couldn't find her,” Agnew tells Teen Vogue. “And through my own journey of wondering how to find a candidate whose life makes more sense for politics, I've actually chosen to take the path of trying to make politics make more sense for working moms.”
Running for office as a Democrat in Arkansas isn’t an easy task, especially in conservative strongholds. The Democratic party has taken heat for reportedly not paying enough attention to county- and state-level races over a period of decades, and red-state Democrats are often left without adequate resources, according to former Democratic politicians.
“The state party is still trying to rebuild and recuperate,” Chelsea Miller, a political consultant for Agnew, says of Arkansas’s Democrats. “And so these candidates — these brilliant women with all these ideas — just keep hitting the walls over and over again. Certainly, it is no cakewalk, but these are winnable. I've been so thrilled by the movement.”
The Democratic women are setting the party politics aside and focusing on grassroots campaigning — the traditional door knocking and farmer’s market visits where they can learn what matters to the constituents. Agnew, an Indian-American Democrat, is campaigning for fixing residential sidewalks and regional transportation plans, among other issues.
“It’s maybe the most unglamorous topic ever,” Agnew admits to Teen Vogue with a laugh. “I'm not going to make headlines talking about sidewalks and roads, but I actually think the voters in my district are concerned about sidewalks and roads. People run in different ways for different reasons. And I'm running to make a difference.”
“If they are a Democrat, they typically whisper it.”
Kelly Unger is the first Democrat to run for Arkansas’s 87th District in the state legislature since it was created from redistricting. The 36-year-old has spent the last year of her father’s life navigating the complex system of private hospitals, veterans’ hospitals, and state hospitals to find him cancer treatment. The healthcare system was “always complicated” and required her to “beg for a transfer for different reasons” to try to get care, Unger tells Teen Vogue.
“When I share a story about my dad with a stranger at the doorstep, a lot of people have the same experiences that I had,” Unger says. “It’s really unfortunate, and I think that whatever party you're from, you can relate or know somebody that can relate to how hard it is to just get treated if you're in a certain income bracket in Arkansas.”
Unger, a former deputy prosecutor, is the mother of a six-year-old and four-year-old. Her father’s experience with health insurance pushed her to run for office as a Democrat, but her family guided her perspective on other issues. Her husband is an Arkansas teacher, and she wants to see the state build a culture where teachers aspire to work locally. She sits and listens to retired teachers and knocks on doors.
“We don't have a lot of Democrats here, but I think we do have a lot of people who think about growth in a progressive mindset, so they really value that I bring that to the table,” Unger tells Teen Vogue. “If they are a Democrat, they typically whisper it. But there are four small businesses right here on our main street that have my sign in their window and they're not, you know, cast out of society.”
“We have to stand up for ourselves.”
Christie Craig, a 38-year-old resident of northwest Arkansas, knows exactly what people assume about her southern state. The first-generation college graduate and proud member of the LGBTQ community will quickly point out that Arkansas’s teachers are strapped for cash, pre-kindergarten programs aren’t widely accessible, and the state’s Medicaid requirements leave low-income families behind.
“Let's say that you are a start-up business or a tech company, and you have some capital that you want to invest in an area. What rank do you think Arkansas is on that shortlist?” Craig asks, anticipating the silence that follows the loaded question. “We have got to change our brand as a state.”
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Craig is a state representative candidate for Arkansas’s 96th District, a corner of the state that voted for Donald Trump. She worked for Walmart as a store manager for 20 years, receiving a series of promotions before returning to school for degrees in economics and political science as a nontraditional student. When she’s not knocking on doors for her campaign, she's working toward obtaining her master's degree.
Craig’s district is heavily red, and one of her biggest concerns before declaring candidacy was how conservatives in northwest Arkansas would react to a member of the LGBT community seeking their vote. Arkansas previously sent two openly LGBT individuals to the state Capitol, but both hailed from the state’s more liberal town of Little Rock. Regardless of politics, Craig refuses to back away from her identity.
“You're going to have people who are negative or people who are malicious sometimes, but, you know what, it is getting better,” Craig tells Teen Vogue. “We're getting there, but we have to stand up for ourselves in order to get there and have representation. You have to run.”
“Democratic values are stepping up.”
Celeste Williams, 43, is always running — but right now it’s out the door. A few seconds after hugging her kids and answering last-minute questions from her son about his Boy Scouts meeting that day, she hops in her car, which serves as a makeshift office, and gets down to business.
Williams is a family nurse practitioner, a mother of two, and a foster parent of three. She was sick of her patients not being able to afford their prescriptions and healthcare needs, so she declared her candidacy for District 95 in Arkansas.
“A lot of times [my patients] would come in to see me and that means that [they] have to make a choice: do I make my payments for my visits, or do I pay my rent?” Williams tells Teen Vogue. “These are people who are working full-time and raising kids, and they're working hard.”
Arkansas recently enacted Medicaid work requirements — wiping thousands of low-income people in Arkansas off their Medicaid coverage, according to The New York Times. Williams says that a lot of Arkansans are losing their access to healthcare as a result.
“I think it is a moral imperative to see if you can figure out how to do what's right for everybody,” Williams explains. “I don't know that everyone is necessarily running to the Democratic Party so much as people who have some more Democratic values are stepping up and saying, ‘Wait, what you're doing is hurting families. What you're doing is hurting children. What you're doing is hurting seniors. Families are the building blocks of our society. If you're putting a policy in place that is hurting families, you're hurting everybody.”
Next, Williams is running to other meetings and knocking on doors to introduce her ideas to more Arkansans. She and her fellow Democrats are already pushing for small changes to show women that running for office is possible.
“We're literally already making history just because we're doing anything,” Miller, the political consultant, tells Teen Vogue. “That's already a win whether or not these brilliant women, all of whom I hope are in the state legislature in January, win. We will have already made history as women and as women candidates because we've done the work to rebuild.”
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