Katherine Clark is already one of the most powerful women in Congress, but her influence will be magnified if the Democrats regain control of the US House of Representatives on November 5.
It’s a big if for the Revere Democrat, who’s been crisscrossing the country fund-raising and rallying support for her party’s candidates in 27 states where there are hotly-contested congressional races. The Democrats need to net just a handful of seats to reclaim the majority, but just like the race for the White House, it’s all too close to call.
One thing is clear: Clark’s meteoric rise from state senator to House minority whip — the chamber’s second most powerful Democrat — in just over a decade.
The way she got there reflects the formidable constituency she’s built, from the women donors who’ve bankrolled her campaigns to the women candidates she coaxed and coached into the corridors of Congress.
When Clark entered Congress in 2013 after winning the seat vacated by newly-elected US Senator Edward J. Markey in a special election, she became the 79th woman in the House that session. That number has since surged to 126 today, with women accounting for close to 30 percent of the chamber.
Clark, 61, sat down with Globe columnist and Say More podcast host Shirley Leung in late October to talk about how the national agenda shifts when more women are in office, what’s at stake in this pivotal election, and leadership lessons she learned from former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Q. After Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, you were given a role to recruit more Democrats to run for Congress. There’s a common saying in politics that “women have to be asked to run, while men just decide to run.” So how do you persuade women to run?
A. “You can do this.” I always say that the only thing Donald Trump has ever done for me is to convince so many women to leave behind wonderful careers and families and their homes and come to Washington to do this work.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Q. After Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, you were given a role to recruit more Democrats to run for Congress. There’s a common saying in politics that “women have to be asked to run, while men just decide to run.” So how do you persuade women to run?
A. “You can do this.” I always say that the only thing Donald Trump has ever done for me is to convince so many women to leave behind wonderful careers and families and their homes and come to Washington to do this work.
Q. How many women do you think you’ve had a hand in recruiting to Congress?
A. Dozens. I may not have been the reason they ran, but I met so many women that cycle. It just has been an incredible experience of meeting women where they are and helping them not only put together professional campaigns and help them raise money, but also being that sounding board.
I have three children. I know what it’s like to be a candidate and a mom. When I was running, I was also caring for my two parents who had a lot of health issues. That feeling that you’re not doing any of those jobs at the level you want to be doing them, and just to have someone else recognize that, have another woman say, “It’s OK.”
Sometimes campaigns are lonely because you’re surrounded by people, but you’re the one trying to balance all these different parts of your life. So to be that sort of therapist role as well, a friend role, someone that helps them connect to other young mothers like [New York Representative] Grace Meng and others who have this similar situation of having school-aged kids and real pressures on them as they run.
When I came to Congress, my parents lived next door and my mom had Alzheimer’s, and my dad had had a debilitating stroke. I would often come home and be in the driveway and not know which way to go. Do I go in and relieve my husband, who’s been doing all those things with three active kids — getting them to practice, homework, personal dramas, whatever it may be? Or do I go to my parents and help them? It really has informed the work and priorities in Congress.
Q. Well, I would’ve just stayed in my car.
A. Sometimes, that was the option. I’ll just sit here and cry.
Q. How do you try to persuade women to become donors?
A. We are so lucky in Massachusetts. My congressional race was one of the first races to have a majority of women donors. Finding that group of women who are your kitchen cabinet — that helped me decide to put my name in for Congress, but also have always been there raising money, extending their networks. I remember one of our donors saying, “Once I started giving, I found it hard to stop. It was so empowering.”
Q. When you spoke at the Democratic National Convention, you talked about how when your three kids were young, before you got to Congress, you and your husband figured out that your entire income went to pay for child care. So take us back to that moment, and did you think about quitting and staying at home?
A. We actually both thought about it. It’s just one of those moments when you think, What are we doing? We were lucky. We had two sets of grandparents that helped us. Not everybody has that. Not everybody has a spouse or partner who’s also making an income.
Those experiences just help ground you in this work and bring a tenacity to it. We think about it as some sort of private decision parents make with a child-care provider. But so much of our economy rests on the availability of child care.
Q. So why has it taken so long to get major legislation done?
A. These are just old, historic views on women and women’s work. Other developed nations on average put $14,000 a year into a toddler’s care. In the US, we put $500. So we have really left this for families to figure it out on their own.
Q. The need for affordable child care is being discussed during the presidential campaign, so no matter who wins, are you hopeful that something will get done?
A. If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are elected and we have the majorities in the House and the Senate, we are going to make a difference in child care. But my Republican colleagues in the House have shown they’re not interested.
What they are missing is the economic and business case. Studies have shown for every dollar we invest, we get $7 back. This investment in child care is one that pays off in so many different ways in our business community, in workforce development and making sure that families can get ahead, not just get by, and in having kids who are ready and prepared when they get to school so they can read at grade level by third grade.
Q. Reproductive rights, in particular access to fertility treatments, has also become front and center with both Trump and Harris talking about their support for IVF.
A. Let’s back up a little. Donald Trump cannot be both things. He put Supreme Court nominees on the bench with the goal of undoing Roe v. Wade, and he is the architect of where we are today and the suffering, the cruelty, the loss of life, the loss of fertility that we are seeing in these states that have bans, and he owns that. That is his legacy.
He knows that [IVF] is popular with the American people. And so all of a sudden he’s declaring himself the father of IVF.
Q. So child care and reproductive rights are topics that should energize women voters. How engaged are they?
A. There’s such a gender gap with women who are supporting Harris. It’s why we’ve seen young women overwhelmingly supporting Harris over Trump. It is why she’s continuing to pull women from Republicans, to pull independent women, suburban women — because women understand what these bans have done.
You cannot take away something like abortion care, which is why my State of the Union guest was Amanda Zurawski. We are like bookends of Roe v. Wade.
When I had a miscarriage, I was sent home for a while, and then was told I had to come in and make sure I got the abortion care I needed before infection set in. I remember asking them before the procedure, would they check to see the heartbeat one last time just to be sure. But I never for a moment doubted that what my doctor told me I needed would happen.
Then you fast forward to Amanda Zurawski. She is thrilled to be pregnant. They’d already named their baby girl Willow. When she had lost the baby and needed abortion care to prevent infection, she was told she had to go home and spike a fever and let infection set in before the Texas hospital could give her the care her doctor recommended. She became septic, was in the ICU, fought for her life, and may have endangered her future fertility.
Now she is on the road for Kamala Harris because she understands in such a terrible and traumatizing way what this means for American women when you can’t get the care that you need.
Q. You have a close relationship with Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as speaker of the House. What’s the most important leadership lesson you learned from her?
A. I always say that I learned math in school, but I learned to count from Nancy Pelosi. It’s important to keep a good count. Part of that is watching what she did. It’s knowing what makes a person tick. What are the pressures of their district? What are they feeling? What’s going on for them personally, why they might miss a vote, and how you can work with them to get that.
That is the piece of it that I think women are very well suited for, and that I really learned from Nancy Pelosi. Speaker Pelosi taught me that you can hold both parts of your legislative life. You can be nice and polite, and tough as nails.
Q. You’re the second most powerful Democrat in the House. So, if Democrats win back the majority, how do you envision shaping the legislative agenda in Congress?
A. We know that a top priority is going to be restoring Roe v. Wade and making sure that we are meeting this moment and restoring reproductive freedom, because we know that health care continues to be an issue where we have to keep pushing to make it a right and not a privilege.
Q. In 2016 when Hillary Clinton ran for president, she leaned into her gender. She wore white suits to honor suffragists and talked about shattering the ultimate glass ceiling at the White House. That has not been part of Harris’s playbook. What do you make of these two different approaches?
A. Kamala Harris is very clear: This election is not really about her; it’s about the American people and bringing their voices back into the corridors of power. Of course, so many of us see us in her. She’s a woman, she’s a Black woman, she’s an Asian woman. But the power of her candidacy is that she sees us, and that’s where her focus is.
Q. So where will you be on Election night?
A. I’ll be in Washington. I am learning that this is tradition for leadership. It’ll feel very odd not to be home. Maybe I’ll be there during the day and get to sneak home.
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Original story HERE.