Rashida Tlaib Isn’t Waiting Until She Gets to Congress to Help Other Women

In the days after a Democratic primary win that’s all but sure to send her to Congress, Rashida Tlaib’s life went into a state of what she calls “happy chaos.”

Even after getting a little breathing room between her and that victory, Tlaib, who will likely become the nation's first Palestinian American Muslim woman in the House, sounds like she’s still adjusting. “Having 26 speaking-engagement requests for different organizations across the country within 48 hours was overwhelming,” she admits.

Tlaib won her Detroit-area congressional primary in a midterm year—on a day, even—of new records for women seeking office. The lawyer and former state rep beat five other Democrats in a battle to succeed Representative John Conyers, a Washington institution who stepped down last year amid allegations he’d harassed female aides.

Without a Republican opponent on the November ballot, nothing short of a catastrophe appears to stand between Tlaib and D.C.—and history.

That blessing (and her background) give Tlaib a sense of duty, a drive to stay engaged on the national stage: “What a powerful message—to have someone like me, with my name, my ethnicity, my faith, all those thing, be such at a forefront,” she tells Glamour in a phone interview.

So while other women have less than 50 days to campaign, to debate, to fund-raise before their November Election Day face-offs, Tlaib is under a different kind of pressure, and she says she’s got plenty of work to do before taking the oath. In fact, she barely paused after her victory speech.

“First thing I did was—I wanted to go uplift other women, and I went to go help Ilhan,” she says of Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat whose Congressional primary win, which came a week after Tlaib’s, gives her a chance to be the first Somali American Muslim woman in the House.

Of course, using her newfound star power to illuminate the campaigns of others isn’t just about shared religious faith for Tlaib, who grew up in Detroit as the eldest of 14—yes, 14—kids born to Palestinian immigrant parents. It’s about class. It’s about community. It’s about most members of Congress being pretty well-off, if not downright loaded, in a country where the median income last year was under $62,000.

That gap between the wealth of the elected and their electors makes Tlaib, who grew up working-class, pose herself some questions about the days between now and November 6: “How can I use this time, this momentum, the fact that we did change the course of history, and how do we bring that light to other communities across the country?” she asks. “And me helping other women win is what I'm trying to do.”

How? “Help them raise money—even just texting Ilhan after she won and let her know I have her back,” she says. This week Tlaib is a speaker at the She the People summit, a San Francisco gathering of progressive women on the ballot. Her Twitter account is a steady churn of support and mutual admiration for like-minded liberals, salted with signal boosts of stories about the Flint water crisis, the Israel-Palestine conflict, police brutality, and immigration.

That I’ve-got-your-back thing is really key, stresses Tlaib, who is poised to become the congresswoman for Michigan’s Thirteenth District. It’s about reinforcing the message primary voters sent by supporting candidates like her, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York or Jahana Hayes in Connecticut or Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts—women, you might say, whose biographies and careers are bound more to social justice than to the social register.

Women running this year, win or lose, tell stories of facing antagonism that goes from sexist to shockingly vicious. But when Tlaib talks about becoming the first Muslim woman elected to Michigan’s legislature in 2008, it sounds like the voices of the haters weren’t as resonant: “I didn't have this heavy presence around social media and this trying to figure out how someone like me could have won—to dismiss that it was hard work and old-fashioned door-to-door, that it was grassroots fund-raising and not a dime of corporate money,” she says.

But for the women facing that abuse now, she speaks of pushing back against forces that are “trying to have us lose some sort of credibility [based] on our age, based on how we speak, based on how we dress…. Talking about our weight [or] whether or not we're married” instead of what she considers the real business at hand for the country.

“I keep saying this: ‘My God, Trump is in office. Focus,’" she says.

To that end, her campaign has shifted into transition mode. There’s still a field team to keep knocking on voters’ doors through the election, and volunteers helping with Tlaib’s schedule. There’s networking with new supporters who stayed out of the primary (or backed one of her rivals). Of course, there are her two boys to care for—plus, she says, “I'm a regular person who had to come back to work, so I'm back at Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice.”

There’s still plenty of talk of a Democratic “blue wave” that could wrest control of Congress from the Republicans, despite of—or because of—the man in the Oval Office. That, of course, hinges on whether voters show up on Election Day.

Will they?

“I'm a believer that they will. We are a country that's reactionary,” Tlaib says. “We kind of wait until things are falling apart for us to kind of be awakened and understand that our vote is needed.”

Celeste Katz is senior political reporter for Glamour. Send news tips, questions, and comments to celeste_katz@condenast.com.

In a pivotal election year, Glamour is keeping track of the historic number of women running (and voting) in the midterm elections. For more on our latest midterm coverage, visit www.glamour.com/midterms.

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