During a breakout session at the Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Summit held over three days last week in Grapevine, Texas, two conservative young women elected to public office took the mic to encourage conference attendees to follow in their footsteps and run for office themselves. (RELATED: How to Defeat Woke, Inc.)
Kansas state Rep. Tory Marie Arnberger-Blew and North Dakota state Rep. Claire Cory addressed the audience to share their experiences, both having held their respective offices since their early 20s.
Cory was initially appointed to her position at the age of 21 in 2019 and then ran in her first election to fill her seat at the age of 23, all while a student at the University of North Dakota.
Arnberger-Blew first ran for her western Kansas house seat after graduating from Fort Hays State University. She gained political connections from interning in the governor’s office while still a student. Initially, she was part of an effort to recruit candidates to replace a representative from her hometown who was never present to do his job. While a part of the recruitment effort, several individuals she spoke to flipped the script and encouraged her to run. Initially reluctant to the suggestion, she eventually listened and hasn’t looked back since.
Although she is presently no longer the youngest legislator in the Kansas State House, Arnberger-Blew said she was glad to see more young people step up to run and win their seats across the state last fall.
Both young women are mentors for Run Gen Z, an organization founded by Iowa state Rep. Joe Mitchell, which seeks to help younger conservatives run for public office.
To kick off last Friday’s breakout session, moderator Leyla Pirnie highlighted the fact that although about 30% of state legislators are women, only about 10% are Republican women.
According to the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University, only 764 of 7,383 of America’s state legislators are Republican women.
During the panel discussion, Arnberger-Blew and Cory covered a number of topics of interest to the attendees. These included building a network, fundraising, campaigning and dealing with negative social media comments. (RELATED: Dana Loesch Rips Apart Democrats’ Radical Gun Control Proposals at Women’s Summit)
Both representatives were also asked to share the biggest piece of advice they want attendees to leave the event with.
Regarding running for elected office, Cory was short and to the point — “Now is as good a time as any.”
Arnberger-Blew used her answer to highlight a specific element of running for office — campaigning door-to-door:
“Invest in good tennis shoes and get nice socks because you will knock on a lot of doors and get a lot of blisters.”
After the conclusion of the panel, I had the chance to speak with 20-year-old Alabama resident Abigail McGill, who plans to run for the Alabama State House in the next several years.
She said the biggest message she is taking away from the session is the emphasis placed on door-to-door campaigning.
“One of the things that stuck out to me was the campaign side of things — going door-to-door, being presentable — you can win an election like that. Even with little money, if you were to go out and meet people, you can get your name out there.”
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Victoria Snitsar Churchill is a proud immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen with a decade of experience in grassroots politics and community organizing.
Her writing has been featured in many online publications, including Campus Reform, The Daily Torch and The Daily Signal.
As an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, Victoria appeared in media outlets such as CBS News, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The Blaze and NRATV.
Victoria is also a former NCAA D1 student-athlete and Kansas College Republicans State Chair.
After moving eleven times in six years, Victoria resides in Arlington, Virginia and enjoys overpriced brunch on Sundays with her husband.
“Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able MEN, such as fear God, MEN of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers….” (Exodus 18:21)
“As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.” (Isaiah 3:12)
“But I suffer not a woman to … to usurp authority over the man….” (1 Timothy 2:12)
This is not to say that the men in positions of civil leadership in the Constitutional Republic are any more biblically qualified than are today’s women – they’re not.
You can thank Article 6’s Christian test ban (by which mandatory biblical qualifications were likewise eliminated) on both counts.
For more regarding Article 6’s Christian test ban, see Chapter 9 “Article 6: The Supreme Law of the Land” of free online book “Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective” at Bible versus Constitution dot org. Click on the top entry on our Online Book page and scroll down to Chapter 9.
Find out how much you really know about the Constitution as compared to the Bible. Take our 10-question Constitution Survey in the sidebar and receive a free copy of the 85-page “Primer” of “BL vs. USC.”