Ellen Malcolm

Ellen Malcolm is the founder and president of EMILY’s List, which recruits and backs female candidates who support abortion rights. The group, the name of which is an acronym for “Early Money Is Like Yeast,” was founded in 1985 and has helped elect dozens of congresswomen and governors, as well as hundreds of women in local offices.

Politics: When EMILY’s List puts its name behind a candidate, how much of a difference does that make in terms of money and momentum?
Malcolm: Oh, it makes a significant difference. When I started EMILY’s List in 1985 nobody took women seriously. So one of the things that we said right off the bat was that we’re going to support women who have a realistic chance of winning. We’re like political venture capitalists. We go in and say, “Ok, this campaign looks good so far. Let’s make a recommendation and do some fundraising, and if [the candidate] catches on, we’ll do more. If the campaign doesn’t catch fi re, then we’ll pull back.”

Politics: What’s the organizational structure?
Malcolm: We have a big membership and marketing effort here that raises the money—more than $40 million in the last cycle. Then we have a political operation that works both with the candidates in our “Political Opportunity” program and with the federal and statewide candidates. Jonathan Parker is our political director in charge of that. We also have our independent expenditure effort “Women Vote,” which Denise Feriozzi is the new head of. There’s a legal wall between the campaign arm and the independent expenditure arm obviously, but we’re a full service political operation now. There are very few organizations like EMILY’s List that only focus on winning elections. The DCCC and Emily’s List are really the only full service operations that are helping people put their campaigns together and help them win on the House side.

Politics: How involved is EMILY’s List in recommending specific strategy and tactics with the campaigns or candidates you endorse?
Malcolm: We are in a constant process of assessing what’s going on in the campaigns. We want to make sure our money is well spent. You have to make sure the campaign has a decent fundraising operation so they can get up on TV, and you need to make sure they have a message. Over time we built a reputation for being tough. So the fact that EMILY’s List is recommending a candidate to its members is a real seal of approval now that the political world takes seriously Cheryle Jackson in Illinois is a great example. She’s an example of somebody at this first stage that needs to be given a boost, and now we can see where she goes with it.

Politics: Last year some were writing obituaries for EMILY’s List after Hillary Clinton’s loss.
Malcolm: Well, that was one race out of many, and we had lots of fantastic victories that year including Jeanne Shaheen and Kay Hagan, electing Bev Purdue governor of North Carolina. And we had the second biggest increase in history of Democratic women in the House. So we are still in the business of making history. We do it every election cycle and it couldn’t be more fun.

Politics: EMILY’s List v. FEC, how does that potentially change how you as an organization operate and raise money?
Malcolm: In the effort to try to stop massive soft money spending in campaigns, the FEC really created a set of rules that put a lot of irrational burden on EMILY’s List. We do a lot of non-federal work, and they were making us spend a lot of regulated hard money to do legitimate non-federal political work. So we challenged the regulations, and the appeals court certainly took the ball and ran with it. They went farther than we even asked and threw out all of those regulations. I don’t know what the end game is going to be, but I think it’s important that people’s right to come together and participate in the political process is protected. We don’t have a single lobbyist on the payroll, and we don’t employ, amazingly, any lawyers. It’s an oddity in Washington, D.C.

Politics: Did the appeals court go too far in your estimation?
Malcolm: I don’t think this is an end game, so I don’t think I even need to get involved in whether they did or didn’t. I’ll give you an example of how ludicrous the rules are, though. We did a video with a whole slew of women that have run for office talking about how important it is to get involved and how they’ve been able to make a difference. And at the end of the video it says, “You should run. We’re asking you to get involved.” Now, because there were federal candidates in that video, even though it had nothing to do with federal elections, we were required to pay for it with hard money. That makes no sense.

Politics: Where are your biggest opportunities in 2010?
Malcolm: I don’t think were going to see a lot of Democratic retirements. But we do see some people moving up to run for the Senate, which creates opportunity. In Illinois, Mark Kirk is running for Senate, and we have a great woman named Julie Hamos running in that House race. Of course, Martha Coakley running in the special in Massachusetts is a very exciting race for us. But we’re going to do a lot of defense in 2010, too. I think all Democrats are going to be doing a lot of defense next year trying to hold onto the House and the Senate.

Politics: The organization has received some criticism for not doing enough online fundraising. What are you doing that’s new?
Malcolm: We’ve been doing online fundraising for some time and have tried to keep our investment in it at the same level of people moving over to do that. I think we’ve done a pretty a good job of that. On our website, which is really fun, we have a blog up there now and all kinds of new things. So we’re moving with the market. And it’s beginning to change a lot of the ways that we do other things in politics besides fundraising. We did a very interesting get out the vote program in North Carolina [in 2008] with younger voters who knew all about Barack Obama, but when we asked them who was running for governor or the Senate, they didn’t have a clue. So we did a major web-based program and some cable TV targeted at younger voters, reminding them that there was a team that was going to help create change—that team included Bev Perdue and Kay Hagan along with President Obama.