The Force Awakens

Donald trump is president—what are you going to do about it? For many women, the answer to that question is to get off the sidelines, roll up their sleeves, and run for office.

- Jill Filipovic

Alex Lipman’s political career started over a cocktail, a plate of gnocchi, and a sensation of cold fear at the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. Coming down from the stress of exams, Lipman, a 30-year-old law student at DePaul University, was out to dinner with friends in late May when the conversation turned to the contentious presidential election. Trump was the presumptive Republican nominee, and stories of his unorthodox views and offensive behavior—his proposals to ban Muslim immigration and to build a wall along the southern border, his comments denigrating women and suggesting Mexicans are rapists—had Lipman’s dinner companions in a state of panic and dismay. “There was this overwhelming fear that rights across the board were about to be destroyed,” Lipman recalls.

Before that dinner, politics interested Lipman but weren’t an animating force in her life. “These policy conversations, conversations about representation, didn’t really exist in my world before this cycle,” she says. “I’m about to graduate, and I was trying to figure out what I was doing with my life.” She’s still planning to practice law at a firm, but when she took note of her peer group’s anxiety about the election and their fresh interest in politics—as well as her own—she started crafting an addendum to her plan: She would run for a position as an alder woman, the equivalent of a city council member, in her hometown of Chicago. Trump’s victory in November solidified her decision.