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A record-breaking number of women were elected governor in 2022 – here are 7 things to know about how that happened

Many factors contributed to a record number of women winning the governor’s office in 2022. Among them: It helps to have political experience.

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Massachusetts Gov.-elect Maura Healey, at a Democratic election night party Nov. 8, 2022, in Boston. AP Photo/Michael Dwyer

Twelve women won a governor’s office in the November 2022 midterm election. Those 12 represent a record number of women governors, more than one-quarter of the 46 women who have ever served as governor since 1974.

These women are slated to be inaugurated in early January 2023.

A governor heads a state’s executive branch. While their powers vary, governors are essential in writing and passing a state’s budget, shaping legislative priorities, signing bills into law and appointing top officials in the executive branch.

The governorship is a common path to the presidency and the vice presidency, and 19 governors have won U.S. Senate seats since 2000.

Diversity in who is elected governor is important. In a time of decreasing trust in democracy, women governors send a message to all Americans that their government is representative of all its people. In addition, research shows that women governors encourage other women to run for elective office and increase feelings of political efficacy among voters. Political efficacy is the connection citizens feel to their govt, allowing them to believe their input matters. Thus they are more likely to pay attention to the actions of their government and participate in politics.

Side-by-side head shots of two women with dark hair.
The 2022 Michigan governor’s race pitted challenger Tudor Dixon, the Republican candidate, left, against incumbent Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Whitmer won. AP Photo/Carlos Osorio

We are scholars who study American politics and women in politics. To understand the backgrounds of the candidates running for governor in 2022, we have gathered information on the prior political experience of all 420 announced candidates for governor in 2022, and from previous years, stretching back to 1978.

Here are seven things we found out about the record number of recently elected women to governorships and what they mean for American politics.

1. To win, you have to run

While this is obvious, women have historically been more hesitant to run than men. Imposter syndrome, the internalized sense that one is not competent or capable and any success is likely due to luck, is a significant barrier. Women often need to be recruited by political party leaders to run, but men usually decide on their own. A record 91 women candidates ran in primaries for governor in 2022. A record 25 women were major party nominees in the general election. Increased efforts to recruit women candidates, like Republican efforts with Right Direction Women, likely played a role.

2. Political experience matters

Women candidates were more likely to have held political office than their male counterparts in 2022. In the 12 races in which a woman won, each had significant political experience before running for governor.

There has never been a Black woman governor. In order to elect Black women as governors, Black women will need to gain more political experience. There were three Black women candidates, two with political experience, who, while they lost, ran competitive races against incumbents.

Kate Brown was the first openly LGBTQ woman governor. She was Oregon’s secretary of state and then was appointed governor. She was subsequently elected to the position in 2016. Both LGBTQ women who won in 2022 had significant political experience. Maura Healey served as Massachusetts attorney general, and Tina Kotek most recently served as speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives.

3. Democratic and Republican women approach the decision to run for governor differently

Political experience increases the chances of success.

Yet in 2022, Republican women were more willing than Democratic women to run without prior political experience. Over half of Democratic women – 52.5% – running in 2022 had political experience. Only 37.7% of Republican women had political experience.

The Democratic women who became party nominees were more likely to have held prior elective office than Republican women party nominees – 75% to 55.6%. Finally, their success rates differed. All Democratic women candidates running for governor with political experience won their general elections, versus 75% of the Republican women candidates.

4. Incumbency matters

The political science literature has a rich and deep history that documents the difficulty of beating an incumbent. All eight women incumbents who ran, won. In three races, these women incumbents defeated women challengers. And in a year in which a red wave was predicted to unseat Democratic incumbents at all levels of government, Democratic incumbents won, and women Democrats were no different. No Democratic woman incumbent governor lost her race. Ten of the 12 losing women gubernatorial candidates in 2022 faced incumbents. Those women who lost included six women candidates who had never held elective office.

Three men and one woman, with her right hand raised, standing together during a ceremony.
Connecticut Democrat Ella Grasso, the first woman governor elected unconnected to a political spouse, is sworn in on Jan. 8, 1975. AP Photo/Bob Child

5. Open seats provide opportunities for women candidates

Four women gubernatorial candidates won open seats out of five total open seats. An open seat is one for which no incumbent is running. In two of those open-seat races, both major-party candidates were women.

6. When women run, they are as successful as men

More women are running. There has been a notable change since 1978, when there were nine total women candidates for governor. In the 36 states that held gubernatorial elections in 2022, the number of women candidates increased tenfold from 1978, to 93.

In 2022, women represented 22% of all gubernatorial candidates, the highest percentage ever, and they made up 35% of all major party nominees. More women candidates have led to more women governors. Before 2000, there were never more than four women governors at one time. There are now 12.

7. Governors’ COVID policies differed between men and women

One study found that women governors were less likely to issue stay-at-home orders during COVID than male governors. At the same time, researchers found that women governors were associated with fewer deaths early in the pandemic. In states where women governors issued early stay-at-home orders, these orders were notably more effective in limiting deaths than in states in which male governors issued early stay-at-home orders. In the same research, women governors also were found to be more empathetic and more confident in their messaging during briefings.

No longer an exception

In 1974, Ella Grasso, a Connecticut Democrat, was the first woman elected governor without being the wife or widow of a man in politics. Since then, 45 more women have served as governor. Most early women governors were Democrats, while recently Republicans have elected women, too.

A half-century ago, a woman elected to any office was an exception. This is no longer true.

The 2022 political experience data tells us that women have entered the mainstream of American politics in both parties. Two state legislatures are majority women – Colorado and Nevada. Almost one-third of state legislators will be women in 2023.

Continued party recruitment and support of women to run in lower-level elected offices is key to increasing the number and diversity of women running for, and ultimately serving as, governor.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Government

Mathematicians use AI to identify emerging COVID-19 variants

Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants…

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Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.

Credit: source: https://phil.cdc.gov/Details.aspx?pid=23312

Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.

The framework combines dimension reduction techniques and a new explainable clustering algorithm called CLASSIX, developed by mathematicians at The University of Manchester. This enables the quick identification of groups of viral genomes that might present a risk in the future from huge volumes of data.

The study, presented this week in the journal PNAS, could support traditional methods of tracking viral evolution, such as phylogenetic analysis, which currently require extensive manual curation.

Roberto Cahuantzi, a researcher at The University of Manchester and first and corresponding author of the paper, said: “Since the emergence of COVID-19, we have seen multiple waves of new variants, heightened transmissibility, evasion of immune responses, and increased severity of illness.

“Scientists are now intensifying efforts to pinpoint these worrying new variants, such as alpha, delta and omicron, at the earliest stages of their emergence. If we can find a way to do this quickly and efficiently, it will enable us to be more proactive in our response, such as tailored vaccine development and may even enable us to eliminate the variants before they become established.”

Like many other RNA viruses, COVID-19 has a high mutation rate and short time between generations meaning it evolves extremely rapidly. This means identifying new strains that are likely to be problematic in the future requires considerable effort.

Currently, there are almost 16 million sequences available on the GISAID database (the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data), which provides access to genomic data of influenza viruses.

Mapping the evolution and history of all COVID-19 genomes from this data is currently done using extremely large amounts of computer and human time.

The described method allows automation of such tasks. The researchers processed 5.7 million high-coverage sequences in only one to two days on a standard modern laptop; this would not be possible for existing methods, putting identification of concerning pathogen strains in the hands of more researchers due to reduced resource needs.

Thomas House, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “The unprecedented amount of genetic data generated during the pandemic demands improvements to our methods to analyse it thoroughly. The data is continuing to grow rapidly but without showing a benefit to curating this data, there is a risk that it will be removed or deleted.

“We know that human expert time is limited, so our approach should not replace the work of humans all together but work alongside them to enable the job to be done much quicker and free our experts for other vital developments.”

The proposed method works by breaking down genetic sequences of the COVID-19 virus into smaller “words” (called 3-mers) represented as numbers by counting them. Then, it groups similar sequences together based on their word patterns using machine learning techniques.

Stefan Güttel, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, said: “The clustering algorithm CLASSIX we developed is much less computationally demanding than traditional methods and is fully explainable, meaning that it provides textual and visual explanations of the computed clusters.”

Roberto Cahuantzi added: “Our analysis serves as a proof of concept, demonstrating the potential use of machine learning methods as an alert tool for the early discovery of emerging major variants without relying on the need to generate phylogenies.

“Whilst phylogenetics remains the ‘gold standard’ for understanding the viral ancestry, these machine learning methods can accommodate several orders of magnitude more sequences than the current phylogenetic methods and at a low computational cost.”


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There will soon be one million seats on this popular Amtrak route

“More people are taking the train than ever before,” says Amtrak’s Executive Vice President.

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While the size of the United States makes it hard for it to compete with the inter-city train access available in places like Japan and many European countries, Amtrak trains are a very popular transportation option in certain pockets of the country — so much so that the country’s national railway company is expanding its Northeast Corridor by more than one million seats.

Related: This is what it's like to take a 19-hour train from New York to Chicago

Running from Boston all the way south to Washington, D.C., the route is one of the most popular as it passes through the most densely populated part of the country and serves as a commuter train for those who need to go between East Coast cities such as New York and Philadelphia for business.

Veronika Bondarenko captured this photo of New York’s Moynihan Train Hall. 

Veronika Bondarenko

Amtrak launches new routes, promises travelers ‘additional travel options’

Earlier this month, Amtrak announced that it was adding four additional Northeastern routes to its schedule — two more routes between New York’s Penn Station and Union Station in Washington, D.C. on the weekend, a new early-morning weekday route between New York and Philadelphia’s William H. Gray III 30th Street Station and a weekend route between Philadelphia and Boston’s South Station.

More Travel:

According to Amtrak, these additions will increase Northeast Corridor’s service by 20% on the weekdays and 10% on the weekends for a total of one million additional seats when counted by how many will ride the corridor over the year.

“More people are taking the train than ever before and we’re proud to offer our customers additional travel options when they ride with us on the Northeast Regional,” Amtrak Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Eliot Hamlisch said in a statement on the new routes. “The Northeast Regional gets you where you want to go comfortably, conveniently and sustainably as you breeze past traffic on I-95 for a more enjoyable travel experience.”

Here are some of the other Amtrak changes you can expect to see

Amtrak also said that, in the 2023 financial year, the Northeast Corridor had nearly 9.2 million riders — 8% more than it had pre-pandemic and a 29% increase from 2022. The higher demand, particularly during both off-peak hours and the time when many business travelers use to get to work, is pushing Amtrak to invest into this corridor in particular.

To reach more customers, Amtrak has also made several changes to both its routes and pricing system. In the fall of 2023, it introduced a type of new “Night Owl Fare” — if traveling during very late or very early hours, one can go between cities like New York and Philadelphia or Philadelphia and Washington. D.C. for $5 to $15.

As travel on the same routes during peak hours can reach as much as $300, this was a deliberate move to reach those who have the flexibility of time and might have otherwise preferred more affordable methods of transportation such as the bus. After seeing strong uptake, Amtrak added this type of fare to more Boston routes.

The largest distances, such as the ones between Boston and New York or New York and Washington, are available at the lowest rate for $20.

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International

The next pandemic? It’s already here for Earth’s wildlife

Bird flu is decimating species already threatened by climate change and habitat loss.

I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.

I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.

This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.

How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.

This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.

This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.

H5N1 originated on a Chinese poultry farm in 1997. ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock

The first signs

Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.

We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.

Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.

Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.

Unfortunately, our warnings were correct.

A roving sickness

Two decades on, bird flu is killing species from the high Arctic to mainland Antarctica.

In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.

Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.

The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.

Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.

At the crossroads

Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.

Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.

It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.

Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.

Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.

A colony of king penguins.
Remote penguin colonies are already threatened by climate change. AndreAnita/Shutterstock

How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.

To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.

Diana Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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