This paper demonstrates that the relationship between wanting a descriptive representative based on gender, and giving that attitude weight in voting decisions, is weakest among White women voters. Among under-represented groups of voters, White women were uniquely positioned going into the 2016 presidential election—they had the option to choose “one of their own” in terms of race and gender. Yet, the majority did not vote for the White woman on the ballot, Hillary Rodham Clinton. This outcome is an opportunity to interrogate how descriptive representation functions in different ways across groups with distinct socio-political positions in American politics. I argue that the relationship between desiring descriptive representation, and giving it weight when deciding for whom to vote for, is different across groups. Using American National Election Survey (ANES) data, I show that this is the case in the 2016 election. Nearly two-thirds of White women who said that electing more women is important, voted for Trump. Moreover, White women's espoused belief in the necessity of electing more women had no significant effect on their ultimate vote choice. In contrast, the same desire for increased descriptive representation based on gender had large, positive, and significant effects on women of color's vote choice. This study bears on extant research considering descriptive representation's importance to voters based only on race, or gender, and on the broader literature linking group identities and voter behavior.

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Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections advances an intersectional account for why the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in elected office has proven so persistent. Using an original dataset encompassing nearly every state legislative general election from 1996 to 2015, and interview and survey data from 42 states, the book demonstrates that factors in candidate emergence that have long been treated as exclusively “racial” or “gendered” in political science are, in fact, shaped by race and gender simultaneously. Focusing on women and men from the two fastest-growing racial groups in the United States—Asian Americans and Latina/os—the book shows that prevailing conceptions of the utility of majority-minority districts and the importance of individual-level concerns like ambition in explaining representation on the ballot require revision. The intersectional model of electoral opportunity presented in the book argues that overlapping and simultaneous structural factors play a previously underappreciated role in shaping who runs for office—and who does not. At the national level, the distribution of majority-white populations across most districts sharply constrains the number of realistic opportunities for nonwhite women and men to get on the ballot. At the local level, within districts and communities of color, the scarcity of viable opportunities to run exacerbates informal processes and institutions that tend to push women of color further from the candidate pipeline. These interactive features of the landscape of electoral opportunities produce a systemic absence of competition for descriptive representation in most state legislative elections.