Long before voters cast ballots, many candidates have already been recruited, introduced to donors, evaluated by party leaders, and quietly judged as either “viable” or “not viable.”
Baltimore has a long history of Black women organizing their communities and stepping into leadership roles, yet there are still gaps in who holds positions of political power in the city. Seeing Black women in leadership does not explain what it takes to get them there. So how does that grassroots leadership translate into political power, and what barriers do Black women face when they try to move from organizing their communities to holding elected office?
In Baltimore and across Maryland, elected officials said the race began long before Election Day, with fundraising disparities, questions of credibility, and the pressure to prove they belonged in the first place.
After spending more than two decades working in international public health, including efforts to improve health care access and prevent infectious diseases, District 46 Delegate Robbyn Lewis entered politics in Baltimore. She was appointed to the Maryland House of Delegates in 2017 and elected to a full term in 2018.
During her campaign, one fundraising event brought the challenges into focus: Lewis raised only a few hundred dollars while an experienced male elected official raised $10,000.
One donor contributed to her campaign before later giving four times as much to the white male candidate running against her, she recalled.
“It’s just the way people think,” she said. “It’s just the way they look at women and the way they look at Black people.”
“Money is not just a resource. It’s also important for the signal that it sends to influential actors who are watching,” said Danielle Thomsen, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, whose research focuses on gender, race, and political ambition.
“Money is an important metric that people use to separate the ones who have a chance and the ones who don’t,” Thomsen said.
Recently, Thomsen collaborated with Savannah Plaskon, a researcher focused on race and gender, to examine more than 20,000 nonincumbent candidates in the U.S. House races between 1988 and 2022. The study found that white and Asian men raised more early campaign money and contributed more personal funds than Black men, Black women, and Latinas. It makes a difference in the first quarter of a campaign, when candidates are trying to establish themselves and attract attention from donors and other political actors.
The study focuses on congressional races, but other research has found similar fundraising disparities in state legislative elections. One study cited by Plaskon and Thomsen found that Black women running for state legislative office raised less than Latina, Asian and white women, although they received higher average contributions from political action committees, groups that raise and spend money to support political candidates, than white and Asian women.
Before entering the Maryland House of Delegates, District 20 Delegate Jheanelle Wilkins worked in civil rights advocacy, eventually becoming director of state and local government affairs at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
She was appointed to the House in 2017 and later ran for election in 2018. When she first began fundraising for office at 28, she said most people in her network were friends who were just beginning their careers, making it difficult to draw on a network of established donors.
“We weren’t making that much, so I’m definitely not asking them for thousands of dollars in checks,” Wilkins said.
“We don’t always have the money networks to be able to run,” she said.
A longtime medical professional, District 12A Delegate Terri Hill spent more than two decades working as a plastic surgeon and running her own medical practice in Maryland. In 2014, she decided to run for the House of Delegates because she wanted to address community challenges through policy rather than continue fighting those problems from the sidelines. But as she began building her campaign, she faced a question from professional fundraising consultants: “Who’s your financial base?”
Hill said that when she identified Black organizations and professional associations as her fundraising network, some consultants immediately questioned whether those communities could financially sustain a competitive campaign.
“Our natural affinity groups are important to winning, but they’re not sufficient,” Hill said. “You can have all the ‘you go girls’ you want, but if you can’t raise the funds to run the campaign, get your message out to voters and look like a viable candidate, you’re going to have a really hard time being successful.”
Nadia Brown, professor of government and director of Georgetown University’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program, said fundraising is part of a larger process in which political parties and influential people decide which candidates are worth supporting.
“Once a woman wins office, how did she get there?” Brown said. “Did she have comparable fundraising numbers to male counterparts or other women? What kind of resources did the political party put into her to get her elected? Were they invested in her?”
For Black women, she said, those political systems often overlap with expectations rooted in race and gender.
Beyond fundraising, Black women are often expected to prove themselves in ways other candidates are not, Baltimore City Councilwoman Phylicia Porter said.
“We are often pushed to overly verify our competence,” Porter said. “We’re pushed to be symbols of aesthetics as opposed to actual policy.”
Those dynamics are familiar to community organizer Javay Adams, who works directly with Baltimore residents preparing for civic leadership. Through the No Boundaries Coalition’s Block Captains Boot Camp Program and Baltimore Votes, Adams said leadership development begins long before launching a campaign.
Adams said Black women are often expected to work behind the scenes as campaign staffers and aides to elected officials rather than occupy visible leadership roles. “We’re expected to be in the background, underlying positions,” Adams said.
She said one of the biggest barriers she sees is helping future candidates build the support they need before campaign season begins.
That support can take different forms, from helping people understand how local government works to giving them the confidence and connections to see themselves as potential candidates. Community organizing can give Black women a record of leadership and community support that strengthens their credibility when entering politics. Adams said community organizations can help women turn their work on local issues into the relationships and recognition needed to pursue elected office.
Together, their experiences reveal that many of those barriers emerge long before Election Day. Limited access to wealth, skepticism from political gatekeepers, fundraising disparities, and heightened expectations shape campaigns before voters ever cast a ballot. For many Black women, the campaign begins not with a speech or a filing deadline, but with convincing others they are worthy of investment.
Lewis said she never saw herself as a candidate because she didn’t believe she was qualified. It took repeated encouragement from others to get her to consider running for office.
“I never in my life — not once — thought about being an elected official,” she said.
She said many women face that same hesitation, believing they aren’t qualified or never considering politics a possibility.
Hill said that is why she hopes more young Black women see public service as something within reach.
“There should not be any limitations within their minds,” Hill said. “If you see it, you can be it. And if you don’t see it, you should imagine being it anyway.”
The path to elected office involved more than earning votes. It meant finding donors, gaining the confidence of political gatekeepers, and being recognized as leaders before they ever appeared on a ballot.