Skip to content

Republish This Story

* Please read before republishing *

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Creative Commons license as long as you follow our republishing guidelines, which require that you credit The 19th and retain our pixel. See our full guidelines for more information.

To republish, simply copy the HTML at right, which includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to The 19th. Have questions? Please email [email protected].

— The Editors

Loading...

Modal Gallery

/

Menu

  • Our Mission
  • Our Team
  • Latest Stories
  • Upcoming Events
  • Contact Us
  • Newsletter
  • Donate
  • Work With Us
  • Fellowships
    • From the Collection

      Changing Child Care

      Illustration of a woman feeding a baby a bottle
      • As climate change worsens hurricane season in Louisiana, doulas are ensuring parents can safely feed their babies

        Jessica Kutz · May 5
      • Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito argued abortion isn’t an economic issue. But is that true?

        Chabeli Carrazana · May 4
      • Pregnant people are at 'greater risk' in states hit hard by wildfire smoke, air pollution, new report shows

        Jessica Kutz · April 20
    • From the Collection

      Next-Gen GOP

      Illustration of a woman riding an elephant
      • A banner year for Republican women

        Amanda Becker · November 11
      • Republican women could double representation in the U.S. House

        Amanda Becker · November 4
      • U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik wants to elect more Republican women into office

        Barbara Rodriguez · August 13
    • From the Collection

      On The Rise

      Illustration of three women marching
      • Jessica Cisneros takes on the last anti-abortion U.S. House Democrat

        Amanda Becker · February 25
      • Meet J. Michelle Childs, South Carolina judge and possible Supreme Court contender

        Candice Norwood · February 18
      • ‘The bench is loaded’: A record number of Latinas are running for governor

        Barbara Rodriguez · February 11
    • From the Collection

      Pandemic Within a Pandemic

      Illustration of four people marching for Black Lives Matter with coronavirus as the backdrop
      • Some LGBTQ+ people worry that the COVID-19 vaccine will affect HIV medication. It won’t.

        Orion Rummler · November 23
      • Why are more men dying from COVID? It’s a complicated story of nature vs. nurture, researchers say

        Mariel Padilla · September 22
      • Few incarcerated women were released during COVID. The ones who remain have struggled.

        Candice Norwood · August 17
    • From the Collection

      Portraits of a Pandemic

      Illustration of a woman wearing a mask and holding up the coronavirus
      • For family caregivers, COVID is a mental health crisis in the making

        Shefali Luthra · October 8
      • A new database tracks COVID-19’s effects on sex and gender

        Shefali Luthra · September 15
      • Pregnant in a pandemic: The 'perfect storm for a crisis'

        Shefali Luthra · August 25
    • From the Collection

      The 19th Explains

      People walking from many articles to one article where they can get the context they need on an issue.
      • The 19th Explains: The governor’s races we’re watching in 2022

        Barbara Rodriguez · May 3
      • The 19th Explains: What to know about Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing

        Candice Norwood, Terri Rupar · March 21
      • The 19th Explains: Colleges are dropping the SAT in admissions. That’s a good thing for most girls.

        Nadra Nittle · March 3
    • From the Collection

      The Electability Myth

      Illustration of three women speaking at podiums
      • Do term limits help women candidates? New York could be a new testing ground

        Barbara Rodriguez · January 11
      • Girls are being socialized to lose political ambition — and it starts younger than we realized

        Barbara Rodriguez · September 23
      • Kathy Hochul’s rise in New York spotlights the barriers to women becoming governors

        Barbara Rodriguez · August 23
    • From the Collection

      The Impact of Aging

      A number of older people walking down a path of information.
      • Woman alleges that an assisted living facility denied her admission because she is transgender

        Sara Luterman · November 8
      • LGBTQ+ seniors fear having to go back in closet for the care they need

        Sara Luterman · October 12
      • The pandemic continues to strain nursing homes. What happens if a lot of them close?

        Mariel Padilla · September 9
    • From the Collection

      Voting Rights

      A series of hands reaching for ballots.
      • Florida’s redistricting fight continues. The head of the state League of Women Voters talks about what’s at stake.

        Barbara Rodriguez · April 19
      • Women have been sounding the alarm ahead of Texas’ first-in-the-nation primary

        Barbara Rodriguez · February 28
      • LGBTQ+ people of color are at risk from rising voter restrictions as federal protections falter in the Senate, advocates say

        Orion Rummler · January 19

    View all collections

  • Explore by Topic

    • Abortion
    • Business & Economy
    • Caregiving
    • Coronavirus
    • Education
    • Election 2020
    • Elections 2022
    • Environment & Climate
    • Health
    • Immigration
    • Inside The 19th
    • Justice
    • LGBTQ+
    • Politics
    • Race
    • Sports
    • Technology

    View All Topics

Home
  • Our Mission
  • Our Team
  • Latest Stories
  • Upcoming Events
  • Contact Us
  • Newsletter
  • Donate
  • Work With Us
  • Fellowships

We’re an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy. Read our story.

The 19th News(letter)

News that represents you, in your inbox every weekday.

You have been subscribed!

Submitting...

Uh-oh! Something went wrong. Please try again later.

Donate to get our member newsletter

The 19th thanks our sponsors. Become one.

Summer Lee is seen smiling at a podium as people hold signs that read
(Courtesy of Summer Lee for Congress campaign)

Elections 2022

Pennsylvania didn’t have a pipeline for candidates like Summer Lee — so she helped build one

Lee is seen as the front-runner in the Democratic primary to fill an open U.S. House seat near Pittsburgh.

Amanda Becker

Washington Correspondent

Amanda Becker portrait

Published

2022-04-26 06:00
6:00
April 26, 2022
am

Share

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email

When Summer Lee moved back home to the Pittsburgh area in 2015 after graduating from Howard University Law School, she did not plan to run for office.

Lee was an organizer. She supported Sen. Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential primary bid, then Hillary Clinton in the general election. The next year, when the high school Lee graduated from became engulfed in scandal after video surfaced showing school officials using stun guns and physical force on Black students, including some with special needs, she attended her first school board meeting.

“It was Black kids who were facing the worst outcomes, who were facing the worst and least amount of opportunities, who were being abused,” Lee recalled in a recent interview with The 19th. Most of the board members were White, and they were “so nonchalant about it,” she said.

The 19th thanks our sponsors. Become one.

Lee is the presumed front-runner in the Democratic primary to fill an open U.S. House seat in a recently redrawn Pittsburgh-area House district when Pennsylvanians vote May 17. Her progressive primary campaign faces headwinds from the local party, which backed one of her opponents, a more moderate, White man without political experience. If elected in November, she would be the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress. 

Lee’s metamorphosis from organizer to candidate began after that 2017 school board meeting. First, she encouraged a friend who was a parent in the district to run a write-in campaign for a board seat. Then she helped other Black candidates do the same. In a matter of weeks, they put four new members onto the board, along with a new superintendent and principal. Still, when the local chapter of the left-leaning Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) noticed Lee’s successes and reached out about running herself, she hesitated. 

“I wasn’t groomed for politics. I wasn’t someone who had political connections and had political networks. It was not something that was normal in my community. It wasn’t just a casual thought that someone like me, with my background, would have,” Lee said.

  • More from The 19th
    Tina Peters speaks into a microphone. An American flag can be seen in the background.
  • What happens if officials who run elections think they’re rigged?
  • Florida’s redistricting fight continues. The head of the state League of Women Voters talks about what’s at stake.
  • Older women voters may play a big role in the 2022 midterms, and they are not happy

“I was an organizer. I was not somebody who was in the foreground, right? I was a background person who really believed in the power of organizing. The thought had never crossed my mind up until that point,” she added.

Lee says she underwent a “very quick reconciliation” and decided it was time to move from the background to the foreground. In 2018, she was one of three DSA-backed women in Pennsylvania who took on incumbents and other moderate Democrats in primaries and went on to win state House seats. 

Lee, Sara Innamorato and Elizabeth Fiedler were all in their 30s. None had the traditional pedigree of a statehouse candidate: Lee was an organizer; Innamorato came from a working-class family she described as “apolitical” and had put herself through college; Fiedler was a recent public radio reporter who campaigned with her small children in tow. Their campaigns focused on environmental justice, raising wages, Medicare for All and equity in representation, with Lee and Innamorato challenging incumbent cousins from a Pittsburgh family prominent in Democratic politics. 

Innamorato wrote in 2017 during the nationwide #MeToo reckoning: “When women are not at the table, they are on the menu. But if we are at the table, they will pull up a chair and invite another woman to sit next to her. This has never been more true than in politics.” 

Pennsylvania ranked 49th among the 50 states at the time in terms of women’s representation in politics. There were no women representing Pennsylvania in the U.S. House or Senate. Only six of the mayors in the state’s 35 largest cities were women. Just 19 percent of state legislators were women. There were no women in statewide executive positions. 

Pennsylvania is still one of the 19 states that has never elected a woman governor. In 2018, when Lee, Innamorato and Fiedler were elected to the state House, four Democratic women from Pennsylvania were also elected to the U.S. House. It was a record-breaking year for women in congressional races generally, and their wins helped Democrats take back control of the lower chamber. 

Lee, Innamorato and Fiedler were vying for public office without a pipeline, or template, for candidates like themselves: young, progressive women running without the support of the Democratic establishment and little from its donor base. So, they built their own network. 

In 2016, Innamorato co-founded She Runs Southwestern Pennsylvania, which supported women running for office, before deciding to run herself. She was introduced to Lee and urged her to jump into the state House race. Innamorato heard Fiedler was running a progressive campaign in the Philadelphia area and called her to talk strategy. The three women convened at a statewide progressive policy conference and went on to hold joint fundraisers and coach one another throughout their campaigns. Lee founded Unite! PAC, an “unapologetically progressive” support system for candidates in western Pennsylvania. 

Even though they’re now either the incumbent in their state House reelection bid (Fiedler) or the only candidate in their primary race with elected experience (Lee), the women sometimes still find themselves without their party’s support. The Allegheny County Democratic Committee has backed Lee’s primary competitor, Steve Irwin, a corporate lawyer who has never held elected office. The Philadelphia Democratic Party endorsed Fiedler’s primary challenger, Michael Giangiordano, a real estate broker and political novice who embraced Donald Trump’s presidency on Twitter. 

A newsletter you can relate to

Storytelling that represents you, delivered to your inbox.

You have been subscribed!

Submitting…

Uh-oh! Something went wrong. Please try again later.

Some state and local parties stay out of contested primaries, or endorse the incumbents. In Pennsylvania, local Democratic party officials vote on whom to endorse in their respective districts. Innamorato said party representatives skew older than the voting population and are less diverse, too. 

“It’s not a system that is reflective of the actual electorate in an area … it’s been an inside baseball game for a long time, and it’s slowly changing in parts [of the state] but it hasn’t changed as a whole, and I don’t think we’ve had the leadership at the top to encourage that kind of diversification of the party,” she said. 

Lee said she and her contemporaries “have been able to tap into an expanding electorate, the base that we are going to need if we are going to actually beat back against extremism on the right” but it’s “going unrecognized by the party that’s just not been able to catch up.”

Lee’s House campaign is focused on some of the same issues that prompted her to run for the state House: environmental justice and equitable economic growth. She supports a pro-labor-union bill pending in Congress called the PRO Act, Democratic efforts to codify federal abortion access and Medicare for All health care. 

Her endorsers include Sanders, along with fellow progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts. She is backed by Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who has a national profile as a member of “the squad.” Lee is supported by left-leaning organizations including Justice Democrats and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, along with EMILY’s List, which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights. Several local chapters of the Service Employees International Union have also endorsed her. 

Lee said that the successful school board write-in campaigns, and then her state House bid, empowered her community to believe it was possible to challenge the status quo via electoral politics. Now, she’s taking it to the national stage. 

“We’re a community that was accustomed to the system sending us its representative, instead of the other way around. I would say it was a rebalancing, getting us back on track, where we were like: ‘No, this is not the way this is supposed to go, we’re supposed to send our representatives,’” she said.

Share

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email

Building stronger together.

A new model for nonprofit journalism: For our readers. For our team. For our community.

Become a member

Sign up for our newsletter

Up Next

Abortion rights demonstrators hold signs at the Oklahoma state Capitol. One reads

Abortion

At Oklahoma abortion clinics, each day could be the last for care as new laws loom

No new abortion ban has taken effect, but the impacts are already being felt in clinics across the state.

Read the Story

The 19th
The 19th is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Our stories are free to republish in accordance with these guidelines.

  • Donate
  • Subscribe to the Newsletter
  • Attend an Event
  • Jobs
  • Fellowships
  • Contact Us
  • About Us
  • Community Guidelines
  • Membership
  • Membership FAQ
  • Major Gifts
  • Sponsorship
  • Privacy
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram