Report: 35 percent of candidates running in NJ are women

<p>New Jersey voters will have many women to choose from at the polls Tuesday.</p>

News 12 Staff

Nov 7, 2017, 4:00 AM

Updated 2,626 days ago

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Report: 35 percent of candidates running in NJ are women
New Jersey voters will have many women to choose from at the polls Tuesday.
According to the Rutgers' Center for American Women and Politics, the Garden State has 79 women on the ballot for state legislative offices. There are also 37 women running for state freeholder. That's just over 35 percent of the candidates.
Debbie Walsh runs Ready to Run, a nonpartisan campaign training program at Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers that encourages women to run for elected office. Walsh says that the last presidential election and campaign had a lot to do with an increased interest in women running for public office.
“It’s become a moment where women are feeling like they can't afford to sit on sidelines in politics anymore,” she says. “They've gotten to point that they have to represent their own voices.”
Walsh says that the Ready to Run enrollment has exploded since last year.
“Normally we have about 150 women who participate,” she says. “This past year we had 270 woman.”
Walsh says that they had to move the program to a larger venue to accommodate all of the participants.
She say that of the women who go through the Ready to Run program, about 30 end up running for office. About 70 percent of those candidates wind up winning their races.
More information about the Ready to Run program can be found HERE.