2018 United States midterm elections

The 2018 United States midterm elections enter She Said as part of the political aftermath surrounding public allegations of sexual misconduct and the growing visibility of women’s voices. The book singles out an unprecedented wave of female candidates and Rachel Crooks’s Ohio legislative primary victory, linking electoral participation to a wider period of public action without claiming that one directly caused the other.

A wave of candidacies

The book characterizes the midterms as an unprecedented surge of female candidates and points to diverse candidates making history. It presents this change as part of a political moment in which women were increasingly visible not only as sources in public accounts of abuse, but also as participants seeking office. The reference establishes the scale and significance of the candidacy wave, though the book does not provide a detailed account of the election results or the candidates’ campaigns.

Rachel Crooks’s primary victory

Rachel Crooks, who had accused Donald Trump of sexual assault, ran for public office and won a legislative primary in Ohio. The book’s brief reference makes her primary victory a concrete instance of political participation during the midterm period. It identifies the result as a primary win, not a general-election outcome, and does not give further details about her campaign or subsequent electoral prospects.

Public voice and civic action

The elections appear alongside accounts of women taking public action in different settings. At a gathering of women whose experiences included workplace harassment and assault, Kim Lawson described filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and participating in a strike at McDonald’s. Her account included speaking publicly, giving interviews, and pushing her daughter in a stroller during the march. These actions are not presented as campaign activity or as a direct cause of the electoral surge; placed near the book’s references to the midterms, they show the broader range of ways women were asserting public agency.

Significance in the narrative

For She Said, the midterms serve as evidence that the period’s changes extended beyond the reporting of individual allegations. The candidate surge and Crooks’s primary victory mark women’s entry into formal electoral politics, while the surrounding accounts document activism and public testimony elsewhere. The book records this political opening but does not establish a direct causal link between the Weinstein reporting, the women’s activism it describes, and the election results.