2024
October 28 - Politico
Lisa Kashinsky. “Harris is pounding Trump on fascism. Some Dems think that’s a mistake.”
“‘On every single trip the vice president has made to Michigan, she has been laser-focused on manufacturing, strengthening the economy and lowering costs,’ Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said in a statement the campaign provided to POLITICO.
“But as they canvassed a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills on Friday, Democratic activists Marcie Paul and Emily Feinstein found Harris still had work to do on that front. Multiple voters expressed concerns about the economy. One man, an auto-industry worker who said he would not vote for Trump again after Jan. 6 but remained undecided in this election, said he wanted to hear more about the candidates’ business policies. One woman said she is voting for Harris in large part because of reproductive rights — but that she has ‘no’ sway over her husband who ‘thinks business is more important.’
“For Harris, ‘there’s a balance between the issues and the dangers of Trump,’ said Paul, who chairs the Michigan-based progressive women’s group Fems for Dems. And right now, she said, voters want to hear ‘who [Harris] is and what she wants to do. They’re still getting to know her.’
“Trump, on the other hand: ‘They know who he is,’ Paul said.
“‘Unfortunately, personally, I feel as though we knew this about him,’ Paul said of the recent revelations about what critics say are Trump’s fascist tendencies. ‘It’s just another drop in a very deep bucket.’”
October 15 - BBC
Madeline Halpert. “Harris started 'like a rocket' in Michigan. Now she's facing headwinds”
“Marcie Paul is nervous.
“A Democratic activist, Ms Paul has been knocking on hundreds of strangers’ doors, making phone calls and sending out flyers, all in an effort to woo people here to vote for Kamala Harris.
“When Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate in July, Ms Paul was hopeful, as she saw the vice-president go “off like a rocket” in Michigan….
“‘To keep that pace for the whole race - even though it’s seriously abbreviated - would be really unrealistic for anyone,’ said Ms Paul, a resident of West Bloomfield, Michigan and co-founder of the liberal advocacy group Fems for Dems. ‘But I thought that we’d be a little more comfortable.’…
“Although the state is far from the southern border, Democratic organisers keep hearing that immigration is a top concern for Michigan voters.
“‘I don’t understand why,’ said Ms Paul, the Fems for Dems leader. ‘It’s just really not relevant for us.’…
“Sharon Baseman, the vice chair of Fems for Dems, said she hopes these concerns motivate people not to become complacent.
“‘We’re all scared,’ she said.”
October 5 - HotAir
John Sexton. “Michigan Democrats are nervous”
…"‘What did we see? Money coming in like crazy. Everybody was excited. There was such a bump,’ said Lori Goldman, who founded Fems for Dems, a leading Michigan Democratic voter outreach group based in Oakland County. ‘And now, you know, it’s neck and neck.’”
October 3 - ABC News In-depth - Australian Public Broadcast Service
“The In Doubt Swing State that could cost Kamala the Presidency” | Foreign Correspondent
Start at 29:28 for a segment in this documentary featuring our chair, Marcie Paul.
September 30 - Detroit Free Press
John Wisely. “In suburban Oakland County, a Trump or Harris success will be measured on the vote margins”
“BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. ― It’s late afternoon and a handful of volunteers sit around a table at the Oakland County Republican Party headquarters in this wealthy suburb a dozen miles northwest of Detroit….
…A few nights later, a similar scene plays out four miles away in Lori Goldman’s dining room…
‘When Hillary Clinton ran, I had the largest weekly phone bank in Michigan,’ said Goldman, a Realtor by day who founded a group called Fems for Dems. ‘We got tons of people that came out to phone bank for Hillary, and we're doing that again.’…
September 19 - Bridge Michigan
Lauren Gibbons. “Suburban shift helped Dems win Michigan. Kamala Harris needs it to hold”
“ROYAL OAK — As spring turned into summer and the election inched closer, Marcie Paul was beginning to fear that the Democratic ticket was ‘a tough game to sell’ in Oakland County.
“Then Vice President Kamala Harris entered the presidential race, and everything changed.
“‘It was almost like a switch went on,’ said Paul, a West Bloomfield resident and chair of Fems for Dems, an Oakland County-based group that works to turn out women voters for Democrats.
“But in a county that played a crucial role in the 2020 election and could again help decide the presidency, control of the U.S. Senate and the state House, Paul isn’t ready to breathe a sigh of relief.
“‘We do feel like the center of the political world right now, and for good reason,’ she said. ‘We can't just think of Oakland County as safe. It's got to make up for every vote that we might not get elsewhere.’”
August 24 - AP
Lisa Mascaro. “‘It’s our time’: As Harris accepts the nomination, many women say a female president is long overdue”
“LORI GOLDMAN, Michigan, founded Fems for Dems in 2016 to elect Hillary Clinton
“At 65, she said, ‘I’m too old to not ever have seen a president that’s female in the United States.’ On Election Day 2016, Goldman had about 30 people to her house and they canvassed until the afternoon, all the while thinking it unnecessary. She said she’s less naïve now.
“For Goldman and chair of Fems for Dems Marcie Paul, the difference between organizing in 2016 and now is knowing the impacts of a Trump administration. Both are mothers, and they cited their daughters’ futures as a reason to vote Harris, both for her policy on reproductive rights and for her potential to be the first female president. Paul said it’s the most important election of a lifetime. ‘But really — this time it is.’”
August 2 - BBC
Madeline Halpert. “In one US state, women politicians dominate. What pointers can it offer Kamala Harris?”
“‘Women are still underestimated,’ said Marcie Paul, the chair of Fems for Dems, an advocacy group for liberal women in Michigan. ‘It’s going to be no different for her [Ms Harris], I believe, than it was when they said three women on the top of the ticket cannot possibly win in Michigan.’
“‘More generally, female candidates face more superficial criticisms than male politicians about how they look, how they carry themselves and how they speak, said Ms Paul, the Fems for Dems leader who helps encourage women to vote and run for office.’”…
June 17 - CNN
“They're Democrats in a battleground state. Hear what's keeping them up at night”
President Joe Biden won Michigan by just over 150,000 votes in 2020, flipping the state from red to blue. Yet polls show the president's popularity may be slipping in the swing state. CNN Senior National Correspondent Miguel Marquez follows Democrats in Oakland County, MI as they fight to keep the state blue in the 2024 election. Watch the video.
April 14 - The Hill
Julia Mueller. "Suburban women are more complicated than 'soccer moms'"
..."There’s also a growing gender gap in college education as more young women get degrees, and many suburban households rely on dual incomes.
"'So even the mom that drives her kids to soccer is doing it with her cellphone on, holding a meeting on Zoom,' said Marcie Paul, chair of the Michigan-based group Fems for Dems."
"Trump, in particular, has seen warning signs from suburban women, though he argued at a campaign stop earlier this month that 'suburban housewives actually like Donald Trump.'
"'I suppose the few women that like to be labeled 'suburban housewife' – they might tolerate him, perhaps. But 'suburban housewife' doesn’t speak to the vast majority of women who embody many different adjectives,' Paul said."
March 7 - Time
Charlotte Alter. “The Dread Election”
“Lori Goldman has spent the last eight years of her life working to defeat Trump. As the founder of Fems for Dems, a grassroots group of suburban Democrats in Michigan, she devotes nearly all her free time to building membership, hosting candidates, and organizing fundraisers. When she started the group, her triplets were 8. For nearly half their lives, Goldman’s political work consumed her—’seven days a week, seven nights a week,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t there if my kids needed something.’…”
February 6 - NBC News
Babe Gutierrez and Fallon Gallagher. “Suburban women helped Biden win in 2020, and he’s trying to keep them in his coalition this year. His campaign is already running ads targeting female voters in places like Michigan.”
“DETROIT — Suburban women were a critical voting bloc for Joe Biden in the 2020 election — and they may play an outsize role in key swing states again.
“Marcie Paul is an organizer of Fems for Dems, a group that formed in early 2016 when the founder sent an e-mail to friends that said she planned to help elect the first female president. After Hillary Clinton lost that election, the group turned its attention to booting then-President Donald Trump from the White House in 2020.
“‘Trump is revolting,’” Paul said, adding that she thought Biden was doing a better job than she had ever expected.”…
‘He doesn’t excite people the way Obama did,’ Paul said of Biden. ‘But fear is a huge motivator.’
“The fear she’s referring to is a dread that Trump will retake the White House. The NBC News poll found Trump leading Biden by 5 percentage points in a hypothetical matchup, within the margin of error…”
2023
March 6 - Detroit Free Press
Bill Laytner. “Oakland County has made stunning political shift from red to blue: Here’s why.”
“In stunning shifts from red to blue, Michigan liberals rule two places where their power once was scarce: Lansing and Oakland County.
“As the political year ramps up, liberals in both places are vowing to see decades of hope become action. That’s a recent refrain from Democratic state lawmakers. The same is coming from local activists. A batch met recently in Oakland County.
“At the Birmingham Unitarian Church, which actually is in Bloomfield Hills, the meeting whose named sponsors were environmental groups began with state Sen. Rosemary Bayer, hardly a rabid leftist. Bayer is a former data and analytics guru who narrowly flipped a Republican district in 2018. After redistricting forced her to move from Beverly Hills to West Bloomfield, Bayer won her new district last fall by 14 points…
“A short parade of other politicians bounced from more talk on gun safety (state Rep. Sharon MacDonell of Troy) to outrage about the outage (U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, whose new district has five cities in Oakland County). All of the non-politicians then stood and told their affiliations, ranging from the nonpartisan (Southfield school board, Voters Not Politicians, National Council of Jewish Women), to the clearly partisan (Fems for Dems, local Democratic Party clubs), to some clear left-leaners (American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, Unitarian-Universalist Social Justice Network…”
2022
2021
February 22 - The American Prospect
Steve Rosenthal. “Organizing Going Forward.”
“We must help nourish the indigenous organizations that grew out of the Trump resistance. Following the election of Trump in 2016, something unheard-of happened. Thousands of progressive, volunteer-led groups spontaneously burst on the scene to mobilize to stop Trump’s agenda and defeat Republican candidates: Groups like Indivisible, Flippable, Run for Something, Sister District, and the Sunrise Movement with something of a national profile; and local groups, like Rooted in Resistance in California, Fems for Dems in Michigan, and Liberal Women of Chesterfield County in Virginia, seemed to pop up everywhere. Those of us who have toiled in the organizing vineyards for decades were shocked and uplifted. These groups played an invaluable role in the 2018 midterm election successes Democrats enjoyed, particularly in suburban and exurban areas. There is no denying that the impacts of COVID-19 profoundly impacted the ability of these grassroots groups to implement their strategies in 2020, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t resurrect their efforts or that we should ignore other grassroots organizations and organizers that were born out of this movement.”
2020
December 28 - AP
Josh Boak, Nicholas Riccardi and Clarie Galofaro. “A divided nation asks: What's holding our country together?”
“A coalition of suburban women achieved what they set out to do — help evict Trump from the White House. But Lori Goldman, in Oakland County, Michigan, who runs the group Fems for Dems, can’t shake the sense that their mission now is more critical than it’s ever been.
“‘We got rid of this blight, this cancer,’ said Goldman, 61. ‘We cut him out. But we know that cancer has spread, it’s spread to soft tissue, other organs. And now we have to save the rest of the body.’
“Trump isn’t gone, not really, she said. She is horrified at the number of Americans who believe his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud.
“‘That’s a dangerous, dangerous place to be in,’ she said. ‘This country is in a lot of trouble.’
“It feels to her that the United States is caught in a period of great transition. The bright, progressive future she longs for seems inevitable. But she thinks a large portion of America would prefer to turn back the clock.
“Trump called people like her the ‘suburban housewives of America,’ and tried to appeal to them by spreading fear about Black Lives Matter protesters, crime and low-income housing. Still, Biden won 54% of suburban voters, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of the electorate.
“Goldman can't understand why 74 million Americans voted for Trump. She went on national television and said she was ashamed that most of her own relatives were among them. Now some of her siblings don’t want to talk to her anymore.
“To her, this is a microcosm of one of the greatest challenges this country has faced: that tribalized politics has pitted people against each other in a way far more profound than ever before. It is no longer Republicans versus Democrats. It has splintered families and friends.
“She weeps when she talks about the rift.”
October 19 - AP
Claire Galofaro. “‘Our house is on fire': Suburban women lead charge vs. Trump.”
“She walks with the determination of a person who believes the very fate of democracy might depend on the next door she knocks on, head down, shoulders forward. She wears nothing fussy, the battle fatigues of her troupe: yoga pants and sneakers. She left her Lincoln Aviator idling in the driveway, the driver door open -- if this house wasn’t the one to save the nation, she can move quickly to the next.
“For most of her life, until 2016, Lori Goldman had been politically apathetic. Had you offered her $1 million, she says, she could not have described the branches of government in any depth. She voted, sometimes.
“Now every moment she spends not trying to rid America of President Donald Trump feels like wasted time.
“‘We take nothing for granted,’” she tells her canvassing partner. “‘They say Joe Biden is ahead. Nope. We work like Biden is behind 20 points in every state….’”
“Goldman started her group, Fems for Dems, in early 2016 by sending an email to a few hundred friends that said she planned to help elect the first female president and asked if they’d like to join her. Four years later, their ranks have swelled to nearly 9,000.
“There is one thing Goldman gives Trump credit for. He stormed into the White House on pure guts and bombast, unwilling to acknowledge failure, averse to saying sorry. Those are not natural traits for most women who’ve absorbed societal expectations to please and be polite, she says. But she dug deep within herself to find some hint of them....”
September 20 - MLive
Malachi Barrett. “Biden campaigners say they’re all over Michigan, even if you can’t see them.”
“Fems for Dems, a women-led organization working in the suburbs of Oakland and Macomb Counties, held its first canvassing event Friday. The grassroots organization has held a handful of small in-person events with limited attendance, social distancing and temperature checks.
“Board Chair Julie Campbell-Bode said activists are feeling ‘Zoom fatigue’ after months of online meetings and conference calls.
“‘We’re trying to be safe and smart because quite frankly, our community wouldn’t have it any other way; they would call us out if we were doing anything they saw to be irresponsible,’ Cambell-Bode said. ‘The honest truth is that people are lonely at this time. It’s not been easy, but we’ve have tried to have a balanced approach to it.’
“Campbell-Bode said volunteers in Michigan’s suburbs helped send 100,000 voter information postcards with details on voter registration and absentee ballots.”
August 3 - Politico
Rikha Sharma Rani. “Could These Evangelical Democrats Change the Party?”
“Of course, with a second Trump term on the line, the possibility of cutting into the president’s evangelical base could prove too hard to resist, even for Democratic voters skeptical of religion. Lori Goldman, founder of Fems for Dems, a political action committee in Michigan that seeks to elect progressives, said her organization would support any candidate whose policies align with progressive values, though she acknowledges deeply religious candidates give her pause. ‘I get a bad taste in my mouth,’ she says. ‘People have done the most egregious things in the name of religion since the beginning of time.’”
2018 and 2019 EVENTS BELOW… see more about fems local, national, and international coverage.
2019
June 11, 2019 - Detroit Free Press
Kathleen Gray. “Signs Michigan Is Prepping for 2020 Election Earlier than Usual.” Click here.
October 8, 2019 - Detroit News
Leonard Fleming. “GOP Keeps Up Attacks on Stevens, Slotkin Over Impeachment Inquiry.” Click here.
May 21, 2019 - Click on Detroit (Video)
Mara MacDonald. “Abortion Rights Activists Rally Across Michigan in Wake of Alabama Abortion Ban.” Click here.
August 20, 2019 - Downtown Newsmagazine, Birmingham Bloomfield
Dana Casadei. “Lori Goldman.” Click here.
July 14, 2019 - MLive.com (Video)
Malachi Barrett. “Democrats and Trump Supporters Fight for Women’s Votes in Michigan Suburbs.” Click here.
March 18, 2019 - Detroit Free Press
Kathleen Gray. “Beto O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand to Campaign in Michigan on Monday.” Click here.
March 19, 2019 - Detroit Free Press
Kathleen Gray. “US Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand Touts Presidential Candidacy at Town Hall in Michigan.” Click here.
January 15, 2019 - Detroit Free Press
Kathleen Gray. “Election Success for Women Could Extend to State Party Leadership Jobs.” Click here.
2018
November 11, 2018 - Detroit Free Press
Bill Laitner. “Republican and Patterson's Hold on Oakland County May Be at an End.” Click here.
November 11, 2018 - Detroit Free Press
Kathleen Gray and Aleanna Siacon. “Celebrities Join the Campaign Trail to Boost Michigan Candidates.” Click here.
March 27, 2018 - The Detroit Jewish News
“Politically Active Women.” Click here.
May 28, 2018 - Detroit Free Press
Kathleen Gray. “Who's Your Political Soul Mate? Candidate Speed Dating Helps Make Match.” Click here.
October 15, 2018 - Detroit Free Press
Bill Laitner. “Dems Target Oakland County in Bid to Flip House, Senate Seats to Blue.” Click here.