The Women Changing Presidential Campaigns From the Inside

Julie McClain Downey, director of state communications for Senator Cory Booker’s presidential campaign, settled into the couch in her Washington, D.C., apartment last June, holding her newborn daughter with her left hand and scrolling through TweetDeck with her right. Technically she was still on the 12-week gender-blind paid leave available to all of the campaign’s full-time staffers. But she wasn’t going to miss Booker’s first major televised debate of the election cycle, one that in other circumstances—when she wasn’t in the throes of diaper changes and feedings—she would have watched from campaign headquarters. And so with the baby swing pulled up next to the sofa, she and her husband (also a Booker campaign staffer, also on paid leave) sat in the glow of the TV, cozy in their sweats. “We were like, ‘What is our life?’” says McClain Downey. “It’s so different now.”