'The time is right'—a startup wants to get 100 progressive women elected to Congress

After election results this November, we're starting to see what happens when people outraged by their politicians' sexism and transphobia run for office.

A new platform, built by a Google Politics alum and founding members of the Obama White House U.S. Digital Service, wants to make sure we don't lose that momentum. Project 100 is a tool to help progressive women get elected—and to help voters find the right progressive women to support and vote for.

"We developed an organization purpose-built to support the new wave of exciting women running around the country so women can actually win," co-founder Danielle Gram said.

Gram founded the organization alongside writer Isabel Kaplan and former U.S. Digital Service creative director Eduardo Ortiz. Google alum Eric Hysen is a senior advisor.

Project 100 is built to bridge the big gap between women deciding to run—as so many women did after the 2016 presidential election—and making sure they have the funds, institutional support, and volunteer base to win.

The platform uses an algorithm that incorporates more factors than just fundraising—the usual benchmark of political success—to help candidates reach more voters. The trending algorithm that shows website visitors candidates in their area also considers social media followings, endorsements, and media traction. The site directs its users to donate and tells them about candidates' backgrounds, like if they're entering politics from education, business, or the sciences.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

While there are other platforms out there that support women running for office—the most well-known of which is EMILY's List—Project 100's founders believe their approach is different. It's designed for the next generation of voters and activists who are frustrated with women's stagnated representation and with campaign tools that haven't fully caught up to the digital era.

The group of founding staffers come from political backgrounds. Gram, who used to lead the Tony Blair Foundation, had two great-great aunts who were radical suffragists and went on hunger strike to get the right to vote for women. Kaplan's mother was the first woman to run a presidential campaign, for 1988 Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. Hysen's parents volunteered for Democratic campaigns in the 1970s. And Ortiz served in the Marines before working on technology at the White House to help immigrants navigate the immigration system.

Hysen, who now works for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, brought his experience building political technology products. One of those was making sure polling places appeared in Google Search.

"A lot of startups tried to make the one shiny app that everyone will get on their phones and suddenly will make the entire world politically engaged. That's an idealistic view of how politics works that doesn't line up with the real world. I don't think there will ever be the Uber or Google of politics that takes off in the same way you see in Silicon Valley," Hysen said. "Every part of this design is designed around how people actually engage in politics, not how we hope they would."

That means that the platform is built to facilitate bursts of political engagement, not to suck people in to spend all their time on the site.

To appear on Project 100, candidates have to meet three bars of progressiveness: supporting equal treatment under the law, economic opportunity, and healthy people and communities. That means supporting LGBTQ rights, criminal justice reform, voting rights, and immigration reform; living wages and equal pay; and healthcare access, gun control, reproductive rights, and sexual assault prevention and response.

The categories are designed to be broad to apply to candidates from all kinds of districts. And Project 100 is designed as a sort of middle ground between voters and candidates.

The platform's short-term goal is to get 100 progressive women in Congress by 2020, or the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. That would bring representation of women in Congress from 20 percent to 23 percent.

Beyond its informational and fundraising site, Project 100 plans to add other features ahead of primary races in March, like incorporating existing get out the vote technology and introducing a toolkit for parties to raise money along with individual candidates.

"The time is right for this," Gram said. "2.5 million men and women marched in the Women's March. Between the #MeToo movement and activism for equal pay and reproductive rights, everyone is talking about these issues, but they haven't yet found a home for action. We want to be where they can go."