Functionality / January 13, 2026
Meet the military wives fighting to win purple districts for Democrats and tell the Secretary of Defense.
Illustration by Victor Juhasz. In 2018, they called themselves “the Badasses,” a group of female national security and military veterans who ran for Congress as Democrats, in what turned out to be a wave of anti-Donald Trump victories and a landslide for female candidates. All five: Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, both former CIA officers; Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Elaine Luria of Virginia, both former naval officers; and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, an Air Force veteran, won their contests in purple districts that year. They emerged as an effective force of centrist-leaning liberals who challenged Trump and later helped President Joe Biden implement his welfare and infrastructure agenda. In 2024, Slotkin was elected to the Senate and in 2025, Spanberger and Sherrill won landslide victories to become governors of their states. Only Luria lost his seat, in 2022; she is running again this year and has a good chance of returning.
In 2026, their counterparts are the “Hell Cats”, four female Democratic military veterans who seek to follow the Badasses’ battle plan to win congressional seats in purple districts. They are JoAnna Mendoza of Arizona; retired Marine Corps Representative Juan Ciscomani; Rebecca Bennett of New Jersey, a Navy pilot officer, faces Rep. Thomas Kean; and Maura Sullivan, a Marine from New Hampshire who is seeking to replace Rep. Chris Pappas, who is running for an open Senate seat. There’s also Cait Conley, a West Point graduate, former National Security Council official and Army veteran with six overseas tours and three Bronze Stars, who is facing New York’s Hudson Valley Rep. Mike Lawler in one of only three districts won by Kamala Harris in 2024 and still held by a Republican. They could be key to the Democratic Party taking control of the House in 2027, since it will need just three seats to flip the House.
The Hell Cats are coming on the heels of historic wins by Slotkin, Spanberger and Sherrill over the past two years, and they are attracting national attention. They started a Signal chat with each other in mid-2025 and introduced themselves as the Hell Cats, after a cohort of female Marines in World War I who were confined to desk work but nonetheless wore uniform and earned the same pay as male Marines. “I was in high school on 9/11,” Conley says. With her long dark hair and engaging smile, she looks a bit like Demi Moore in the 1997 film. GI Jeanne before shaving his head to join the Navy SEALs. (The veteran admits without irony that the film partly inspired her military career.) “I was sitting there watching those towers fall, just 30 miles down the river. And being part of communities where we lost a lot of firefighters that day, as well as people in the financial sector, other first responders, I had the feeling: Someone else got us into this mess. And we’re going to fix it.” Terrible political leadership has led us into disastrous wars.
Conley had a similar feeling in 2024, when Trump returned to the White House and the supposedly centrist Lawler retained his seat. “At the end of November, seeing the country I love so divided and feeling that division tearing communities and even families apart is what concerns me most. »
Conley and her Hell Cat sisters believe their military experience allows them to reach a larger number of voters than many other Democrats and offers a solution to partisan polarization. Data collected by the political group VoteVets confirms this: Democratic military veterans perform on average 5.8 percentage points better than nonveteran Democratic candidates. Republican veterans, meanwhile, enjoy no advantage over their non-veteran colleagues. Of course, for all the political successes of their Badass predecessors, it’s worth noting that they haven’t been able to work bipartisan magic in Congress — at least not yet — even though their relative centrism likely helped several of them rise to state leadership, a much-needed contribution to strengthening democracy today.
It is relevant that Badasses and Hell Cats rose to service and leadership through the military, one of the most integrated institutions in American society and the most committed to giving its members the tools to advance economically, from job training to college tuition to mortgage assistance, all of which helped create the post-World War II middle class. As Trump destroys social programs and the safety net we have left, these female military veterans may be uniquely equipped to advocate for a 21st century society of opportunity and to be seen as credible by a bipartisan voting base that does not believe our current political establishment seriously addresses the political and economic decline of the past 50 years.
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“Veterans definitely have an advantage in the trust-building process. And yes, people honor their service, and that’s all good and important,” says Max Rose, a decorated Army veteran, former congressman and senior adviser to VoteVets, who trained a group of veterans opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to run for office in 2006 and has since helped build a cadre of Democratic veterans in Congress. “But their military service showed each of them what America’s potential was. You have this system that lifts people up, educates them, forges connections across cultural, socio-economic and ethnic divides like I’ve never seen. It breeds incredible solidarity and ambition to overcome challenges. what the Hell Cats bring.
Called to report: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrives for a congressional briefing after military strikes on ships in the Caribbean.(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) The Hell Cats are not carbon copies of the Badasses. Elected the same year as part of the left-wing team, featuring New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 2018 women military veterans sometimes presented themselves as moderate stooges of these progressive women. After Democrats lost congressional seats in 2020 even as Biden won the White House, Spanberger lambasted his party’s left wing. “If we consider Tuesday a success from a Congressional perspective, we’re going to tear ourselves apart in 2022,” Spanberger said. “This is reality.” She continued: “We must never use the words socialist Or socialism never again. »
At the time, AOC fired back: “You can’t just tell the black, brown, and young organizers who show up to save us every election to shut up or not let their representatives stand up for them when they need us,” she tweeted. “Or ask yourself why they don’t show up for the midterm exams when they are criticized for existing. Especially when they win.”
The 2018 veterans got slightly higher ratings from conservative “limited government” groups like the Institute for Legislative Analysis than Squad members, but they were only in the teens, while the Squad was in the single digits. In GovTrack.us’ ideological tracking, veteran Democrats were all in the most progressive 50 percent of the 435 House members, while the Squad was in the most progressive 10 percent. These were all reliable votes on Biden priorities, like the Build Back Better bill, which faced early opposition from conservative House Democrats (who ultimately supported it) and was torpedoed in the Senate by faux-Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
On one issue, foreign intervention, veteran Democrats might be more progressive than their nonveteran counterparts, Rose told me. “I think veterans – and this is certainly the case with the Hell Cats – are much more likely to want to use military force only when absolutely necessary, and to think about it responsibly. »
The Hell Cats seem a bit more ideologically diverse than their Badass predecessors. So far, they haven’t fought with the left of their party, and in my conversations with them, neither has mentioned New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (who ignored Spanberger’s warning never to mention socialism, to great effect), for better or worse.
All four Hell Cats are solidly working class and they represent themselves that way. Mendoza, the child of farmers, is a queer single mother who joined the military at 17 and whose family sometimes relied on SNAP and Medicaid when she was growing up. Conley’s parents never went to college. His mother worked for the U.S. Postal Service and raised three children; his father was a construction worker and his grandfather and great-grandfather worked in the brickyards of Montrose, New York. Sullivan won a scholarship to Northwestern University; while there, she worked three jobs to pay for her housing and food. Bennett went to college on an ROTC scholarship and worked two other jobs to get by.
Their military experience protects them from the tough questions that female candidates often face, underlines a Democratic consultant. (She did not want to be mentioned by name, for fear of being seen as perpetuating the stereotype that women leaders are somehow weaker than men.) “Just because you’ve been in the military doesn’t mean you’re actually a servant leader,” says Emily Cherniack, co-founder of New Politics, which recruits not only military veterans but also people who have served in Americorps, the Peace Corps, health care, education and other roles. non-profit. The Hell Cats credit Cherniack with introducing the group’s members last year.
“Through their service experience, they have learned to lead diverse teams,” Cherniack continues. “They’ve had to bring people together to a mission bigger than themselves. And they’ve been in some really difficult situations, whether it’s in Iraq, or a failing school with no resources, or being the first responders bringing relief to a country. [civilian] conservation body. My theory was that the lea experience dership is really necessary in political life.
Standing on principle: Senator Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA officer, participated in a video created by elected Democrats to tell the military that they do not have to follow illegal orders.(youtube.com/@senatorelissaslotkin / shorts) For a long time, recruiting candidates for the House of Representatives was primarily the responsibility of local Democratic leaders, alongside the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In 2006, the party took back the House, thanks in part to public disgust with the Iraq War and Republican sex and ethics scandals. That year, then-DCCC head Rahm Emanuel made a point of recruiting “macho” candidates like former college football star and social conservative Heath Shuler in North Carolina, retired Adm. Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, and decorated Illinois Iraq War veteran Tammy Duckworth, who is now a senator. That same year, Democratic Senate Campaign Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer, now Senate Minority Leader, endorsed social conservative and former Marine Jim Webb, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, to run for the Virginia Senate. VoteVets, also founded in 2006, launched a major campaign to recruit veterans into Democratic politics, aiming to wrest the GOP’s role as the pro-national security party. “Before VoteVets existed, Conservatives and Republicans were considered a pro-military, pro-security party for decades,” the organization’s website explains. “VoteVets helped change this dynamic…Today, some of America’s best-known veteran elected officials are Democrats.” That year, VoteVe ts endorsed Tim Walz of Minnesota and Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania, as well as Sestak and Duckworth. In 2018, he went all-in for Badasses and aggressively supported Spanberger and Sherrill’s bids for governor in 2025. Since then, the group has expanded into local and state elections, and in 2024, 143 of its candidates won their bids for city, state, or congressional seats. Recruiting local candidates ensures there is a strong pool of veterans who can advance.
VoteVets has also gone beyond veterans’ issues, becoming an active voice for gun safety legislation, public lands preservation, and labor rights. As the Trump administration has cut the federal workforce, 30 percent of which are military veterans, the group has emerged as a savvy force opposing those cuts. VoteVets currently supports 32 veteran Democrats, many of whom are incumbents, for Congress in 2026, including all four Hell Cats.
Over the past decade, the party leadership’s preference for middle-of-the-road candidates has spawned several other initiatives aimed at recruiting more progressives. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ insurgent 2016 presidential campaign inspired the formation of Justice Democrats, who helped recruit the 2018 candidates who would form the team, among others. The Collective PAC, which recruits and supports black candidates at all levels of government through its Black Campaign School, also emerged that year. Since then, he has helped elect more than 500 black leaders. Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump motivated the creation of Run for Something, founded in 2017 to recruit progressive Democrats under the age of 40 to run at the local and state levels. Run for Something reports having recruited or provided significant assistance to 1,500 young elected officials.
Meanwhile, EMILYs List, which has been recruiting and developing candidates since its founding in 1985, has stepped up its efforts with state legislatures and Congress after thousands of women contacted the group saying Trump’s election had inspired them to run for political office. Several mentions of EMILY’s List have also been supported by VoteVets. While we were complaining about the election over lunch in early 2017, Stephanie Schriock, then president of EMILYs List, told me about Badass Chrissy Houlahan, whom the group enthusiastically supported.
Outsider groups continue to emerge: David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland, Fla., school massacre, co-founded Leaders We Deserve in 2023 to recruit millennial and Gen Z candidates. Hogg’s determination to unseat Democratic Party stalwarts — some of whom were liberal women and people of color — angered even some progressive party leaders and cost him his seat as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. But his group perseveres. In 2025, the Working Families Party launched a formal effort to recruit and train working-class Democratic candidates, something sorely needed in a party that is losing its working-class base — including, more recently, some working-class voters of color.
Cats from Hell: From left, congressional candidates Cait Conley, JoAnna Mendoza and Rebecca Bennett use their military experience to argue for their fitness for office. The Hell Cats could benefit from another factor in this cycle: the growing national revulsion toward Trump’s incompetent and unqualified Secretary of Defense (and former Fox News host) Pete Hegseth, whose vision for the military could not be further from theirs. While it was Trump who fired Coast Guard Commander Admiral Linda Fagan on his first day in office (since she was in charge of the Department of Homeland Security), Hegseth quickly followed suit by firing other high-ranking female military leaders. In his first six months, he removed Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first female chief of naval operations; Air Force Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short, senior military assistant to the Secretary of Defense (whom Hegseth called a “DEI hire”); Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, the only female general officer on the NATO Military Committee; and Vice Admiral Yvette Davids, director of the United States Naval Academy. Many of the firings appeared to be motivated by Trump’s crackdown on what he considers a “woke army.” Hegseth purged a top black military leader for the same reasons.
In early December, the Defense Department’s inspector general reported that Hegseth’s use of the encrypted but insecure messaging app Signal to discuss an imminent airstrike on Yemen last March could have endangered U.S. troops. And his willingness to commit war crimes, much praised in the MAGA world, increasingly outrages the rest of the country. For months, Hegseth led the almost certainly illegal targeting of small boats off the coast of Venezuela, which they both claimed were drug cartel vessels trafficking fentanyl and other narcotics to the United States, without providing any evidence.
Hegseth was directly involved in a war crime, according to The Washington Postwhen he allegedly ordered U.S. forces to “kill them all” during the first strike in the Caribbean, leading to an attack on two desperate survivors – in violation of several U.S. and international codes regarding the obligation to rescue survivors of military strikes, not murder them.
The Hell Cats bring fire when they talk about Hegseth. He not only denigrated the qualifications of women like them, dedicated soldiers who are now ridiculed in DEI hiring. “You have a Secretary of Defense who, unfortunately, is so faced with his own insecurity that he’s not focused on our national security,” Sullivan told me. “It just focuses on what people look like, what their gender is, or what their race is, as opposed to: Are they competent? Do they meet the standards? And can they do the job of fighting and winning the nation’s wars?” The thought of Hegseth at the helm keeps her going when she is tired.
JoAnna Mendoza says it was her 9-year-old son who most motivated her to run, but Hegseth’s nomination gave her another reason. She is dismayed by the changes he made to protocols for filing sexual assault complaints. In October, the Associated Press reported that Hegseth signed a memo “directing the inspector general to identify anyone who files a complaint instead of leaving them anonymous, to dismiss any complaint the inspector general deems ‘not credible,’ and to set new, tighter deadlines for filing complaints and concluding investigations.” The guidelines will serve to discourage women from coming forward, she said, and could thwart efforts to seek justice for those who do. “I am particularly concerned as someone who was an advocate for victims of the sexual assault prevention program,” Mendoza told me. “I am a survivor.”
Hegseth himself was accused of sexual assault and paid a settlement to one of his accusers, although he did not admit guilt.
Rebecca Bennett remembers vividly what it was like to be one of the Navy’s first female pilots, a grueling ordeal that seems far beyond anything Hegseth experienced: “The TMI version is that there’s no way for women to go to the bathroom in a Navy helicopter. So we would just… we’d call it ‘tactical dehydration’: we just wouldn’t drink water. So imagine, you know, it’s 120 degrees in the Middle East, and you have to do a 12 hour mission, and you intentionally dehydrate yourself.
“Badasses” at work: From left, Reps. Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, Chrissy Houlahan and Elissa Slotkin meet at the Captiol in 2019.(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) Cait Conley tells me Hegseth should resign or be fired for his war crimes in Venezuelan waters. “Pete Hegseth is not fit to lead the Department of Defense,” she said. “Every reckless decision he makes puts our service members and our American families at risk. The honorable thing he can do now is resign and let someone competent lead our troops and keep our country safe.”
But while Hegseth provokes her, Conley says, her daily motivation is her opponent, Mike Lawler, who advocates moderation by voting for Trump’s agenda, including the Big Ugly Bill, which gutted Medicaid while cutting taxes on the rich, which Lawler claims to oppose. He refused to support a deal to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies in a compromise bill aimed at ending the government shutdown, even though he said he wanted to renew them (and supported a separate bipartisan bill that would do that but had no chance of passing).
“It’s not s [just] that he is a Republican. He’s the opposite of me,” Conley said. “He was a political operative and a politician for the last 20 years when I was out there defending the sons and daughters of America. I stood up for the American people while they stoked partisan discord.
Perhaps one of the creepiest things Lawler, or his Republican campaign operatives, did was support an effort to “attack” the Working Families Party nomination to take it away from Democrat Mondaire Jones in 2024. His campaign supported former Republican Anthony Frascone in his challenge to Jones in an unexpected WFP primary, which Frascone later won. Taking a risk – since it needs 2 percent of all votes every two years to maintain its electoral position – the WFP asked its voters to support Jones on the Democratic Party line. Still, Lawler led Jones, 52 to 46 percent (Frascone received only 2 percent of the vote). This year, although a Republican recently registered as a Democrat has filed to run in the primary, WFP sources don’t expect the same trouble, since he’s running as a Democrat.
Conley tells me she’s not sure she’ll seek endorsement from the left-leaning PAM. “I don’t know yet,” she said. “We need to figure out how, as the Democratic Party, we can organize better. How can we just engage voters where they are, regardless of how they register?”
WFP sources told me they were in contact with Conley’s campaign and were not deterred by his hesitation. The party is waiting to see how the next few months will unfold.
Perhaps because of the precedent set by the Badasses and perhaps because of their own rhetoric, the Hell Cats are still widely considered centrist-leaning — although that is not disqualifying, according to a prominent progressive activist in NY-17, Lawler’s district, who asked to remain anonymous. He says he likes Conley and considers her the favorite at this point — she’s outpaced other Democrats in fundraising and outpaced Lawler in at least one poll — but he calls her a “centrist” in the race. Even so, when I ask him to name a position she took that makes the Army veteran — a lesbian who lives with her partner and two dogs in Ossining — more “centrist” than the others in the primary, he admits he can’t. “I think it’s primarily the military appeal,” he says, adding, “Which is a good thing in this purple neighborhood.” Most candidates are focusing first on affordability: The pandemic exodus from New York and other factors have driven up housing prices in the Hudson Valley, and the region’s manufacturing base is shrinking, as it is in most places. The NY-17 activist says he’ll vote in the primary for the person he thinks can beat Lawler, and many people think it’s Conley, he adds.
None of the four Hell Cats like being forced to define themselves as progressive or moderate. “I think moderate And progressive mean different things to different people,” Bennett tells me. “At the end of the day, people are looking for someone who understands what they’re going through and will fight for them.” Three of the four say they would have opposed Democrats’ vote in November to reopen the government without getting a deal to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. “We’re facing an affordability crisis here in New York 17; people are having to make tradeoffs between groceries and prescription drugs,” says Conley. “Then pursuing a policy that makes health care more expensive is wrong. This is not the time when you take away the [ACA] tax credits. » A typical eligible couple in NY-17 would see their premiums increase by 221 percent, or $1,330 per month, if the ACA subsidies expire, Conley’s office told me, citing a KFF study.
JoAnna Mendoza initially strongly opposed the government shutdown. “I don’t like to discuss hypotheses. I mean, what’s already happened has happened,” she says. But “the fact that there is this strategy of withholding the salaries of people who work in the federal government, in our armed forces, and in their families, that is completely wrong.”
Of course, perceived ideology is not always destiny. The Badasses were instrumental in then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to bring the first impeachment charges against Trump, after he openly threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine if newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky refused to reveal damaging information about Joe Biden. The five women, along with two Democratic veterans, collaborated on a project Washington Post editorial calling for impeachment that seemed to tip the scales away from Pelosi’s former caution.
In late November, Slotkin and Houlahan joined other veteran congressional Democrats in an ad titled “Don’t Abandon Ship,” reminding military personnel and intelligence officials that they are not obligated to obey illegal orders from anyone, including the president. The narration alternates between the six veterans: “This administration pits our uniformed military and intelligence professionals against American citizens,” they say, concluding: “Our laws are clear, you can refuse illegal orders…you must refuse illegal orders.” »
In response, Trump exploded on social media. “Every one of these traitors to our country must be arrested and tried,” he said, sharing threats from other users, such as “Hang them, George Washington would do it.” Hegseth announced that Senator Mark Kelly, the group’s only retired military officer, was under investigation for possible court-martial; Additionally, the lawmakers could be subject to an FBI investigation.
At a time when some Democrats are arguing over whether “table questions” or “Trump versus democracy” should be their candidates’ rallying cry, these women are wondering why it can’t be both. Maura Sullivan, drawing on her experience in the nightmare Battle of Fallujah in Iraq, where she and her fellow Marines faced the repercussions of Washington’s disastrous policy decisions and clueless leadership, says Americans need not choose between these issues.
“What I saw…as a Marine officer in Fallujah during the Iraq War,” she says, “was that the leaders in Washington – Republicans and Democrats – were totally out of touch with what was happening on the ground. You had leaders sending a bunch of other people’s children into a war that we should never have been in without a plan to win and without the resources to succeed.”
It is also striking that these women grew up in a military that was the most integrated institution in American society. Their service alongside people of all races and classes (the wealthy, of course, are underrepresented in our volunteer armed forces) seems to have prepared them well to represent their various constituencies.
The persecution of immigrants by the Trump regime was a central campaign issue for them. “They bring together small business owners, community leaders and veterans,” says Mendoza. “As a brown woman, it’s scary and concerning. There are a lot of people in our communities who are afraid to go to work; they’re afraid to go to the grocery store. We have non-citizen veterans who are being deported. These are people who signed up to serve this country, who are willing to die for this country, who were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Some even had papers.”
“People are staying home” in immigrant neighborhoods in his district, Conley said. And some Trump voters, she notes, have doubts. She saw it when she was knocking on doors during the 2025 local elections: “I knocked a ton of them myself. And you could see and feel the reactions, because families are divided. They’re OK if you go after the drug cartels, but you can’t tell me that the grandmother who’s been here for 30 years is a drug cartel agent. It’s not about watching a mother get abandoned in front of her 4 year old girl This is not what they thought they were supporting.
Rebecca Bennett credits the GI Bill and other programs her military involvement allowed with helping her get to where she is today: “I had an ROTC scholarship for my undergraduate studies, then I worked two extra jobs to cover bills that I didn’t have covered by my scholarship, and I used the GI Bill to [other degrees]. The military is one of the things that helps people build their version of the American dream. As we tear down the economic ladders that were erected between World War II and the early 1970s, many of these welfare programs still remain in the military. These women can tell the story of how government — not just the military — can benefit people, at a time when Trump is ravaging both.
Cait Conley says she also learned this lesson from her mother, who was a local postal worker: “I remember on Christmas Day we would wake up, open some presents, and we had to go get dressed. We ended up at a college. And then we would go out and deliver packages.”
“And I was like, ‘Mom, I don’t understand. The postal service is closed.’ And she said, “Cait, this is our responsibility. You never know when this package will be the only one a family will receive. So we don’t just recognize the right thing, we do it. It’s not five to nine and these are not holiday hours. It’s doing the right thing when it’s hard.
Jeanne Walsh Joan Walsh, national affairs correspondent for The Nationis co-producer of The sit-in: Harry Belafonte hosts the Tonight Show and the author of What’s wrong with white people? Finding our way in the next America. His new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the lies and half-truths that protect profit, power and wealth in America.