In 2018, they called themselves “the Badasses”–a cadre of female national-security and military veterans running for Congress as Democrats, in what turned out to be a wave of anti–Donald Trump victories and a landslide for women candidates. All five—Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, both ex–CIA officers; New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill and Virginia’s Elaine Luria, both ex–Navy officers; and Pennsylvania’s Chrissy Houlahan, an Air Force veteran—won their contests in purple districts that year. They emerged as an effective force of center-leaning liberals that challenged Trump and then helped President Joe Biden enact his social-welfare and infrastructure agenda. In 2024, Slotkin was elected to the Senate, and in 2025, Spanberger and Sherrill won landslide victories to become the governors of their states. Only Luria lost her seat, in 2022; she’s running again this year and has a good chance to take it back.

In 2026, their counterparts are the “Hell Cats,” four female Democratic military veterans seeking to follow the Badasses’ battle plan to win congressional seats in purple districts. They are Arizona’s JoAnna Mendoza, a retired Marine challenging Representative Juan Ciscomani; New Jersey’s Rebecca Bennett, a Navy pilot officer taking on Representative Thomas Kean; and Maura Sullivan, a New Hampshire Marine looking to replace Representative 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 tours overseas and three Bronze Stars, who is up against New York’s Hudson Valley Representative Mike Lawler in one of the only three districts won by Kamala Harris in 2024 that is still held by a Republican. They could be key to the Democratic Party assuming control of the House in 2027, since it will need just three seats to flip the chamber.

The Hell Cats are running in the wake of the landmark wins by Slotkin, Spanberger, and Sherrill in the past two years, and they are getting national attention. They began a Signal chat with one another in mid-2025 and branded themselves as the Hell Cats, after a World War I cohort of female Marines who were confined to desk duty but nevertheless wore the uniform and made the same salary as male Marines. “I was a junior in high school on 9/11,” Conley says. With her long, dark hair and engaging smile, she looks a little like Demi Moore in the 1997 movie G.I. Jane before she shaved her head to join the Navy SEALs. (The veteran unironically confesses that the movie partly inspired her military career.) “I sat there watching those towers fall, just 20-some miles down the river. And being part of communities where we lost a lot of firefighters that day, as well as folks in the finance industry, other first responders, I had the feeling: Someone else got us into this mess. And we are going to fix it.” Of course, “we” did not—terrible political leadership led us into disastrous wars.

Conley had a similar feeling in 2024, when Trump careened back into the White House and the pretend centrist Lawler kept his seat. “Coming out of November, to see the country I love be so divided and to feel that division tearing apart communities and even families—that is what I’m most concerned about.”

Conley and her Hell Cat sisters believe their military experience enables them to reach a wider swath of voters than many other Democrats do and offers a solution to partisan polarization. Data collected by the political group VoteVets bears this out: Democratic military veterans perform 5.8 percentage points better, on average, than Democratic candidates who are nonveterans. Republican veterans, meanwhile, do not enjoy any advantage over their non-vet colleagues. Of course, for all their Badass predecessors’ political successes, it should be noted that they were not able to work bipartisan magic in Congress—at least not yet—though their relative centrism probably helped several of them go on to statewide leadership, a much-needed contribution to shoring up democracy today.

It’s relevant that the Badasses and the Hell Cats came to service and leadership through the military, one of the most integrated institutions in American society, and the one most committed to giving its members the tools to climb economically, from vocational training to college tuition to mortgage assistance, all of which helped create the post–World War II middle class. As Trump shreds social programs and whatever safety net we have left, these female military veterans may be uniquely equipped to argue for a 21st-century opportunity society, and to be seen as credible by a bipartisan voter base that doesn’t believe that our current political establishment is serious about addressing the political and economic decline of the past 50 years.

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“There’s undeniably a leg up that veterans have 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, which cultivated a group of veterans opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to run for office in 2006 and has been helping to build a cadre of Democratic veterans in Congress ever since. “But their military service showed each of them what the potential for America could be. You have this system that helps people up, educates them, forges bonds across cultural, socioeconomic, and ethnic divides like none I’ve ever seen. It engenders incredible solidarity and ambition to overcome challenges. And that system is funded by taxpayer dollars. It has led to incredible leaders speaking to an incredible message across the country that we need. That’s what the Hell Cats bring.”

The Hell Cats aren’t carbon copies of the Badasses. Elected the same year as the left-wing Squad, starring New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2018’s female military veterans sometimes styled themselves as moderate foils to these progressive women. After the Dems lost congressional seats in 2020 even as Biden won the White House, Spanberger blasted the left wing of her party. “If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get fucking torn apart in 2022,” Spanberger said. “That’s the reality.” She went on: “We need to not ever use the words socialist or socialism ever again.”

At the time, AOC fired back on cue: “You can’t just tell the Black, Brown, & youth organizers riding in to save us every election to be quiet or not have their reps champion them when they need us,” she tweeted. “Or wonder why they don’t show up for midterms when they’re scolded for existing. Esp when they’re delivering victories.”

The 2018 veterans did get slightly higher marks from conservative, “limited government” groups like the Institute for Legislative Analysis than the Squad members did, but they only hovered in the teens, while the Squad was in the single digits. In GovTrack.us’s ideology tracker, the Democratic vets all fell within the more progressive 50 percent of the House’s 435 members, while the Squad was in the most progressive 10 percent. All were reliable votes on Biden priorities like the Build Back Better bill, which faced early opposition from conservative Democrats in the House (who ultimately supported it) and was torpedoed in the Senate by faux-Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

On one issue, foreign intervention, Democratic vets may be more progressive than their non-vet counterparts, Rose tells 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 it is absolutely required, and to think about it responsibly.”

The Hell Cats seem somewhat more ideologically diverse than their Badass predecessors. So far, they haven’t picked fights with their party’s left, and in my conversations with them, none mentioned New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (who ignored Spanberger’s admonition 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 Army at 17 and whose family at times relied on SNAP and Medicaid when she was growing up. Conley’s parents never went to college. Her mother worked for the US Postal Service and raised three kids; her father was a construction worker, and her grandfather and great-grandfather worked in the brickyards in Montrose, New York. Sullivan earned a scholarship to go to Northwestern University; while she was there, she worked three jobs to pay for her room and board. Bennett went to college on an ROTC scholarship and worked two other jobs to get through.

Their military background inoculates them against the questions about toughness that women candidates often face, a Democratic consultant points out. (She didn’t want to be quoted by name for fear of being seen as perpetuating the stereotype that women leaders are somehow weaker than men.) “Just because you’ve done the military doesn’t mean you’re actually a servant leader,” says Emily Cherniack, a cofounder of New Politics, which recruits not just military veterans but folks who have served in Americorps, the Peace Corps, healthcare, education, and nonprofit roles. Cherniack is credited by the Hell Cats with introducing the group’s members to one another last year.

“In the service experience, they’ve learned how to lead teams that are diverse,” Cherniack continues. “They’ve had to bring people together towards a mission larger than themselves. And they’ve been in really difficult situations, whether it’s in Iraq, or whether it’s in a school that is failing with no resources, or whether they’re a first responder bringing relief in a [civilian] conservation corps. My theory was that leadership experience is really necessary in political life.”

For a long time, the recruitment of House candidates was mainly the purview of local Democratic leaders alongside the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In 2006, the party took back the House, thanks in part to public revulsion over the Iraq War and Republican sex and ethical scandals. That year, Rahm Emanuel, then the head of the DCCC, made a point of recruiting “macho” candidates like former college football star and social conservative Heath Shuler in North Carolina, retired admiral Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, and decorated Illinois Iraq War veteran Tammy Duckworth, who’s now a senator. That same year, Democratic Senate Campaign Committee chair Chuck Schumer, now the Senate minority leader, endorsed the social conservative and former Marine Jim Webb, Ronald Reagan’s Navy secretary, to run for the Senate in Virginia. VoteVets, also founded in 2006, launched a major push to recruit veterans into Democratic politics, with the goal of wresting the mantle of pro-national-security party away from the GOP. “Prior to VoteVets’ existence, conservatives and Republicans were viewed as the pro-military, pro-security party, for decades,” the organization’s website explains. “VoteVets helped change that dynamic…. Now, some of the best known veteran elected officials in America are Democrats.” That year, VoteVets endorsed Minnesota’s Tim Walz and Pennsylvania’s Patrick Murphy, as well as Sestak and Duckworth. In 2018, it went all in for the Badasses, and it aggressively backed Spanberger’s and Sherrill’s runs for governor in 2025. Since then, the group has expanded into local and state races, and in 2024, 143 of its candidates won their bids for city, state, or congressional seats. Recruiting local candidates ensures there’s a deep bench of veterans who can move up.

VoteVets has also moved beyond veterans’ issues, becoming an active voice for gun-safety legislation, the preservation of public lands, and labor rights. As the Trump administration slashed the federal workforce, of which 30 percent are military veterans, the group emerged as a savvy force pushing back against the cuts. VoteVets is currently endorsing 32 Democratic veterans, many of them incumbents, for Congress in 2026, including all four Hell Cats.

In the past decade, the party leadership’s bias for middle-of-the-road candidates has spawned several more initiatives to recruit more progressives. Senator Bernie Sanders’s insurgent 2016 presidential campaign inspired the formation of Justice Democrats, which helped recruit the 2018 candidates who would go on to form the Squad, and others. The Collective PAC, which recruits and endorses Black candidates at every level of government through its Black Campaign School, emerged that year as well. Since then, it says, it has helped elect more than 500 Black leaders. Hillary Clinton’s defeat by Trump spurred 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 level. Run for Something reports that it either recruited or gave significant help to 1,500 young electeds.

At the same time, EMILYs List, which has been recruiting and developing candidates since its founding in 1985, stepped up its efforts in state legislatures and Congress after thousands of women contacted the group saying that Trump’s election had inspired them to seek political office. Several EMILYs List endorsements have also been backed by VoteVets. As we commiserated about the election over lunch in early 2017, EMILYs List’s then-president, Stephanie Schriock, told me about Badass Chrissy Houlahan, whom the group was enthusiastically supporting.

Outsider groups continue to emerge: David Hogg, a survivor of the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, cofounded Leaders We Deserve in 2023 to recruit millennial and Gen Z candidates. Hogg’s determination to topple Democratic Party stalwarts—some of them liberal women and people of color—irritated 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’s been losing its working-class base—including, more recently, some working-class voters of color.

The Hell Cats may benefit from another factor in this cycle: the growing national revulsion at Trump’s incompetent, unqualified secretary of defense (and former Fox News host), Pete Hegseth, whose vision of the military couldn’t be farther from theirs. While it was Trump who fired the Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Linda Fagan, on day one of his administration (since she was a Department of Homeland Security official), Hegseth quickly followed suit in firing other top female military leaders. In his first six months, he removed Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first female chief of naval operations; Air Force Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short, a senior military assistant to the defense secretary (whom Hegseth referred to as a “DEI hire”); Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, the only female flag officer on NATO’s Military Committee; and Vice Adm. Yvette Davids, the head of the US Naval Academy. Many of the terminations seemed motivated by Trump’s crackdown on what he deems a “woke military.” Hegseth purged a top Black military leader for some of the same reasons.

In early December, the Defense Department’s inspector general reported that Hegseth’s use of the encrypted but unsecure texting application Signal to discuss an impending air strike on Yemen last March could have endangered American troops. And his willingness to commit war crimes, much lauded in MAGA world, is increasingly outraging the rest of the country. For months, Hegseth carried out Trump’s almost certainly illegal targeting of small boats off the coast of Venezuela, which they both claimed were drug-cartel vessels smuggling fentanyl and other narcotics to the United States, while providing no evidence.

Hegseth was directly implicated in a war crime, according to The Washington Post, when he reportedly ordered US forces to “kill them all” in the first Caribbean strike, leading to an attack on two desperate survivors—in violation of multiple US and international codes regarding the obligation to rescue survivors of military strikes, not murder them.

The Hell Cats bring the fire when they talk about Hegseth. He has not only denigrated the qualifications of women just like them, dedicated soldiers who are now derided as DEI hires. “You have a secretary of defense who is unfortunately dealing with so much of his own insecurity that he’s not focused on our national security,” Sullivan tells me. “He’s simply focusing on what people look like or what gender somebody is, or what race, 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 gets tired.

JoAnna Mendoza says she was most motivated to run by her 9-year-old son, but Hegseth’s appointment has given her another reason. She is appalled by the changes he’s made to the protocols for filing sexual-assault complaints. In October, the Associated Press reported that Hegseth signed a memo “ordering the inspector general to identify anyone who makes a complaint instead of letting them be anonymous, to dismiss any complaints the inspector general deems ‘non-credible,’ and to set new, tighter timelines for complaints to be filed and investigations to be completed.” These directives will serve to discourage women from coming forward, she says, and potentially thwart the efforts to get justice for those who do. “I am concerned especially as someone who was a victim-advocate for the sexual-assault-prevention response program,” Mendoza tells me. “I’m a survivor.”

Hegseth himself has been accused of sexual assault and paid a settlement to one of his accusers, while not admitting guilt.

Rebecca Bennett vividly remembers what it felt like to be one of the first female Navy pilots, a grueling test that seems far beyond anything Hegseth has experienced: “The TMI version of this is that there’s no way for women to go to the bathroom in a Navy helicopter. So we would just have to… we would call it ‘tactical dehydration’: We just would not drink water. So just imagine, you know, it’s 120 degrees in the Middle East, and you have to do a 12-hour mission, and you are basically intentionally dehydrating yourself.”

Cait Conley tells me that Hegseth should resign or be fired for his war crimes in Venezuelan waters. “Pete Hegseth is unfit to lead the Department of Defense,” she says. “Every reckless decision he makes puts our service members and American families in danger. 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 espouses moderation while voting for Trump’s agenda—including the Big Ugly Bill, which slashed Medicaid while lowering taxes on the wealthy, both of which Lawler professes to oppose. He refused to support a deal to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies in a compromise bill to end the government shutdown, even though he claimed he wanted to renew them (and backed a separate bipartisan bill that would do that but had no chance of passing).

“It’s not [just] that he’s a Republican. He’s the opposite of me,” Conley says. “He was a political operative and politician the last 20 years, when I was out there defending America’s sons and daughters. I’ve been delivering for the American people while he’s been stoking partisan discord.”

Arguably one of the slimiest things that Lawler, or his Republican campaign operatives, did was to support an effort to “ballot-raid” the Working Families Party nomination to take it away from Democrat Mondaire Jones in 2024. His campaign backed former Republican Anthony Frascone in challenging Jones in an unexpected WFP primary, which Frascone then won. Taking a risk—since it needs 2 percent of all votes every two years to keep its ballot line—the WFP told its voters to back Jones on the Democratic Party line. Still, Lawler edged out Jones, 52 to 46 percent (Frascone netted just 2 percent of the vote). This year, although a Republican who recently registered as a Democrat has filed to run in the primary, WFP sources don’t expect the same high jinks, since he’s running as a Democrat.

Conley tells me she’s not sure if she’ll seek the left-leaning WFP’s endorsement. “I don’t know about that now,” she says. “We need to figure out how, as a Democratic Party, we can better organize. How do we just engage voters where they are, regardless of how they register?”

WFP sources told me that they’ve been in touch with Conley’s campaign and that they weren’t discouraged by her hesitation. The party is looking to see how the next few months will play out.

Possibly because of the precedent set by the Badasses and possibly because of their own rhetoric, the Hell Cats are still widely considered centrist-leaning—although not disqualifyingly so, 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 front-runner at this point—she’s moved ahead of other Democrats in fundraising and surpassed Lawler in at least one poll—but he calls her the “centrist” in the race. Even so, when I ask him to cite a position she’s taken that makes the Army veteran—a lesbian who lives with her partner and two dogs in Ossining—more “centrist” than others in the primary, he admits that he can’t. “I think it’s primarily the military appeal,” he says, adding: “Which in this purple district is a good thing.” Most of the candidates focus first on affordability—the pandemic exodus from New York City and other factors pushed Hudson Valley’s home prices through the roof, 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 believes can beat Lawler, and a lot of folks are thinking that’s Conley, he adds.

None of the four Hell Cats like to be forced to define themselves as progressive or moderate. “I do 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 are going through and is going to fight for them.” Three of the four say they would have opposed the Democrats’ November vote to reopen the government without getting a deal to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies. “We are facing an affordability crisis here in New York 17; people are having to make trade-offs between groceries and prescriptions,” Conley says. “To then pursue a policy where we are making it more expensive to have healthcare—it’s wrong. This is not the time when you take away the [ACA] tax credits.” A typical qualifying couple in NY-17 would see their premiums increase by 221 percent, or $1,330 a month, if the ACA’s subsidies expire, Conley’s office told me, citing research by KFF.

JoAnna Mendoza strongly opposed shutting down the government in the first place. “I don’t like to deal in hypotheticals—I mean, what’s already happened has happened,” she says. But “the fact that there is this strategy to withhold wages from people that work in the federal government, our military, their families—that is so wrong.”

Of course, perceived ideology isn’t always destiny. The Badasses were decisive in then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to bring the first impeachment charges against Trump, after he brazenly threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine if newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky refused to reveal damaging information about Joe Biden. All five women, plus two male Democratic military veterans, collaborated on a Washington Post op-ed calling for impeachment that seemed to tip the scales away from Pelosi’s former caution.

In late November, Slotkin and Houlahan joined other Democratic congressional vets in an ad titled “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” reminding military personnel and intelligence officials that they don’t have to obey illegal orders from anybody, including the president. The narration alternates among the six veterans: “This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community 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. “Each one of these traitors to our country should be arrested and put on trial,” he declared, sharing other users’ threats, such as “Hang them, George Washington would.” Hegseth announced that Senator Mark Kelly, the group’s only retired military officer, is being investigated for a possible court-martial; in addition, the lawmakers may be facing an FBI investigation.

At a time when some Democrats are fighting over whether “kitchen-table issues” or “Trump versus democracy” should be their candidates’ rallying cry, these women are asking why it can’t be both. Maura Sullivan, drawing on her experience in the nightmare of the battle of Fallujah in Iraq, where she and her fellow Marines faced the repercussions of the disastrous policy decisions and clueless leadership coming from Washington, says that Americans don’t need to choose between those issues.

“What I saw…as a Marine officer in Fallujah during the Iraq War,” she says, “was that leaders in Washington—Republican and Democrats—were totally out of touch with what was going on on the ground. You had leaders who sent a bunch of other people’s kids to a war that we never should have been in without a plan to win and without the resources to succeed.”

It’s also striking that these women came up in a military that was the most integrated institution in American society. Their service alongside people of every race and class (the wealthy, of course, are underrepresented in our volunteer military) appears to have prepared them well in representing their diverse constituencies.

The Trump regime’s persecution of immigrants has been a central campaign issue for them. “They’re rounding up small-business owners, community leaders, veterans,” Mendoza says. “As someone who is a brown woman, it’s scary and it’s concerning. There’s a lot of folks in our communities who are afraid to go to work; they’re afraid to go to the grocery store. We have noncitizen veterans who are being deported. These are people who signed up to serve this country, who are willing to die for this country, who’ve deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Some even had papers.”

“People are staying indoors” in the immigrant neighborhoods of her district, Conley says. And some Trump voters, she notes, are having second thoughts. She saw it when she was knocking on doors in the 2025 local elections: “I knocked a ton of them myself. And you could see and feel reactions, because families are split. They’re OK if you’re going after drug cartels, but you can’t tell me the grandmother who’s been here for 30 years is an agent of a drug cartel. They’re not about watching a mother get walked off in front of her 4-year-old daughter. That is not what they thought they were supporting.”

Rebecca Bennett credits the GI Bill and other programs that her military enlistment afforded her for helping her get to where she is today: “I had an ROTC scholarship for my undergrad, and then I worked two jobs on top of that to cover the bills that I didn’t have covered by my scholarship, and I used the GI Bill for [other degrees]. The military is one of the things that helps catapult people to be able to build their version of the American dream.” As we tear down the economic ladders that were erected during the years between World War II and the early 1970s, many of these entitlement programs still remain in the military. These women can tell a story about how government—and not just the military—can benefit people, in a period when Trump is savaging both.

Cait Conley says she also learned that lesson from her mother, who was a local postal worker: “I remember on Christmas Day, we’d wake up, open a couple of presents, and we’d have to go get our clothes on. We would meet up at a college. And then we’d go out and deliver packages.

“And I was like, ‘Mom, I don’t get it. The Postal Service is closed.’ And she said, ‘Cait, this is our responsibility. You never know when this package is the only package a family is going to get.’ So we don’t just recognize the right thing—we do it. It’s not nine-to-five, and it’s not holiday hours. It’s doing the right thing when it’s hard.”