Whether for her pathbreaking role as the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket or for rapping “Baby Got Back” on “The Masked Singer,” Sarah Palin has, since her debut on the national scene in 2008, made an art of attracting the spotlight.
But fame — even in America — can get you only so far, and Ms. Palin’s campaign this year for Alaska’s only House seat has exposed the limits of her celebrity. Her fund-raising has lagged. Her campaign schedule has been unusually light for a candidate heading into a competitive election. And she announced recently that she’d received “crappy advice” from advisers and was no longer trying to raise money. In an unexpectedly close ranked-choice race, she has had to endure the indignity of encouraging voters to support her Republican opponent, in a last-ditch effort to prevent the Democrat, Mary Peltola, from running away with the seat.
Ms. Palin may be about to fade once again from national politics, but the “mama grizzly” brand she invented is here to stay. Already, a group of female leaders is embracing and iterating on Ms. Palin’s trademark mom-knows-best Republicanism. Some are politicians, railing against the powers that be; others are activists, speaking out against school closures and vaccine mandates. As these new mama bears enter the political sphere, they are transforming American discourse, harnessing motherhood itself as a political asset, just as Ms. Palin did before them. Even if she loses her battle to make it to Washington next week, in a broader cultural sense, Ms. Palin has already won the war. And a new generation of GOP women stands poised to carry her complex legacy forward.
When John McCain chose Ms. Palin as his running mate in 2008, she was in her 40s and had served less than two years as governor. Her many doubters said, correctly, that she wasn’t ready for the job of vice president. But their criticisms were often shot through with a condescension and sexism that had less to do with Ms. Palin’s experience than with her looks, clothes and identity as a mother of five.
Few female politicians before her had emphasized their lives as mothers to the extent she did. She held her baby onstage right after accepting the nomination, deliberately presenting herself as a down-to-earth “hockey mom” and later on as a protective “mama grizzly.” Ms. Palin’s folksy demeanor was often ridiculed as a gimmick and Ms. Palin herself as an ignoramus. But the course of political events soon proved that she was onto something.
The Tea Party wave during Barack Obama’s first term swept Palin imitators like Michele Bachmann and Christine O’Donnell to national prominence, women who were likely to be found in jeans at the gun range, when they weren’t giving a speech in stilettos. Rather than leaving family life at home the way men always had, which a previous generation of women had seen as a necessity to succeed professionally, this new generation saw how womanhood and motherhood added significantly to their brand. By signaling their tenacity in the domestic sphere, they implied their toughness in the political arena. And they increased their populist appeal.
Among those who noticed their potential was Donald Trump’s future adviser Steve Bannon, who made a 2010 documentary called “Fire From the Heartland” glorifying Mrs. Bachmann and other Tea Party women, as well as a 2011 documentary about Ms. Palin called “The Undefeated,” framing her femininity and Everywoman image as an unsung asset for the GOP.
Of course, Mr. Bannon and the right as a whole eventually found a different champion, and while Mr. Trump left little room for also-rans like Ms. Palin, his time in office helped her particular strain of conservatism mutate and spread — giving rise to a new, Trumpier version of Ms. Palin’s mama grizzly.
This new generation’s pugnaciousness makes Ms. Palin’s “Going Rogue” days look subdued. Conservative moms from all over the country have turned local school board meetings into contentious showdowns over policy and curriculum, organized by groups like Moms for Liberty, which says it is “on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” “We do NOT co-parent with the government,” reads the back of one of the T-shirts for sale in the group’s online merch store.
Shades of Ms. Palin can be seen in Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whose gun-toting photo ops recall Ms. Palin’s rural, hunting-and-fishing image. But Kari Lake, the hard-right former news anchor running for governor in Arizona, is perhaps the paradigmatic New Mama Bear. One moment, she’s vacuuming a red carpet for Mr. Trump; the next, she’s calling her Democratic opponent a coward and the media the “right hand of the Devil.” Ms. Lake shares Ms. Palin’s instinct for the spotlight and feel for optics, as well as her affection for copacetic mama bears. (Ms. Lake has often used the term.)
But while Ms. Palin lost control of her image to a skeptical, often condescending news media (remember the infamous Katie Couric interview in which the candidate couldn’t name any newspapers she read?), the steely, intense Ms. Lake has made a sport of antagonizing the reporters on her trail and excelled at turning the exchanges into content. The rise of the New Mama Bear might not have been possible without the fragmentation of a media now more drawn than ever toward controversy and the outrageous.
Ms. Lake, who has a knack for generating outrage, stands a very good chance of winning. And she is far from the only one. In the heated conservative debate over schools, the new mama bears have been racking up some important wins, crashing school meetings to protest critical race theory and banning books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes or other content they deem inappropriate from school libraries. Moms for Liberty has claimed huge growth in membership over the past year and made itself a key player in the education battles that have marked this midterm cycle.
Top Republicans have embraced the school controversies, showing just how potent this new paradigm has become on a national scale. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who gave the keynote speech at Moms for Liberty’s Joyful Warriors conference this summer, endorsed several of its school board candidates, and they went on to win their primaries. The effect could be that the new mama bears see their trademark political issues high on the agenda for the 2024 Republican primary season.
It’s ironic that Ms. Palin, the mother of mama bear politicking, should be an afterthought during a moment so clearly born of her trailblazing prime. But that’s often how it goes in politics, where an innovation’s impact is obvious only in hindsight — once someone else has perfected it.