‘Design Mom’ Gabrielle Blair Pivots to Politics
By Bindu Madhavan
Gabrielle Blair has a simple message: “Vote for one of our candidates!”
That’s the simple message she is attempting to send to the public via her web pages. Her efforts in this regard have been successful in the form of getting her husband, a former president of the PGA Golf Tour, a member of Congress in his home state of Florida, and several prominent Democratic candidates into the race for governor of Hawaii.
Blair, a designer by trade, has spent a good bit of time in the political arena, but she found herself running for office the first time around when she ran for the Hōkūle‘a School Board in 2000 in a highly competitive, two-person race. Though she did not win the Democratic primary, she came close to, finishing third in the general election with 554 votes.
Blair has used her web site and her social media accounts, and her blog, to give her political opinions. In recent months, it has become apparent that she has changed her views on the subject of abortion from pro-choice to pro-life.
Now, she says, she is simply trying to use her abilities as a designer and her background in politics to make change. Though she says she is not running for Congress, she is exploring the prospect of running for local leadership positions such as mayor of the capital city of Honolulu.
She has also taken the unusual step of opening up her social media profiles on Facebook and Instagram to the public in the hope that their views about the subject of abortion might not be completely uninfluenced by the social media profiles of their political peers.
“When I’m in Washington — you never know,” she says. “I may have been a pro-Choice person before I became a Design Mom.”
Her current position on abortion, and her decision to be a Design Mom, are both the result of a recent change in her view on the topic of abortion. She came to the conclusion that she could be an effective spokesperson for her views when she began exploring the possibility of running for office.
In the weeks following the 2016 election, Blair tried to reach out to members of Congress who were on the record in opposition to making the issue of abortion a partisan topic. “I tried to make it clear that I was