From Booth to Ballot and Beyond

Daniella Gibbons has been a dreamer since childhood. The earliest prophetic dream she can remember came at age 4.

In recent years, the theme of her prophetic dreams has been the significant role of women in the church, she says. The Lord has been speaking adamantly to her for the past few years about the righteous voices that would come forth in a women’s movement birthed by God—including her own.

In 2019, Gibbons and a friend were casually conversing about Isaiah 8:18, which reads, “See, I and the children whom the Lord has given me are for signs and for wonders in Israel from the Lord of Hosts who dwells in Mount Zion.” During that conversation, the two also brought up the subject of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, the day women were granted the right to vote in America.

That date was August 18, 2020, or 8-18. Gibbons immediately connected it with the Bible verse she and her friend had been discussing.

“While we were talking about that historical event, I looked at my friend and said, ‘You know, somebody really should do something in celebration of it,'” Gibbons says. “She looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, you really should do something about it.’ So that got me more than a little bit stirred up.”

In the fall of 2019, in the middle of a 40-day fast leading up to her 40th birthday, Gibbons received a prophetic word from the Lord reassuring her that He had prepared her for this women’s movement. Out of that prophetic word, the Lord used her to birth a new podcast called Booth to Ballot, where she and other women celebrate stories and champion voices of righteous women who are influencing the governmental mountain while stirring up the influencer gifts in others.

The show launched on the Charisma Podcast Network on May 14, 2020, with an episode in which Gibbons addressed her own Christian journey and ability to hear the voice of God. She admits there was a time when she took the right to vote for granted, and she regrets she didn’t know much about the anguish women endured more than a century ago to earn her that right.

“Booth to Ballot is a place where righteous women are finding solidarity together,” Gibbons says. “In our first season, I interviewed women of different elected positions, but I also really wanted to tell the stories of women who may not have put their name on the ballot, but they influenced in a different capacity.”

One of the individuals Gibbons interviewed during her show’s first season was Lori Viars, whom Gibbons described as “an incredible woman who had contributed to hundreds of campaigns, from school board elections to presidential campaigns.”

“When Lori was a young mother, she looked at the world around her and recognized where we were headed as a society,” Gibbons says. “From that time on, she began just giving her time, volunteering for the betterment of the world that her children were going to inherit and live in. Today, Lori is deeply respected by her state legislature because she knows how to get things done. She has literally walked into communities and completely transformed the whole governing body just within one area.

“She’s a wife; she’s a mom; and she’s living a very humble life,” Gibbons says. “But she is the everyday woman who can look around and say, ‘I know that there has to be something better for my children.'”

Other female leaders Gibbons has interviewed include then-Ohio Rep. Candice Keller; Dr. Marlene Carson, a member of the U.S. Advisory Council on Trafficking with the former Trump administration; Jennifer Gross, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who served 21 years before retiring and then won a seat in the Ohio Legislature as a conservative Christian voice in November 2020; Heather Evans, a California singer/songwriter and worship leader who has become an influencer in the arts, media and government; and Sue Thurston of Arise and Thresh International Ministries, who has helped spark the exponential growth of the underground church movement in communist China.

Leading Our Nation

Eighty-six women (27.6%) hold statewide executive offices across the country; with 312 positions available, according to reflect.us, a national, nonpartisan coalition of the leading women’s representation organizations working to increase the number of women elected and appointed to public office at the local, state and national levels.

Of the 7,383 state legislators in the United States, 2,129 (28.8%) are women, and women, many of whom are conservative voices, hold 127 (23.7%) of the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. About one quarter of the U.S. Senate (24) are women. These statistics have continued to rise heartily over the past 20 years.

While Gibbons says she’s both proud and thrilled that women’s voices in government have grown louder in recent decades, some, she says, have “not remained virtuous.”

Female leaders such as Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters and Kamala Harris have championed unbiblical values such as same-sex marriage and abortion, and their circles of influence have allowed the enemy to gain a foothold in our culture that will be difficult to overcome.

But others, such as Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett; former South Carolina governor and former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley; and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem continue to fly God’s banner high and will continue to fight for biblical values and God’s justice.

And there will be more who will gain God’s favor to help lead our nation back to the Christian principles on which it was founded, Gibbons says.

“The women’s movement to come is a roar of voices, carrying the DNA of restoration and redemption to injustice,” she says. “Gone are the days of the loudest voices crying out from a place of rejection. Make way for those who have been on the hillsides, fighting battles no one else saw. These are the women the prophets have been telling us about—the ones the Lord has pulled from obscurity into the mountains of influence.”

Influencing Our Government

While the first season of Booth to Ballot focused on the women who have become a major influence in the governmental mountain of our culture, Gibbons says she plans to take the second season to a much deeper and wider level.

“What that means is that we are going deeper with the intent to understand our God-given purpose for the day that we live in,” Gibbons says. “We are going forward in equipping and encouraging and empowering women to take their rightful place as influencers for the kingdom of heaven. We are going wider by extending out and hearing stories from women who are influencing multiple cultural mountains.

“The reason we’re doing that is because we have to start to recognize that every mountain in our society, in some way, influences government,” she says. “Yes, we understand that we need women to put their names on the ballot. But it goes beyond that. In 2020, it really became blatantly obvious that the governmental mountain itself is greatly influenced by those at the top of all of the other mountains. We can look at our society and see how celebrities influence political races, with endorsements of their favor of an office holder or a potential office holder.

“But what 2020 showed us is how even seeing how health officials, billionaire businessmen, our education system—all of these mountains—play a role in really shaping and influencing the governmental mountain,” Gibbons says. “The reality is whoever occupies the top of each mountain will shape the agenda of nations. In every place of influence that a Christian does not occupy, someone with an evil agenda will. Democracy doesn’t work because of a smarter idea. It really only works when God is honored, and honoring God instills systems of ethics and values. We are created to carry the kingdom of God and the economics of His kingdom into every sphere of society, shifting and creating heaven’s culture on earth. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re celebrating those stories, and we’re championing women who are influencing all of those mountains.”

Michael Allen is a freelance writer for Charisma Media