'NO END IN SIGHT'
The legal defense arm of Time's Up, an organization launched in January to battle sexual harassment in workplaces, said it has fielded calls from more than 3,500 women and men.
New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who wrote some of the first articles about Weinstein a year ago, said in a recent Times editorial that "this discussion over harassment and assault has no end in sight".
"Perhaps it is time to start thinking of this less as a news story than as a permanent new element of our lives," they wrote.
The role of #Metoo is expected to be major in the Nov. 6 elections, when voters choose a third of U.S. Senators, all 435 members of the House of Representatives and dozens of state governors.
The mid-term elections are seen as a referendum on the policies of President Donald Trump, and opposition Democrats hope to gain control of the lower House and gain seats in the Senate, both now controlled by Trump's Republican Party.
"We're going to have a lot more feminists sitting in those seats," Toni Van Pelt, president of the National Organization for Women, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"Women understand we have to have women's voices sitting at the table or we're going to continue to be disrespected and treated as if we don't count and as second-class citizens by the old white men that are in office right now," she said.
More than 42,000 women interested in running for office have contacted Emily's List, an advocacy group supporting female candidates, since Trump was elected in 2016.
In the two years prior, 920 women contacted the group, said a spokeswoman.
Research shows a majority of U.S. voters see sexual harassment as a serious problem, said Amanda Hunter, spokeswoman for the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which conducts research and promotes women for political office.
Campaign messages criticizing or belittling #Metoo elicited negative responses from voters in the foundation's research, she added.
"#Metoo really changed the national conversation," she told reporters.
