It is well established that women are less likely to seek to run for office while also composing a minority of potential candidate pools. In this study, we seek to measure whether women in an important candidate pool, municipal-level officeholders in the US, express similar levels of progressive ambition as their male counterparts and whether, conditional on that expressed ambition, run at similar rates. To do so, we surveyed 2,800 elected US municipal officials in 2016 about their desires to run for higher office, and then 8 years later, we followed up on their political careers to identify what offices they had run for since being surveyed. So far, we have found that half of the local officials who indicated that they would definitely run for higher office in the future had done so. To our knowledge, this is the first study to combine such data sources together to examine the gendered pipeline to higher office and to test whether we see a leakier pipeline for women even among low-level office holders who expressed ambition to run for higher office. If we find this to be the case, it means that women face additional hurdles to higher office even once they enter a likely candidate pool. On the other hand, if male and female municipal officials run for higher office at similar rates, it suggests that one key to increasing female representation at higher office is getting more women into the pipeline.