Ranting On...the Republican Woman Problem

State Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA)

I recently read a fascinating article from the Washington Post detailing that women are winning a number of high profile Senate races this year, but that if you look at the larger picture, the number of women compared to the actual number of candidates is very small, and the article went on to detail some of the issues that continue to affect female candidates as they move up to higher office.

The article is a great read, and definitely worth checking out, but I had been planning an article in a slightly different vein, and figured now was a great time to introduce it, particularly focusing on the GOP and their continued issues with female voters and recruiting female candidates.  The GOP has bemoaned the "War on Women" campaign, and though I'm not going to through that particular issue for a rant today (though, seriously, why in 2014 are we debating birth control?!?), I did want to talk about the Republican Party specifically and their recruitment of women to federal office.

It's worth noting that this year, especially in the Senate, the Republicans have clearly made an effort to recruit female candidates to some high profile races.  Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land of Michigan appears to be in an even race in Michigan, Monica Wehby has gained a lot of press in Oregon for her campaigning skills, and State Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa looks poised to win her primary, possibly by enough to avoid a convention runoff.  This is definitely a step in the right direction, but it also speaks to some problems that we see with Republican recruitment and female candidates: none of these are what you would call particularly competitive seats, save perhaps Michigan (upon re-read I missed Rep. Shelley Moore Capito in West Virginia, who, while not a "competitive" seat, is key to the Republicans taking over the Senate, so credit where it's due, though my larger point is still intact).  States like North Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alaska are generally touted as being the "most competitive" seats in the nation, where the GOP is trying to win their majority (Iowa, Michigan, and Oregon are states where they've already won their majority, a distinct and key difference).  In the states that most matter, the GOP is reaching out to straight, white men.  You can contrast this quite regularly with the Democratic Party, where the only two potential pickup seats the party is running female candidates (Alison Lundergan Grimes and Michelle Nunn).

This is just one piece of anecdotal evidence that paints a larger picture: the Republican Party does not do a good job of recruiting women, in particular for Congress.  I can pull almost any statistic out of the air on this one, and the Democratic Party is ahead.  Currently in the Congress, 80% of the female senators are Democrats and 76% of the female House members are Democrats.  Recently Curt Clawson won the Florida-19 special election primary in an upset over State Senate Majority Leader Lizbeth Benacquisto, continuing a losing streak for Republican women that stretches back to 2004 of how long it's been since a Republican woman won a House special election (Shelley Sekula-Gibbs in Texas).  Since that time, the Democrats have elected twelve women in special elections, and appear near certain to make it thirteen with Alma Adams in North Carolina's 12th come November.

Attorney General Pam Bondi (R-FL)

The list goes on: looking at the twenty closest Senate races of the past six years, a Republican woman was only running in one of those races (and it was State Rep. Sharron Angle, who was not the establishment's choice).  State Attorneys General, which is typically the best political office to make a jumping point toward the governor's mansion or a Senate seat, has the same imbalance: only one Republican woman in the country is Attorney General (Pam Bondi of Florida) out of 24 in office, compared to Democrats with eight.  The NRCC Young Guns (the program featuring the House GOP's most prominent challengers for open and Democratic-held seats) program only has seven female members out of a possible seventy (an abysmal ten percent) and only three of those women are not against a fellow endorsed Young Gun (meaning a disbursement of the funds that help the candidates less).  Compare that to the Red-to-Blue program for the Democrats (the equivalent) where the top eighteen candidates are featured and and ten of them are female candidates.  I could go on and on, but this all paints a pretty startling picture about the GOP's recruitment of women to run for public office.

The Democratic Party, of course, is not perfect on this front.  We, for example, have been particularly lax in recruiting women to run for governor (perhaps the only metric where the GOP currently beats Democrats), and some of the above numbers are not a 50/50 split (and only one has women on the majority side).  But the Republican Party continues to complain about the War on Women, and while there may be some truth to their arguments about the fairness of the attacks, there's little evidence to show that they are trying to make a difference.  Little efforts are made in situations like, say Lizabeth Benacquisto, to push aside white male Republicans in a primary in order to get a potential female star into Congress.  Look at the governor's races this year, where the GOP will almost certainly not elect any new female Republican governors, while the Democrats have major female recruits in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island (and of course Wendy Davis in Texas).  Or look at something like Emily's List, a Democratic super PAC that raised $52 million for female Democratic candidates across the country (the Republican Party has nothing near this, and Emily's List is one of the most significant PAC's in the country and will be instrumental in helping the Democrats' battle for the Senate in particular this year).

The reality for the Republican Party isn't quite as bleak as I'm making it out to be from a ballot box perspective, of course.  Gender has always been a relatively weak indicator for preference at the ballot box-women do not necessarily just vote for other women, as things like party label, geography, and economic situation are far more reliable indicators of how a woman will vote.  However, the GOP is continuing to do itself a disservice if it continues to have this huge gap in the gender of its elected officials, as it only continues to exacerbate the growing schism with female voters who are turning to the Democratic Party.  Considering that women make up the majority of the American electorate, this is not a problem that should be taken lightly.