Ranting On...Will Hurd & the GOP's Diversity Problem

Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX)

In the past two weeks, the Republican Party has endured a number of retirements, but none was perhaps more notable than the retirement of Rep. Will Hurd of Texas.  Hurd was a third-term congressman, one who rode into office in 2014 on the back of a massive GOP wave (he had to defeat incumbent-Rep. Pete Gallego to win his seat), and then won reelection in two very difficult environments, the first as Hillary Clinton won his seat in 2016 and the second as Beto O'Rourke won Hurd's seat in 2018 in his Senate bid.  Hurd's teflon nature will be a huge loss for the Republican Party in 2020-many pundits moved this seat from "Tossup" to "Leans D" with Hurd moving out of office, and while it's not inevitable that the GOP will lose the seat in 2020, it's hard to imagine an open seat that went for Hillary/Beto won't end up going for the Democratic nominee in 2020, and indeed, the leading Democrat (Gina Ortiz Jones) was already outpacing Hurd in the last quarter in terms of fundraising.

However, I'm not here to talk about the ramifications of Hurd's seat going to the Democrats (though they are significant, as it makes it so that the Republicans would need to win yet another Democratic seat in 2020).  What I want to talk about is Hurd himself, and his position in the US House of Representatives.  While he's a backbencher from a swing district (as a result, someone who probably gets more press than your average three-term congressman), he is also the only African-American person currently sitting in the House GOP caucus.  Hurd earned this distinction last year when Rep. Mia Love (R-UT) lost her reelection bid.  With Hurd leaving, the only African-American Republican on Capitol Hill will be Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.  This is compounded by the recent retirements of Reps. Susan Brooks & Martha Roby, two of only 13 women in the House GOP caucus.  This is a troubling statistic, and something I wanted to dive into to see exactly how divergent the Republican and Democratic caucuses are when it comes to racial and gender equality.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC)

Looking at the two bodies, I examined based on their current makeups (235 Democrats to 198 Republicans in the House, 53 Republicans to 47 Democrats in the Senate), what the diversity ratios were between the two.  The Republicans fare slightly better in the Senate, partially because there are less people and also because, thanks to appointment laws, there are more women who as a result of "becoming" the incumbents didn't have to make it through primaries (we'll get to why that's important in a second, but just keep in mind that three of the eight Republican women in the US Senate were appointed to that position, though two (Cindy Hyde-Smith & Lisa Murkowski) have been elected to that same office since their appointments).  The Republicans have 15% of the caucus represented by women (compared to the Democrats 36%), and 5% of the caucus is a racial minority (we could get into a lot of semantics here, but I am counting anyone who identifies as Latino-American, African-American, or Asian-American here...Democrats have 13% of their caucus who identify with these groups).  Combining both groups, 21% of the Senate GOP caucus is either a person-of-color and/or female, while 40% of the Senate Democrats are.  In both cases, the Democrats are more than double the Republicans...and this is still considerably better than the House GOP.

This is because the House GOP is staggeringly not diverse.  Only 3% of the House GOP caucus comprises one of those three racial backgrounds, while 41% of House Democrats do.  Conversely, 38% of the House Democrats are women, while only 6% of the House Republicans are.  This combines for a House Democratic caucus that is 63% diverse, whereas the House Republicans have less than 10% of their makeup that is not a straight, white male.  With the retirements of Hurd, Brooks, & Roby, it's possible next year that this number could go down even further.

That's because women and racial minorities struggle to advance in the easiest contests to get into the House Republican caucus-open GOP seats.  In 2018, House Republicans had 39 retiring incumbents, but only nominated women for eight of the seats, for a measly 20% female percentage for these open seats.  Conversely, Democrats had 21 open seats, a considerably smaller number, but still nominated more women for these seats (10) and as a result nearly 50% of those open seat contests were filled by women.  It's worth noting, though, that the GOP couldn't get their female candidates elected-only one of those women actually won (Carol Miller of West Virginia), with the remaining seven all losing their battles (a 12% success rate, which is pretty pathetic); for comparison's sake, only 5 of the 31 Republican men (16%) were nominated for these seats & ended up losing.  This means that there was a lower percentage of women who even won for the GOP in these seats than there was the percentage of Republican men who lost.  By contrast, the Democrats managed to elect all but one of their open seat female challengers in the general election.

This is a lot of stats, almost all of them staggering, but it comes down to this-it is not healthy for our country to have such an imbalance when it comes to gender and race.  It is not healthy for a political party to have such an imbalance of race and gender.  It would be good for the Republican Party to elect more people-of-color and women if only because it would better impact some of their policy initiatives.  Look at, say, Sens. Scott & Rubio torpedoing white supremacist judges that have been nominated by President Trump (Ryan Bounds and Thomas Farr, in case you want to google).  Having diversity of thought within your caucus can be a catalyst for change, even if it's only gradual.

Secretary of State Shantel Krebs (R-SD), one of many qualified
Republican women who got rejected in her party's primary

But it also shows that for all the hemming-and-hawing about racism and sexism in the Republican Party, and protests from conservative saying that it's only a few people or it's not a systemic thing, it's hard to argue with these numbers.  I frequently hear Republicans bring up the phrase "we're just choosing the most qualified candidates-it has nothing to do with gender or race" when discussing the primaries, but when 90%+ plus of the time the most qualified candidate just happens to be a white man, what does that say about your hiring practices?  If a company were to have that kind of human resources track record, they'd almost certainly (and correctly) be sued for harassment.  If you're only willing to hire a woman or a person-of-color a slim percentage of the time, how is that not tacit racism or sexism?

It's not like racial minorities or women aren't running in these primaries-they just aren't getting elected.  Of those 26 Republican white men who won those open seats in 2018, eight of them ran against very serious Republican women in the primary.  The challengers included four state legislators, two prominent local fundraisers, a combat aviator, and even a statewide-elected official (Shantel Krebs of South Dakota).  All of them lost their primaries, as did Joan Perry earlier this year in the special election for Walter Jones's seat.  It's hard not to look at these numbers, where women can't win primaries, and in the rare cases that they do, the Republicans don't give them enough support (either monetary or at the ballot box) to actually win, and think that there's not a sexism problem in the Republican Party.  And the same can assuredly be said for people-of-color, where individuals like Tim Scott are so rare they can basically just be summed up as Tim Scott at this point.  The Republican Party frequently likes to claim people should get in on their own merits, but when presented with the opportunity to elect a woman or person-of-color who is just as qualified as their opponents, they almost never take the opportunity.  Will Hurd's retirement just highlights a problem that seems to be getting worse, rather than better, for the GOP.  The Republican Party's sexism and racism in their policies applies to their own members, and by becoming less diverse, it makes it less likely the party will have incentive to change their policies.