Happy Friday! I'm not D.C.-based so I'm missing out on all the cherry blossoms this weekend — so send me your best cherry blossom pics and ideas for this newsletter! sgardner@politico.com If you’re a man named John, consider yourself well represented in the Senate. If you’re a Republican woman? No such luck. There are more men named John or Jon (10) in the Senate than there are GOP Women (nine). It’s a disparity that’s been underlined and bolded by the upcoming race to succeed Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, featuring three men named John; John Thune (R-S.D.), John Cornyn (R-Texas) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) are widely considered to be the main contenders. No women have yet to jump in. The scenario echoes the chaotic race for Speaker of the House last October, where no women attempted to clinch the position — though many expected New York Rep. and GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik to give it a go. Women as a whole are still starkly underrepresented in Congress. But for decades, the numbers of Republican women have lagged severely behind the numbers of Democratic women. There are 15 Democratic women in the Senate to the GOP’s nine, and 91 Democratic women in the House, compared to just 33 on the Republican side. And even when GOP women do make it to the Hill, they usually don’t end up in Congressional leadership. The main problem? As Laurel Elder, author of The Partisan Gap: Why Democratic Women Get Elected But Republican Women Don't, sees it, the issue isn’t biased in the voting base. It’s that Republican women aren’t running in the first place. “When women run they do just as well as similarly qualified men, and that's true for both Democratic and Republican women,” Elder tells Women Rule. “But overall, women don't run for office as much as men. And that’s particularly a problem on the Republican side.” It’s not a talking point many Republicans in Congress are willing to take up — likely because of an aversion to anything that could be seen as “identity politics” — says Emily Cherniack, founder and executive director of New Politics, a bipartisan organization that works to recruit veterans and people from underserved communities to run for office. And, for the same reason, says Cherniack, the party is often unsupportive of organizations devoted specifically to electing GOP women. “Republicans’ philosophy is meritocracy and free market theory,” Cherniack says. “By that design, they're about recruiting the ‘best’ candidate, and the ‘best’ candidate wins. So for them to focus on women or Latinos — whatever population — to them, that feels like identity politics.” In 2018, When Stefanik launched Elevate PAC — usually known as E-PAC — with the goal of getting more GOP women elected, she was met with immediate backlash from the Republican establishment. Then-NRCC chair, Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, called Stefanik’s efforts to boost women running in the primaries “a mistake.” Stefanik clapped back on X, saying she “wasn’t asking for permission.” There are Republican organizations — like VIEWPAC — that work to get qualified conservative women elected to Congress, but they don’t nearly secure the same funding as their Democratic counterparts, like EMILYs List. Kathy Barnette, who ran for Senate in the 2022 Pennsylvania GOP primary against Mehmet Oz and recently worked on Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign, says she would support a group that specifically helped Republican women get elected — as long as they were “the right women” and “not just anybody with a uterus and ovaries.” “Have I noticed that there is a lack of representation of the nation in the Republican Party? Absolutely. But I must admit, I don't obsess over it,” she tells Women Rule in an interview. Barnette suggests that the way the GOP establishment decides which candidates to back could be keeping the field majority white and male. “The primary two requirements are: ‘Do you have a high name ID? Because if you have a high name ID, I can fundraise off of that’ or ‘Are you independently wealthy?’” Barnette said. “What I've learned is that [it] really is [about] the ‘picker,’ and the ones who typically pick are the consultants.” But even when GOP Women make it to Congress, they have trouble moving up the ranks. Some of that can be chalked up to the fact that GOP women often don’t have the seniority of their male counterparts — and some of it to the fact that men are more likely to feel qualified for those positions and therefore are more likely to raise their hands, says Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Center for American Women and Politics. But she also thinks that we can’t fully understand the dynamic without seeing what’s going on in closed conversations on the Hill, and she doesn’t expect to see a substantive change any time soon — at least until the strategy to recruit GOP women changes. “Increasing women's political representation and power is not a one-size-fits-all strategy,” Dittmar says. “What we've been doing on the Democratic or progressive side is not working on the Republican side.”
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment