WASHINGTON – Republicans are having a challenging time recruiting and electing women to Congress and are lagging behind Democrats in ensuring that women, who make up half the population, have a forceful voice in the halls of power, said experts on women in politics on Tuesday.
“This year’s data clearly shows that Republican women are falling behind in terms of candidacies, nominations and even success in primaries,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey, in a phone call with reporters.
Democratic women, on the other hand, “not only outperform their male counterparts, but also achieve near parity with Democratic men in nominations and office.”
The 435-member US House of Representatives currently includes 126 women, 34 of whom are Republicans. The 100-member Senate has 25 female representatives, nine of whom belong to the Republican Party.
CAWP Data Director Chelsea Hill said on the call that while women make up just 31.1% of House general election candidates overall, the breakdown shows a clear difference between Democratic and Republican politicians.
“Women continue to be significantly underrepresented as a percentage of all U.S. House and Senate candidates and nominees,” Hill said. “But Republican women make up a significantly smaller percentage of their party’s candidates and nominees than Democratic women.”
Democratic women running for the House represent 45.9% of candidates within their party, putting them nearly on par with their male counterparts and increasing the share of female candidates throughout 2022, she said.
However, Republican women make up 16.2% of Republican House candidates this election cycle, a smaller share than in 2020 and 2022, Hill said.
In the Senate, female candidates make up 30.9% of general election candidates, with a similar split between Democrats and Republicans.
Democratic women make up 46.9% of the party’s candidates for that chamber of Congress, also near parity, although women make up 17.6% of Republican Senate candidates, “a smaller share than in the three previous cycles,” Hill said.
Why are fewer Republican women running?
CAWP experts said the disparity in female candidates is largely due to structural differences as well as differing views on the importance of women in office among leaders and voters.
CAWP research director Kelly Dittmar said if party leadership doesn’t believe the underrepresentation of women in government is a problem that needs a solution, it will “make it arduous to build the kind of support infrastructure – be it for women’s PACs, Training, recruitment programs – that would ensure those numbers stay high.”
Dittmar said an example of this was House Republican leaders’ decision to launch a program called “Project Grow,” which aimed to recruit female GOP lawmakers into the “Young Guns” program more focused on general recruiting.
“Young Guns” is also the title of a 2010 book by former House Republican leaders Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy, all men.
Dittmar said the evolution of the Republican Party under former President Donald Trump and the change in abortion access resulting from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 were not significant factors, who are responsible for the lower number of female Republican candidates.
“I would suggest that at the candidate level there are enough conservative Republican women in the country who could be recruited and supported as candidates,” Dittmar said.
Walsh said one of the reasons GOP leaders are not focusing on recruiting and promoting women to public office is because there is a “hesitation” within the Republican Party to engage in identity politics.
“The Democratic Party emphasizes this, as opposed to the Republican Party, which says the best candidate rises to the top and lets the best person win,” Walsh said. “So it’s a deeply philosophical difference that impacts candidate recruitment and candidate support.”
Dittmar added that Democrats don’t necessarily recruit and promote female candidates “out of the goodness of their hearts,” but do so because their voters expect it.
“There is an electoral incentive, partly because of the gender gap in voting, but also because of the racial and ethnic differences in the Democratic base, where more is required of the Democratic Party to say, ‘Look, we’re going to get you votes. ‘” ‘You need to prioritize and value this level of representation.'”
