Where Did The GOP Women Go?
Greene, Mace, and others came in as Trump was voted out. Then things only got weirder.
Ohio, which held its congressional primaries in March, has 15 Congressional districts; every one of them has a male Republican nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives this year. It’s a clean 15-0 sweep for the Y chromosome crowd.
That includes eight incumbent Republicans running for re-election; three running hopelessly against Democratic incumbents in heavily D-leaning districts; two running to succeed Republicans not seeking re-election in heavily R-leaning districts; and two running against vulnerable Democrats. All men.
This is, in my opinion, not the most startling data point I’m going to give you in this post, so stick with me.
Something odd has been happening with gender in the Republican nominating process recently. For a very long time, it had been simple: roughly one of every ten newly-elected Republican House members were women. That held, within a few percentage points either way, cycle after cycle, decade after decade, from the 1980s through the mid-2010s. Republicans would regularly claim that this was somehow not due to systemic sexism, while also claiming to be breaking the pattern in the current election cycle, and everything remained the same.
Then in the 2018 mid-term elections—Trump’s mid-term—Republican women did especially badly: out of 29 new incoming GOP conference members, just one was female. Men also won in all six special elections taken by Republicans during the subsequent 116th Congress. This, while more than half of newly elected Democrats for that session were women.
That was followed by an amazing reversal: an astonishing 40 percent of the GOP freshmen in the next, 117th Congress, were women. Lots and lots of women won GOP nominations in winnable races in 2020. It seemed that something significant had changed in the MAGAfied Republican party.
Maybe. In the 2022 midterms, the figure dropped to 18 percent—higher than it used to be, but not near a repeat of 2020.
And now this cycle, so far, looks to be a further retrenchment. About a third of districts nationally have already chosen nominees (thanks to big states California, Texas, Illinois, North Carolina, and Ohio primarying early), and Republicans have selected men in 87 percent of them.
More telling are the open seats in solidly Republican districts (including three in North Carolina re-drawn to favor the GOP). These are the nominating contests that really matter, and men have won all nine decided so far. (In a 10th, North Carolina’s 13th district, Kelly Daughtry heads to a runoff in May.)
I don’t know what all of this says about the current GOP. In my opinion, having written about this topic for two decades now, the main block for women in the party has been a systemic inability for women to get in a position to be backed as ‘next up’—by local pols and funders, and national right-wing organizations—when a winnable open seat comes up. My guess, and it’s little more than a guess. Is that two things happened in the anomalous 2020 cycle. One was that many institutional players, fearing the Trump-driven loss of suburban women to Democrats, seemed to make a genuine effort to back women candidates. The second reason was a desire among GOP primary voters for MAGA iconoclasts, allowing for the nomination of Greene, Boebert, Cammack, and so on despite a lack of strong institutional backing for them.
If I’m right about all that, I suspect the first of those two factors quickly faded, as party insiders patted themselves on the back for solving the problem and went back to business as usual. And perhaps the second is fading as well. We may get a better sense as the rest of this cycle’s primaries play out.
But meanwhile, the unusual number of Republican women elected to Congress in the last two cycles has obscured something else going on: the departure of the ones who were there before.
The total Republican House conference currently stands at 16 percent female—unimpressive, but better than around 10 percent, where it was for years.
But, as described above, that includes 26 Republican women members first elected in the last two cycles.
Only eight remain who were first sworn in prior to 2021 (and that’s including Claudia Tenney of New York, who was voted out in 2018 but got voted back in via a 2021 special election). That’s just six percent of Republicans with at least two full terms under their belts.
And of those eight, three—Kay Granger, Debbie Lesko, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers—are retiring this year. This is the startling (to me at least) data point I promised earlier: just a handful at most of Republican congresswomen pre-dating 2021 will remain in the House come January 2025. Only Virginia Foxx will pre-date 2013 (when Ann Wagner was sworn in).
I’m not sure what to make of that, other than a lack of seniority for getting women into committee chairmanships and leadership positions. I have some theories about why it might have happened, but I’ll leave that for another time.