The 1992 election was dubbed the “Year of the Woman” after four women—Patty Murray, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Carole Moseley Braun—were elected to the Senate to bring the total number of women in the upper chamber to six. In 2018, there are six Senate races that will feature women running against women.
Including House races, there are 33 women vs. women match-ups in total. Thanks to a high number of retirements, less than half of them have Republican incumbents. While much is made this election cycle of Donald Trump’s unpopularity, the ongoing effects of the #MeToo movement, and how the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle will galvanize female voters, the women who are actually running don’t fit predictable Pink Wave stereotypes.
Of the six female Senate challengers taking on female incumbents this fall, for instance, just one is a Democrat: Lincoln, Nebraska councilwoman and business owner Jane Raybould, whose Republican incumbent opponent Deb Fischer is favored heavily to win a second term. In Arizona, both parties nominated a woman to replace retiring Senator Jeff Flake.
“Neither of those women chose to run because of 2016,” said Rutgers political scientist Kelly DIttmar of these two candidates, sounding a little tired of the same old story: “That’s a really simplistic narrative about why women chose to run this year.”
Republican Martha McSally and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, are congresswomen with compelling backstories—and well-known ambitions. McSally, currently favored to win in November, is a retired Air Force colonel who served 1988 until 2010. She went public last spring with a story of sexual abuse, amid a legislative effort she cosponsored to crack down sexual harassment in Congress. Sinema grew up in poverty, went from a “Prada socialist” in the state legislature to a carefully polished centrist congresswoman heeding a call to higher office. Both women are seasoned politicians well poised for their next step. “Sometimes we want to tell one story about why women run, when really so much is based on a perception of opportunity,” Dittmar said.
Republican Chele Farley, meanwhile, is running uphill against Kirsten Gillibrand in New York. And she’s tried to use Gillibrand’s insurmountably high profile as a knock on her. “Too many politicians care more about making headlines, and hashtags, than making a difference for the families they’re supposed to represent,” Farley said in one her first interviews this year.
Washington senator Maria Cantwell’s opponent Susan Hutchinson, another Trump-supporting challenger with no real chance against the incumbent Democrat, is an Emmy-winning TV journalist and former state party chair. Hutchinson and Farley run less because they’ve sensed an opportunity to serve than because they disagree with the other side’s ideology. Though it runs in the opposite direction, their motivation springs from same source as that anti-Trump wave of women candidates: They see a status quo they can’t abide, and so they’re trying to “be the change.”
Minnesota’s Senate race, where interim senator (and former lieutenant governor) Tina Smith is running to replace Al Franken has gotten particularly ugly. While her opponent, state senator Karin Housley, has been closer in the polls than expected, her history of offensive comments might come back to haunt her. Subtlety not being her campaign style either, she’s charged Smith with rank hypocrisy for opposing Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation while not calling out Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison for the same: Ellison’s ex-girlfriend accused him of emotional abuse over the summer. “When it’s a Democrat who’s accused of sexual harassment, they don’t want to hear it,” Housley said,.
Elsewhere in the Midwest, Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin’s Republican opponent, Leah Vukmir, a nurse and state senator, has out-fundraised the first-term incumbent. In a controversial ad she cut over the summer, death threats played over her home answering machine while the camera panned over family photos to Vukmir at her kitchen table, a gun resting by her right hand. She then touted her record of battling unions alongside Scott Walker, who supports her Senate bid—and said Trump could use such “reinforcement” in Washington. In a primary contest drowning in donor funds, Vukmir defeated a robustly funed former Democrat and Iraq War veteran Kevin Nicholson. She currently trails Baldwin, however, by 9 points.
One consequence of more and more women running against other women is that voters will see a wider array of personalities and political philosophies. “People think of women candidates in this monolithic way,” as Dittmar put it. “These races force you to realize women are as ideological different from each other as their male counterparts.” These races portend a lasting representational shift—in that they force the electorate to pay attention to women who don’t fit any preferred narratives.
