With all but one race for the House of Representatives finally determined, the numbers are in and they are grim for Republicans: a loss of either 39 or 40 seats, pending the result of one last contest in California. But beneath that figure is one that ought to terrify Republicans even more, one that suggests a crisis-level problem in the party.
Out of the 200 House Republicans who will be sworn into the 116th Congress, only 13 will be women. In the Senate, the picture is only slightly less grim, with seven women out of the 53 Republicans in that chamber. Earlier this year, I wrote about the potential for the Republican Party to end “the Year of the Woman 2.0” with fewer women in Congress than it started with, and sure enough, the ranks of Republican women in the House have been nearly cut in half.
But Republicans voters themselves do not tend to think there is a crisis at hand, and simply laying out the numbers is not necessarily enough to spark a sense of crisis. I conducted surveys of Republican voters both pre- and post- election where I asked about views on what the Republican Party does well, what they think about having more women in politics, and what they would or wouldn’t support the Republican Party doing to boost the number of GOP women in the game.
The good news is that Republican voters — over three-quarters of them — believe it is important to make sure Republican women are elected to office. Pre-election, 70 percent of Republicans thought the party was doing a good job at putting women in leadership roles, a figure that actually rose to 72 points post-election.
Part of this may simply be that the numbers are not widely known. The last Congress featured 23 Republican women in the House, who together comprised around nine percent of the Republican conference. When in the survey we first asked Republicans to guess what percentage of their conference in the chamber was female, less than a quarter of respondents said they thought the figure was below 10 percent. Most respondents significantly overestimated the percentage of the conference that was female.
Yet, when we then followed up with the actual figure — nine percent — and asked if they thought the country would be better off, worse off, or would there be no difference if more elected Republicans in Congress were women, a majority said “no difference.” (Thankfully, only four percent said “worse.”)
Put simply, Republicans and Democrats think very differently about the extent to which gender matters in politics. Republicans think men and women can be equally good, or bad, at governing; in our survey, 87 percent of Republicans said men and women are generally equally capable of serving in political office. Democrats, meanwhile, tend to think women bring particular virtues to public office. Pew Research Center back in August uncovered similar findings, with a majority of Democrats saying that Congress would do a better job solving problems if there were more women in the chamber, while only 18 percent of Republicans agreed. Morning Consult polling from the summer showed a similar effect.
Given this, it makes sense that the numbers and proportions themselves would not raise particular alarm for Republicans. And in interviews I conducted for the project with over a dozen Republican leaders around the country, that sense was echoed: Give us the best candidates, period. And yet, while talking in terms of numbers sounds like a path to quotas and other things Republicans abhor, there is a sense that having more Republican women in office would make sure Republican women feel more represented, would push back against the media narrative that Republican women don’t count, and would help Republicans win more elections.
Numbers themselves may not seem to effect governing, but winning more seats sure does. And some 75 percent of Republican voters think more female candidates would help build greater support with female voters, a critical priority after losing women by enormous margins in this year’s midterm elections. The same number of Republicans say that encouraging more qualified and talented Republican women to run would mean a stronger slate of candidates.
There are ways to boost the number of Republican women running for and winning office that get large majority support among Republican voters. Nearly two-thirds say we should make politics more family-friendly to make it easier for moms to participate in the process, an issue brought to the forefront by the surge in young moms entering Congress this year. And focusing specifically on the issue of electing more women isn’t something most Republicans think is at odds with their party’s values, with over 7 in 10 saying it actually helps “promote our values as a party.”
Republican voters may be reluctant to think a lack of gender balance in and of itself is a crisis. But they don’t want their party to leave talent on the table and think we’re better off for having more Republican women’s voices heard. They support a wide range of efforts to begin working on the problem of having so few Republican women in Congress. Party leaders would be wise to listen.
