More women than ever are running for elected office in 2018. The surge is attributable to the potent confluence of factors: Hillary Clinton’s loss—to Donald Trump of all people—as well as the new feminism that has emerged from the #MeToo movement.
Early this year, Emily’s List announced 36,000 women were seeking executive-level statewide office and House and Senate seats—60 percent more potential candidates than two years prior. Their number peaked before primary season started picking them off.
The bulk of these candidates are inspired by Trump’s rise. They’re Democrats, that is. In House elections, where more than 150 women have won primaries already, and more than 300 are still running, only 42 Republican women, a 10-year low, have won their party’s primary so far, according to Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics. In the Senate, four Republican women have won primaries so far, compared to more than twice as many Democrats.
While the number of women in Congress will likely increase overall, the number of Republican women may fall. “There is a possibility that could happen, because of the Republican women who are not running again—and then the lower number in the candidate pool,” said Rutgers’ Kelly Dittmar. “To be fair, there is an increase in the number of Republican women running compared to 2016,” she added.
Even so, the broader trends don’t favor Republican women—and women don’t favor Republicans. A recent FiveThirtyEight analysis found that Democratic women’s dominance is due in part to their disproportionate representation in the candidate pipeline: The highly educated and highly partisan people that populate likely candidate pools skew Democratic, among women anyway, to begin with. The Trump presidency hasn’t helped.
When Steve Bannon said white women with college degrees—a coalition Clinton failed to win over—had given up on Trump, he was absolutely right: Women have left the Republican party in disgusted droves since Trump’s election. And those who’ve stayed “strongly approve” at less than half the rate of men. Across the whole political spectrum, 65 percent of women view him negatively.
Women’s visceral reaction to Trump is more a response to the masculine type he represents: He’s a grotesque Babbit of the sort we thought we’d bred out of circulation. “He’s a throwback to a day when men thought that women were there for their pleasure,” as Elaine Kamarck, director of the Brookings Institute’s project for tracking female candidates, puts it. And while there may be far more Democratic women running this year than Republicans—and many more women vowing to vote for Democrats this fall—party affiliation is not what repels women from this president. It’s just a means of articulating our distance from him. “If we’d elected a more garden variety Republican president, I don’t think you would have had this outpouring of women,” Kamarck says.
But we didn’t elect a Mitt Romney type, so gains are a surer shot for Democratic women. Republican women will be lucky to break even. Incumbent Alabama congresswoman Martha Roby—a stalwart advocate for working families, and a former Trump critic—barely won a runoff election last month. Florida congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is one of many Republicans retiring from the House, along with Kansas’s Lynn Jenkins. Arizona’s Martha McSally is running for the Senate while Marsha Blackburn and Kristi Noem are running for governor in Tennessee and South Dakota, respectively. If Republican women win their remaining primaries, Dittmar notes, there’s a chance of avoiding an overall loss..
It’s worth looking back to the last big “pink wave,” in 1992. That was the election that swept Patty Murray, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer into the Senate. Its catalyst was, primarily, the challenging optics of Anita Hill’s testimony before an all-male Judiciary Committee—and the contents of her allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, which presented a power dynamic familiar to professional women and sent sexual harassment to the forefront of civil debate. But that so-called “Year of the Woman” faded from memory and consequence insofar as none of the conventional slate of women’s issues advanced immediately, or much at all.
Who’s to say women’s hopes for 2018 won’t meet the same fate? “This is more real than the Year of the Woman was,” said Kamarck. “They’re younger. They’ve got more energy. They’re mad as hell,” she added of the cohort craning for a platform in the Trump era. Polling suggests these candidacies are driven more by the Trump presidency than any other factor. So, she adds, are female voters. Asked to whether we’re looking at more of a passing political fad or a permanent representational shift, Kamarck told me to took to the governors’ races.
There are currently just six female governors. This year, 11 women have won their party’s nomination for the office: That’s another new record. But we hit the last record for female gubernatorial nominees—10 women—in 1994, and have met it multiple times in the intervening years. An increase of just one, suggests more of the same inching forward: It’s not the makings of a true wave. Still, some of these women—eight Democrats, and three Republicans—will probably win. (And let’s not forget the 16 women who are running for governor in states that have yet to hold their primaries.) Two term-limited Republican women governors, meanwhile, are on their way out this year. The record for female governors serving simultaneously is nine, and there’s no clear indication—yet—that this year will break it. Still: 11 is a record, and we have more primaries to go.
Plus, a governor makes a solid presidential candidate, Kamarck reminded me: 40 percent in total, and four of the last seven, were governors before winning the presidency. Governors, more so than senators, prove they can preside over a diverse and complicated chunk of America. One of our present, future, or past women governors could make a likelier “first woman president” than Clinton was, Kamarck adds: “Hillary started in politics as first lady, which is a little weird,” she quipped. “She wasn’t Maggie Thatcher, who started all on her own”—and whose toughness Clinton tried to emulate in 2008. Clinton’s modeling her first presidential run on Thatcher brings to mind another outcome of women’s running and winning in increasing numbers.
“We hope that it will inspire other women to run,” Dittmar said, of the purported “pink wave,” “And will highlight the importance of having women run and serve.” There’s limited evidence so far showing that seeing other women on the ballot or in office inspires women to run. But human nature—and anecdotal evidence—is unequivocal on the question.
The inverse can be true, too: In 1992, it was a paucity of female senators that first sparked the famous surge. Democratic women may seem own the day, but there’s a certain motivating power in being left behind when you know you have what it takes to lead. “I’m not sure this year’s narrative will have much of an effect of Republican women,” Dittmar said—unless, of course, “They notice that they’re not part of the story.”
