We have got to rid ourselves of these toxic characters who can’t win.
—Former congresswoman Barbara Comstock (R-VA)
In his first State of the Union address to the 116th Congress, President Donald Trump delivered a few lines that brought nearly everyone to their feet: “Exactly one century after Congress passed the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote,” he said, “we also have more women serving in Congress than at any time before.”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, sitting behind Trump, rose and began to clap, and the room quickly erupted into chants of “USA! USA!”
The irony of the moment was not lost on Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), one of the few Republican women who had survived the 2018 campaign. Trump, who had played a large role in motivating women across the country to dump candidates of his party in the midterm election, was lauding the record increase in female lawmakers. “The Republican women’s message gets lost as one of the few women in Congress,” McMorris Rodgers told me. “I would say it was more difficult to be one of the few Republicans among women than one of the few women among Republicans.”
In a year of female firsts, 2019 was an unwelcome one for GOP congresswomen: a historic wipeout. Their numbers in the House fell from twenty-three to thirteen, the biggest percentage drop ever and the lowest number overall in a generation. The story was much the same in state legislatures, where Republican women’s representation fell nearly 10 percentage points to 9 percent, even as women’s total representation increased from about 25 percent to 29 percent.
Some Republicans had chosen to retire before voters could decide their fate. Then, just months into the new Congress, two Republican women, Rep. Susan Brooks, a former prosecutor from Indiana who was a key recruiter of women for the party, and Rep. Martha Roby, who came from a ruby-red district in Alabama and was deeply respected by her colleagues, announced they would soon be hanging it up, too.
In Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, one character asks another, “How did you go bankrupt?” The reply: “Two ways. Gradually, and then suddenly.” Without a doubt, Trump cost many Republican members of Congress their seats in 2018, especially in districts where Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had prevailed in 2016. His constant and pernicious attacks targeting a broad array of groups; his history of misogyny, of denigrating women’s looks, of bragging about sexual assault and laughing off more than a dozen charges of sexual misconduct; his persistent humiliation of his own cabinet members; and his public disregard for basic comity toward veterans, members of his own party, and others had all become a proxy for the Republican Party, even for the few members who had tried to run away from him.
Many Republicans and their campaign managers told me tales of going door-to-door in 2018, only to be met by female voters who said that although they had voted for the Republican incumbent in 2016, they were not going to pull the lever for a member of Trump’s party now. “The suburban woman voter cares about raising her kids as good citizens,” said Mimi Walters, who lost her seat in Southern California to Katie Porter. “She wants them to have people to look up to, including the president, and she looked at Trump and she didn’t like what she saw.”
In fact, 2018 was merely the capper of a slowly deteriorating decade for Republican women. Myriad factors have contributed to this decline, including a fractured fundraising system that is far outmatched by the one fueling female Democrats; a historic allergy throughout much of the party to so-called identity politics; and too few senior Republican women pulling up newcomers into the ranks. “I can say with certainty that the problem of so few elected women in the Republican Party is not simply a Trump effect,” Laurel Elder, a political science professor at Hartwick College and coordinator of its Women’s and Gender Studies Program, told me. She has written extensively on women in both parties. “The problem is structural, and there are several overlapping causes.”
Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who had recently relinquished her leadership seat to Liz Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney and one of the few other Republican women left standing, won her reelection in eastern Washington largely by appealing to female voters, and was eager to share her somewhat atypical campaign strategy—it included a lot of ads specifically targeting women—with her male Republican colleagues back on Capitol Hill.
They showed little interest, however. “A lot of women were saying, ‘Hey, I need to do that in my district,’ ” she told me. “And when I told the guys this, I felt kind of like I was talking past them.”
The lack of interest, she felt, illuminated problems ranging from too few female professionals running political campaigns to much larger philosophical issues in the party she says she loves. “I am very concerned that the Republican Party is sending signals that we are rejecting minorities, offensive to millennials, and not reaching out to women,” McMorris Rodgers said. “As a party, we’re foolish if we do not make sure that people see Republicans as part of the next generation.”
File under “insult to injury”: in the era of Trump, many Republican women in the suburbs have stopped voting for Republican women.
Within weeks of the start of the new session, McMorris Rodgers, now in the minority, out of her leadership post, and with a lot more time on her hands, began to take steps on her own to reach out to Republican women to take on the new female Democrats. “There are a lot of women in America who don’t identify with marches and funny hats and anger,” she said, adding that many women who are running in 2020 felt simultaneously motivated by the big wins among Democratic women and began calling her for help.
But while the party was looking narrowly at the Trump effect on the midterm elections, it is abundantly clear that Republican women were contending with a much broader trend: the increased polarization in contemporary politics that has pulled the bases of both parties to their most strident corners. That dynamic has in some ways benefited female Democrats, who can appeal to the liberal base’s desire, even demands, for diversity, but it has been corrosive for female Republicans, whose base over time has moved further from this goal.
It was not always thus. From 1917, when Jeannette Rankin began to serve, until the 1970s, women in Congress were about evenly split between the parties, and at several points Republican women outnumbered Democrats. Rankin was a Republican who devoted much of her life to fighting for women’s right to vote; more Republicans than Democrats voted for the Nineteenth Amendment, which codified those rights. The first woman to win an election to both the House and the Senate was Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine who tirelessly fought for the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948, which gave women the right to serve as permanent regular members of the military, as well as the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s; she was a political maverick long before Senator John McCain of Arizona appropriated the term for himself. Republican Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, served in the Senate for nearly two decades, and was the first woman ever to chair a major Senate committee.
The feminist movement of the ’70s fueled the pace for female Democrats, however, as the Republican Party moved away from gender-based recruitment, and by the 1990s, Democratic women began to outnumber Republican women significantly.
This trend culminated in the 116th Congress, when 106 female Democrats were sworn into office, compared with twenty-one Republicans. “I’ll be honest with you, when [my husband] and I made the decision to run both for the city council and for Congress, the fact that I was a woman never occurred to me,” said Republican congresswoman Martha Roby in an interview in her large office on Capitol Hill. “I had taken my father’s word that I could be anything I wanted to be.” But, she told me, there have been things that have been said to her over the years that demonstrate the challenges female politicians face.
Roby first served in the city council of her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, after its only female member retired. She was a lawyer at the time she decided to campaign for the seat. “I would get to my law practice at like seven in the morning,” she said, “and then leave at three o’clock in a ‘Montgomery Needs Martha’ T-shirt and a pair of shorts, and go knock on doors by myself.”
She announced she was running for Congress when her son, George, her second child, was twelve weeks old. People, often women, would ask her about that. “ ‘Well, who’s going to babysit the children? Is Riley planning to babysit the children when you’re in Washington?’ ” she said. “I would say, ‘Nooooo, he’s their father, and we’re raising these children together. And we actually pay a babysitter when we need after-school childcare or whatever the need may be. And I would guess that men don’t get asked that question. If they have, I’d love to know.”
Equally irritating was what people would say to Roby when she announced her retirement and said she had no set future plans. “ ‘You can go home and be a wife and a mother.’ You know, as though I have not been a wife and mother for the nine years that I’ve been doing this,” she said. “I know people don’t mean it maliciously. But if people could step back for a moment, and just think about the words that they’re saying . . .”
While men often gaze into a mirror and find the best candidate for office staring back, women historically have had to be asked to run by others, often numerous times. Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox, who have studied the “ambition gap” for years, have found that Republican women feel even less qualified to run than Democratic women, and that this has not been remedied by current events, nor by the tiny increase of women in boardrooms or C-suites, which are often a breeding ground for political leadership. After the 2018 election they found that 23 percent of women, compared to 38 percent of men, had considered running for office. “Nearly identical to the 16-point gender gap we uncovered in political ambition in studies of potential candidates from 2001 and 2011,” they wrote.
There are also cultural gaps. Women in both parties fear neglecting family responsibilities or losing income when they run, but the Republican women I spoke to said they have encountered this more acutely over the decades. “When I first ran for office in 1996, I had women tell me to stay home with my kids,” two-term California congresswoman Mimi Walters recalled in a telephone interview. “And that was for the city council, which was a part-time deal!”
Two-term Virginia congresswoman Barbara Comstock was an accidental candidate when she ran for the statehouse in 2009. A former senior aide to Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) and a conservative operative during the Clinton years, Comstock was working as a lawyer in private practice when Wolf encouraged her to take a run at the Virginia House of Delegates. As the primary breadwinner in her family (her husband is a schoolteacher), she feared the financial risk. Wolf recommended that she reach out to the Virginia House Speaker, Bill Howell.
Howell suggested that she attend an event for another candidate, where he would be speaking on that candidate’s behalf. It was there, she told me, that Howell, not realizing she hadn’t yet made up her mind, announced, “I want to introduce Barbara Comstock. She is running, too.”
“Like a lot of Republican women, I had not thought of myself as a candidate,” Comstock said. “But the Speaker announced I was going to run, and I really hit it off with him and liked him, so I thought, ‘What the heck,’ and I ran.”
Later, when Wolf retired from his US House seat, it was a different story. “I didn’t need someone to accidentally push me in the pool to run,” Comstock said. “I jumped in and won a six-way primary, defeating five men with fifty-five percent of the vote.”
Republicans often seem to forget their own history, it seems. “Thirty to forty years ago, it seemed like the party was prepping lots of women, and they were eagerly in the pipeline for positions at all legislative levels,” Melanie Gustafson, a professor at the University of Vermont who has written extensively on political inclusion, told me. “It was the era when Republican women learned the power of wearing red suits. Now they are in grays, trying to blend in with the men, perhaps trying to go unnoticed. In the 1990s, I predicted that the first woman president would be a Republican. Elizabeth Dole’s candidacy [in 2000], however, didn’t seem to spark Republican women; she was too much the surrogate, almost as if she was in widow’s weeds. Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential candidacy didn’t help, and Michele Bachmann certainly did not either.”
Women in both parties often cite a fear of raising money, the engine of most successful political campaigns, even though they tend to be as successful as men in doing so once they put their minds to it. Most of the early women who entered Congress were financially secure, but as time went on, many had to depend on grassroots fundraising. The first time Senator Patty Murray ran for local office in the state of Washington, she and her husband held a garage sale rather than ask for donations. (She said that, sadly, he gave away an expensive lawn mower, leaving the fundraiser at a net loss.) Senator Amy Klobuchar loves to tell the story of her 2006 Senate run in Minnesota, which she financed by shaking down all her ex-boyfriends—to the tune of $17,000.
Seeing money as the key to political equity, Democrats in the late 1980s began to focus specifically on fundraising vehicles for female candidates in their ranks. EMILY’s List, which is an acronym for “Early Money Is Like Yeast,” started in 1985 with the specific goal of raising money for female Democrats who supported abortion rights. It was an immediate success, propelling Barbara Mikulski of Maryland in 1986 to run for the Senate from the House (she went on to become the longest-serving woman in Congress ever), and it has grown into a fundraising powerhouse that has helped to elect scores of female Democrats since.
“The Democratic Party is benefiting from an incredibly well-funded and well-organized external organization dedicated to recruitment and support of women candidates,” Laurel Elder told me. “I interviewed women members of Congress, and they said it was EMILY’s list, not the Democratic Party itself, that reached out to them when openings occurred and supported them every step of the way.”
While there are now a few such organizations on the Republican side, none of them have the clout of EMILY’s List, and sometimes they even compete with each other. “If all these different organizations pooled their money together, they’d be more effective,” former Republican congresswoman Mimi Walters said. “You can’t get them to work together. Everyone wants their own PACs, but you’re not going to be as successful that way. Giving me twenty-seven hundred dollars, that doesn’t do anything. You pool your money and do a hundred-thousand-dollar ad campaign—that is going to have an impact.”
Often, female Republican voters simply won’t put their money where their mouths are. “My biggest donors are Republican men,” Congresswoman Brooks said. “Myself and others are trying to get the message out to Republican women about the importance of supporting Republican women. The Democrats have done a better job of that.”
The story of the Republican women of Congress can be told through the tale of the Congressional Women’s Caucus. For much of the 1970s, largely left out of leadership positions and with no real platform to leverage their role as women, a bipartisan group of congresswomen tried to form an alliance that would, they hoped, give them legislative strength in numbers. The launch was initially stymied by senior Democratic women, many of whom hewed socially conservative, who were either contemptuous of the goals of the caucus or fearful that having a legislative organization based on gender would only foment division along gender lines.
Then there was Bella Abzug, a polarizing figure many women wanted nothing to do with, according to political scientist Irwin Gertzog’s fascinating book Women & Power on Capitol Hill. Abzug’s aggressive manner, which worked on the West Side of Manhattan, did not endear her to other women in Congress, and this served as an impediment to a coalition.
At last, though, in 1977 fifteen women from both parties came together to form the congresswomen’s caucus, with the goal of elevating legislative issues that they believed bridged party lines. The group insisted that its cochairs always come from both parties and that they focus on an agenda that all could agree on. Although the majority of the female Republicans in Congress before the mid-1990s were pro-choice, the abortion issue was left off the agenda.
In an oral history interview with House historian Matt Wasniewski, one of the founding members, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, told him, “The creation of the Women’s Caucus for the first time said to women of every ethnicity and every political party that there was a place for women in the process. . . . We were feminists, but we brought together women who weren’t necessarily feminists. And I think that it had an impact on bringing more women to the House and the Senate.”
During its early years, according to Gertzog, the Women’s Caucus struggled to get its highest-priority agenda items on the congressional calendar, including help for single mothers, an increase in high-level jobs for women in the federal government, and improved health-care resources for women. The caucus also pressed for legislation to protect victims of domestic violence, a rape shield law to prohibit victims from being asked about their sexual history in court, and the Equal Rights Amendment, which then saw tremendous gains in congressional support, even if it ultimately failed.
The caucus managed to hold together in the 1980s, through the Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan, which was hostile to much of its agenda, serving as a refuge of sorts for what remained a small number of women relative to the legislative body.
“It was a great opportunity for women to come together,” former congresswoman Connie Morella, a moderate Republican who was a key member of the caucus in the 1990s, told me. “We didn’t talk about abortion. We talked about the Violence Against Women Act. We planned conferences. We just did all kinds of things. Whenever men saw women come out of the Women’s Caucus, they would say, ‘What are they conspiring about now?’ It constituted a group of ideas and the sense that something was going to happen from them.”
In 1993—after twenty-four new women were elected to the House, the post–Anita Hill cohort—the caucus began to see truly large victories in the areas of health care, domestic violence, and employment, and used its expanding numbers to push for better committee assignments. Their efforts, along with the support of the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton, meant that, “The 103rd Congress produced more legislation addressing the needs of women and their children than any Congress in history,” Gertzog wrote, citing the Family and Medical Leave Act; funding at the National Institutes of Health for women’s health programs and making sure women were included in clinical research; free vaccines for kids on Medicaid; the Violence Against Women Act; and a measure helping single parents collect child support. Pressed by Republican women, there were also measures to assist in women’s access to credit and business development.
The biggest blow to the Women’s Caucus came with the Republican takeover of the House in 1995. The newly empowered Republicans did away with the funding for legislative groups, meaning that the Women’s Caucus and other such groups were starved of cash for staff and research. Many new Republican women were hostile to the caucus’s mission and, for the first time, tried to roll back its agenda, including even such petty but symbolic acts as refusing to allow the move of a marble sculpture that memorialized suffrage leaders to a more prominent place in the Capitol. And as more antiabortion Republican women joined the House, the abortion debate became a wedge issue. Bipartisanship, once the bedrock of the group, fractured, and Democrats started their own separate group.
The Congressional Women’s Caucus now has so few avenues for legislative agreement that its activities tend to be more ceremonial and social than anything else, reflecting an erosion of political cooperation writ large in the Congress and the country. If anything, many Republican congresswomen have come to resent their Democratic counterparts, believing, fairly or not, that they have specifically targeted them for defeat, and that the Democrats’ desire to see more women in politics is purely limited to their own party. (This is basically true for both parties, but there used to be far more talk among women about the need for more of one another in politics regardless of party. That notion has fallen victim to partisan rancor.) “Make no mistake,” one Republican staff member told me, “Democrats want more Democratic women in Congress, not more women in general. This is not a happy bipartisan scene you’re seeing up there now.”
It is becoming increasingly hard for a Republican woman to be a moderate—and still win. Some experts have found that Republican voters perceive women to be less conservative and doctrinaire, when voters actually want, as one GOP fundraiser put it, “someone to spit fire and tear the place down.”
Connie Morella, who represented a swath of Maryland from 1987 to 2003, agreed with this assessment. “There is the desire within the party leadership that people who run for office must feel a certain way about key issues,” she said. “So many women look at the platform and say, ‘Do I have to come out and say I am against Roe v. Wade or background checks for gun buyers?’ You must come out and pledge it, and that discourages them from running.”
Even when they fit the hard-core GOP mold, however, congresswomen still face more challenges than congressmen. Joan Perry, a North Carolina pediatrician who was soundly defeated in a primary race for a special election in 2019, is a case in point. Perry was a very conservative, highly educated woman running in a soundly red district, and many Republican women, along with those who fund them, threw their weight behind her. It seemed to be a perfect opportunity for a party eager to expand its female ranks. But the male voters in the district weren’t having it.
“Females are perceived to be more liberal, particularly on crime issues,” Michael Luethy, who managed her campaign, told me. “In this environment, for the Republican primary voter there is no more important issue than illegal immigration, which shows support for the president and fits into the crime-issues set. I do believe that is why we lost.”
“A man campaigning with me who could speak on behalf of my conservatism would have been a game changer,” Perry told me, in retrospect. Her internal polling showed that older female and male voters rejected her on the basis of gender. “I would never play the woman card, and I never did,” she said, “but you know the leadership of any organization needs to reflect the body that they are leading. Millennials are going to be looking at this and saying, ‘Is there a place for women in the Republican Party?’ ”
Barbara Comstock, who lost her House seat in 2018 to a Democrat, did not mince words about the need to try and eliminate some of the more fringe male Republican candidates, especially in politically mixed districts. “We have these really ridiculous men who are unaccomplished and just nuts, who troll around and cause trouble,” she said, citing as an example Corey Stewart, a Virginia politician associated with white nationalists, who won a Senate primary in 2018 only to get destroyed by Democrat Tim Kaine in the general election. She also mentioned her own 2018 primary challenger, Shak Hill, who associated himself with some of Stewart’s beliefs. “We have got to rid ourselves of these toxic characters who can’t win and they come in and make life worse for everybody,” Comstock said.
The challenges GOP women face now could well turn into a vicious cycle for the future: senior women are necessary for recruiting, mentoring, campaigning for, and otherwise bringing along new candidates from the same party. “There are simply many more Democratic women actively involved in recruiting and supporting more women to run,” expert Laurel Elder said. Running for office begets running for office. And as the numbers of Republican women decline at the state level, the national candidate pool shrinks.
Republicans must also confront a deep philosophical issue: while most Democrats believe that it is beneficial to have a big tent that includes women, Republicans in recent decades have become wedded to the notion of so-called meritocracy, over gender parity. For instance, Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who more or less pushed Cathy McMorris Rodgers out of her leadership post, has been a fierce opponent of highlighting gender in Republican politics, often insisting that running on a strong national security agenda is enough to bring in female voters (perhaps failing here to acknowledge her own significant advantage of being named Cheney).
When the New York Times did a large photo essay of all the women in the 116th Congress, Cheney was the only member who declined to participate. Cheney is also one of the few Republican women whom colleagues seem to treat with near reverence. “I just think that one reason Liz Cheney is so successful is that she doesn’t take crap from anybody,” Mimi Walters told me. “If we want to compete with the big boys, we have to be tough. Cathy [McMorris Rodgers] is a really nice lady, but if she really wanted that position she would have fought for it.”
If a party doesn’t make an effort to care about gender equity, however, it won’t “just happen on its own,” as Elder noted. After the 2018 wipeout, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York’s North Country, wrote a memo to her colleagues that suggested they work harder to elect women to their ranks and saying that she would start a PAC to do just that. She was instantly shot down by party operatives. “If that’s what Elise wants to do, then that’s her call, her right,” said Tom Emmer, a Republican from Minnesota, who is in charge of the party’s committee to elect House Republicans. “But I think that’s a mistake.”
“NEWSFLASH,” Stefanik replied to him on Twitter. “I wasn’t asking for permission.”
Until the party makes systemic moves to help women get through primaries, the ladies’ room off the House floor will likely feature few Republican women between votes. Martha Roby, who clashed early on with Trump when she retracted her endorsement of him after his “Grab them by the pussy” comments came out, insists that the current politics of the day did not lead her to become the latest Republican woman to flee the Hill. “It’s just time,” she told me. “I mean, look, there are frustrating days here, or just in this world that I live in. But the joy that I find in doing the work on behalf of the people I represent far outweighs any one thing.”
In that case, I asked her, why has she decided to leave Congress, when Republican women need her in the ranks?
“We’re just at a place where we’re ready to see what’s next,” she said.