More Women In Congress Isn't Just A "Nice" Thing-- It's CRUCIAL For This Country's Success

Two of the most important Senate races this cycle pit women against each other. One of the Senate's most progressive Democrats, a courageous reformer with a fantastic voting record that spans a career as a state legislator, a congresswoman and more recently as a senator, Tammy Baldwin, is up against a conservative Republican, Leah Vukmir, in Wisconsin. My lens on this race frames an outspoken progressive against a Trump-enabling reactionary. The woman-thing is removed as an identity politics factor. Another identity politics factor may or may not be in play: Tammy has always been upfront about being a lesbian.

Over in Arizona, there are also two women competing, both congressmembers looking to ascend to the Senate. Kyrsten Sinema is running as a Democrat, although she votes more with the Republicans than anyone would ever expect from a Democrat. She is the head of the Blue Dogs and has the single worst voting record of any Democrat in the House. You think Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly and Heidi Heitkamp are bad? Just wait 'til this monstrosity is in the Senate. Her opponent, a mainstream conservative Republican, Martha McSally, is worse. Again the identity politics factor is removed and again there's a wiggle here because Sinema self-identifies as LGBT.

Without the "women thing" as a determinant for identity politics voters, it might make for a race where voting records-- readily available-- become more meaningful than anatomy, not a bad thing. The Senate needs more women members and I didn't pick the word "needs" randomly. I want to tell you why I chose that word. At worked at a company a long time ago where senior management would meet once a week for house and hours and hours. There were no women-- and eventually there was one woman-- and it was, among other things, dysfunctional and not in the best interests of the company. Forget about anything like "fairness" for a moment. Senior management of a company cannot make good decisions-- CANNOT-- without diversity. Without diversity you fail-- that simple. This is not a "bleeding heart" observation. Quite the contrary. There have been lots of studies that have shown how important diversity is in decision making. Companies need to take it serious and eventually mine did, which gave them an enormous advantage of our competitors who were more male-dominated. This Forbes article from last year, New Research: Diversity + Inclusion = Better Decision Making At Work, explains that "inclusive teams make better business decisions up to 87% of the time" and why "decisions made and executed by diverse teams delivered 60% better results." Believe me, that isn't just true in business.

This week, NBC reported that 100 women may be elected to the House in November-- with a very disturbing caveat: "the wave is being driven entirely by Democrats; on the GOP side, the number of women serving in office is expected to dip.

Keep in mind that there are plenty of woman v women races in the House, just like the two I mentioned in the Senate above. In Washington state, for example, an outstanding progressive leader, Lisa Brown, is facing off against a Trump/Ryan puppet in Spokane, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the top-ranked woman in the GOP leadership. (Her Trump affinity rating is a startling 97.8% of the time!)

NBC makes the point that if the 100 women are elected in the House, it will "put more new women in the House than in any prior election." That's a positive good for many reasons-- but especially for the country.

Between 30 and 40 new women are poised to enter the House next January, shattering the previous record of 24 set in 1992's "Year of the Woman." And much as pundits interpreted 1992's wave as a backlash against Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation, 2018 is now clearly a backlash to President Donald Trump's election.

Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton didn't just launch the Women's March; it set off an avalanche of Democratic women running for Congress, many of them first-time candidates, ranging from former Navy helicopter pilots to former CIA officers. Of the 254 non-incumbent Democratic nominees for the House, an unheard-of 50 percent are women, compared to 18 percent of Republicans.

Currently, there are 61 female Democrats and 23 female Republicans serving in the House. But after November, Democrats could expand their ranks of women by more than a third. Meanwhile, the GOP's ranks could shrink by up to a third.

Democratic primary voters have made clear they feel the best way to send a message to Trump is to send a woman to Congress: In Democratic House primaries featuring at least one man, one woman and no incumbent on the ballot, a female candidate has won 69 percent of the time. In the same situations on the GOP side, a female candidate has won just 35 percent of the time.

Keep in mind, not every woman candidate is any good. Some are more like Kyrtsen Sinema than like Tammy Baldwin, BUT... in races that pit women against Republicans? There's no contest. Even the worst, most reactionary female Democrats running for House seats-- say, Kathy Manning in North Carolina, Gretchen Driskell in Michigan, Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona, Elaine Luria in Virginia-- are absolutely better choices than their Republican opponents (male or female).

Let me go back to the Senate races for one second, actually just this one in Tennessee which pits a woman against a man. The man is a fairly conservative, though not dogmatic, former governor, Phil Bredesen (D). The woman is an extreme right fanatic, very dogmatic, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R). She's currently one of the worst members on Congress-- absolutely dreadful by every possible metric. On top of that, she's one of Trump's top picks for the Senate anywhere in the country and is running a campaign that explicitly vows to protect him from impeachment. You going to vote for the woman candidate against the male in this instance?