Republicans Only Have 13 Women In The House

Guess which party is havin' a meetin'

After the North Carolina Republican Party got caught trying to steal the NC-09 House seat last November, the election of far right Trumpist sociopath, Mark Harris was invalidated and a special election called for September 10. Citizens of a district going from Charlotte to Fayetteville will have had no representation in Congress for nearly a year. The Democrat in the race is, politically, a worthless Blue Dog, Dan McCready and his GOP opponent, Dan Bishop, is even worse-- a right-wing psychopath who made a name for himself as author of the legislation to deny transgender children bathrooms.

There are only 13 Republican women in the House, a shockingly low number likely to bear some of the responsibility for the output of such a horrifying GOP agenda, even more extreme than normal. Women have been encouraged to run in open-seat primaries and against Democrats, weakly by the NRCC and strongly by Elise Stefanik' and her pro-women leadership initiative E-PAC. [Spoiler: last cycle, Stefanik raised money by screaming about electing women-- for example, $10,000 each from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UPS, Goldman Sachs, the Laborers Union, Ernst & Young-- but in the end she contributed to 54 right-wing men and just 20 women. She's a phony; keep reading.] When it came time to sign up for the NC-09 race, 4 women qualified as candidates. The votes of all 4 combined didn't add up to the transgender bathroom bill guy.

• Transgender Bathroom Bill Guy- 14,178 (47.7%)
• Leigh Thomas Brown- 2,624 (8.8%)
• Stevie Rivenbark- 892 (3.0%)
• Fern Shubert- 433 (1.5%)
• Kathie Day- 190 (0.6%)

Two other crazy right-wing lunatics, Stony Rushing (5,820 votes) and Matthew Ridenhour (5,065 votes) also finished significantly ahead of Brown. The biggest outlay of outside money ($1.3 million) was spent on behalf of Brown by the National Association of Realtors-- with this ad-- but to no avail. The ad was too positive and uplifting, not what Republican primary voters expect to hear in North Carolina. They were more interested in Dan Bishop's negative ugly messaging against AOC and socialism and his image as someone for trans-fats and against transgender students. This is the ad the Club for Growth, which was backing Stony Rushing, ran to smear Brown:





Did the NRCC or Stefanik rush to her defense? Not a chance. On Sunday Laura Barrón-López and Mealnie Zanona, reporting for Politico wrote that "Before Leigh Brown ran for a vacant House seat in North Carolina earlier this year, she got plenty of encouragement from Republicans in Washington eager to grow the ranks of GOP women in Congress. Then Brown jumped into a crowded Republican primary-- and the people who had given her hope were nowhere to be found. Among those who disappeared, she said, was Rep. Elise Stefanik, who launched an initiative this year to elect more Republican women."

“That's a little frustrating to have initial conversations and then follow up and be ghosted,” Brown said in an interview with Politico. “I put my real estate business on hold. I've dinged my own reputation in order to put myself forward as a public servant, and then you find out exactly how lonely it is to run for office.”

Stefanik acknowledged Brown’s account during a brief exchange in the Capitol last week but declined to elaborate.

The Republican Party has ramped up its efforts to recruit female candidates for the 2020 election, following the brutal midterm that decimated the ranks of GOP women. But Brown’s experience highlights an enduring challenge for the party: translating widespread concern about the dearth of women in the House Republican Conference into significant campaign support and, ultimately, victories by female candidates.

GOP consultants and candidates acknowledge their recruitment and resources lag far behind Democrats. And no centralized group exists to provide hiring advice, social media guidance, press training, or messaging tactics to candidates. Democrats, on the other hand, have the behemoth EMILY’s List network, as well as groups focused on recruiting immigrants, women of color, female veterans and more.

“The support structure needs to be more than the idea that you can get some PAC dollars from random PACs out there,” Brown said. “I didn't know how to hire. I'm an outsider to this.”

Republicans are not blind to the problem. A growing number of outside GOP groups are dedicated to boosting female candidates since the House GOP’s official campaign arm doesn’t play in primaries. “Winning for Women” launched a new super PAC in response to the devastating losses Republicans suffered in 2018.

And after watching her party swear in a 29-member class of House freshmen that included 28 men, Stefanik repurposed her leadership PAC, known as E-PAC, to focus on backing women in primaries. She told Politico at the time that “we are at a crisis level for GOP women.”

But neither Stefanik nor Winning for Women supported Brown, who faced nine other Republicans in the North Carolina race-- including three other women, each of whom finished with fewer than a thousand votes. The National Association of Realtors threw $1.3 million behind Brown as she presented a more moderate tone than her conservative opponents, and View PAC, a group focused on electing more GOP women since 1997, endorsed her.

Brown also spoke to Winning for Women before she filed and received strong encouragement. But once she announced her candidacy, she never heard from them again. Winning for Women’s super PAC said it has limited resources and stresses candidate viability.

...[A] number of Washington Republicans, including Stefanik and Winning for Women, have coalesced around a different female candidate in another special North Carolina race this year: Joan Perry.

Perry’s success in an upcoming July 9 runoff will be the first real test of Republicans’ new efforts to propel female candidates through primaries. But Perry begins the race at a disadvantage: She finished with 15 percent of the vote in the April primary, behind the first-place candidate, Greg Murphy, who earned 23 percent.

If Perry fails, it will highlight the limits of Republicans’ cash-only strategy-- and amplify the party’s woman problem heading into 2020. [It will also highlight how bad GOP recruiting is when the best woman they could find is so obviously unsuited for Congress and who couldn't come up with a better ad than this pathetic attempt to run against AOC and Bernie. Has anyone asked her how she feels about the total abortion bans in Alabama, Georgia and Missouri?]





“Donors are taking it seriously. Outside groups are taking this seriously. The party is taking it seriously,” said Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for the Winning for Women Action Fund. “It would be awesome if the first election after the midterms, Republican voters chose a woman. It would send a strong message.”

Indeed, Republican leaders have made replenishing their ranks of female lawmakers a top priority in 2020. The issue could take on even greater urgency if Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, decides to run for an open Senate seat in Wyoming.

The party’s leader, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA), has already contributed to New York state Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, who is running to unseat freshman Democratic Rep. Max Rose-- even though the rest of the GOP field has yet to take shape.

[Note: Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm is expected to run, win the primary and lose the general.]

...[A]ccording to recent data collected by The Associated Press, just 38 of 172 declared Republican House challengers for the 2020 elections were women, or around 1 in 5. That compares with 84 of 222 declared House Democratic challengers, nearly 2 in 5.

Part of the problem, critics say, is that there is little concert between the groups set up to help Republican women. And they limit where they get involved to vacant, open Republican-leaning seats or swing districts currently held by Democrats-- while deliberately shying away from backing challengers to male incumbents.

...The key to getting Republicans to commit to a cohesive effort to boost women candidates isn’t just convincing them that it’s good for the party’s image, but that women will make better candidates in general elections against Democrats, VIEW PAC’s Conway said.

"People need to put their thumbs on the scale during the primary to make the nominee be the person most likely to be able to win in November,” Conway said. “And the Republicans have not done enough of that.”

"The key to getting Republicans to commit to a cohesive effort to boost women candidates isn’t just convincing them that it’s good for the party’s image, but that women will make better candidates in general elections against Democrats." Yes, but that will never happen inside a party that seems to think that a way one women is a good strategy to turn out their base voters. Maybe not passing abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest in every state that Republicans control would be good messaging too?