Why Can't Republicans Elect Women?

• Author: Gedye, Grace

The number of Democratic congresswomen has soared in recent years. On the GOP side it's barely budged. Will that change in 2020?

In the long and mostly disappointing history of women in American politics, 1992 is widely considered a pivotal year. Fueled in part by outrage over Anita Hill's treatment by an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court nomination hearings the previous fall, voters elected a record number of women to the House and Senate.

Headline writers would soon dub 1992 "The Year of the Woman." In the popular imagination, that phrase has come to evoke the beginning of a decisive upward trajectory for women in elective office. But it was always a bit of a misnomer. Of the 24 women elected to the House in 1992, 20 were Democrats--as were all four of the newly elected senators. A more accurate description would have been "The Year of the Democratic Woman."

That label would also have foreshadowed the path of progress for women in the years since.

The next 30 years of data tell a consistent story of two lines diverging. In 2004, 52 Democratic women were elected to Congress, compared to 30 on the Republican side. But by 2008, the Republican women's caucus was reduced to 21, while Democrats had climbed up to 69. Today, partly on the strength of another "year of the woman" in 2018, Democrats are up to 105 women. And Republicans? Twenty-two. In fact, while there are currently more Democratic women serving in the House than at any point in history, the number of Republican women in the House is the lowest it's been since 1992.

In light of the attrition, some Republicans are making a push to get more women elected in 2020. As of this writing, a record 220 (and counting) Republican women have filed to run in congressional primaries. Susan Brooks, a Republican congresswoman who has been vocal about getting more women to run, was put in charge of the National Republican Congressional Committee's (NRCC) candidate recruitment efforts. Elise Stefanik, another House Republican, launched E-PAC, a political action committee, to support and raise money for GOP women candidates, with a focus on supporting their primary bids. (The "E" stands for "Engage, Empower, Elevate, and Elect.") And more than half of the NRCC's 22 "young guns"--House candidates that the party identifies as especially promising--are women.

If Republicans are going to reverse the trend of the past nearly 30 years, it's going to be thanks to candidates like Tiffany Shedd, who is running to represent Arizona's First District. Her CV boasts a wide range of talents: natural resource lawyer, farmer, bilingual kindergarten teacher, homeschool mom, and 4-H certified shotgun coach. She grew up in Arizona and stuck around for law school. She realizes that she checks certain boxes for the party. "I don't really have to guess or figure out, like, so-called 'messaging,' because I am the demographic we're trying to win," she told me in April. Her campaign ad tells the story of facing off drug smugglers trying to cross her land, interspliced with video of people climbing over border walls, clips of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking angrily, and Shedd shooting a rifle. On her campaign site, she pledges to work with Donald Trump to secure the border.

The Republican establishment has lined up behind her. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has endorsed her, and the NRCC named her a "contender," one tier below a young gun. She's got support from more than a dozen members of Congress, the Arizona Farm Bureau, a handful of woman-focused conservative PACs, and more. She ran in 2018 and didn't make it out of the primary, but this year she has outraised her only remaining primary opponent by more than five to one. Her district is currently represented by a Democrat, but it voted for Trump in 2016. With all that backing, Shedd and candidates like her are a test case. The GOP has been remade in Trump's image. Is there any room left for Republican women?

There's a Godwin's law of conversations about women running for office: As a discussion runs longer, the probability of someone bringing up EMILY's List approaches 100 percent. Founded in 1985 to back...