How Election Week 2022 Went Down

After a poor showing in Congressional races in 2018 (especially compared to Democrats), Republican women bounced back in 2020 with a record-breaking number of female candidates elected to Congress. But that progress doesn’t look like it will be repeated in 2022. So why does the GOP struggle to keep up with Democrats in terms of gender representation?

For nearly three decades, the Democratic Party has elected more women than Republicans to Congress. This has a lot to do with the supply of candidates — a higher share of women identify as Democrats, and the women in the pool of “qualified” candidates (college educated, in white-collar professions) are likely to lean Democratic. There’s also the issue of demand — the Democratic Party has made gender equality a political priority, and their voters are also more likely to say there are too few women in high political offices, which may give female candidates an advantage among Democratic voters.

But these supply-and-demand issues could be mitigated if the Republican Party’s organizational arm recruited from less traditional candidate pools and lent female candidates credibility with endorsements and financial backing. One of the quickest ways to narrow the gender gap in the GOP would be to nominate women to both competitive and safely red seats. However, as Amelia and I wrote last month, fewer Republican women than Democratic women are running in competitive or safe seats in the House. In other words, more Democratic than Republican women are running in House races where the outlook is favorable. In the Senate, Republican women have a more favorable outlook compared to Democratic women, but their numbers are small.

The backdrop of Trumpian politics this cycle might have worked against Republican women in the primaries, too. According to political science research, Republican women who run for office are perceived as more moderate than Republican men, even when they aren’t, and this may have hurt women in Republican primaries in deep-red states, especially if they faced off against a male candidate with Trump’s endorsement. And if women can’t win primaries, they can’t win in the general.

Trump’s endorsement certainly helped a few Republican women win their primaries, and may have assuaged voters’ fears that they are too moderate. For example, Republican Kari Lake — who is slightly favored over the Democrat, Katie Hobbs, in the Arizona governor’s race — was endorsed by Trump. She has also denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election and, like Trump, is also a political amateur and a local celebrity (she is a former newscaster).

Other women, like Republican Jen Kiggans in Virginia’s 2nd District, won their primaries without Trump’s endorsement but took Trumpian positions such as supporting a “full forensic audit,” which may have helped their conservative credentials. Kiggans is in a toss-up race against the incumbent, Elaine Luria, who flipped her seat in 2018. I’ll be keeping an eye on races where Republican women are competitive to see how they fare tonight, and talking more on the live blog about what their success (or failure) tells us about the modern GOP.