Press Release

The future president’s ability to enact an agenda would depend on the balance of power in Congress. But House and Senate candidates are hardly the main attraction when there’s a race for the White House sucking up attention and resources.

“Overall, women are smart, and they know it’s very difficult to win elections, and when you’re competing with a presidential ticket, no matter which side of the aisle you’re on, you’re already facing an uphill battle,” said Lauren Zelt, executive director of Maggie’s List, a PAC that helps elect conservative women. “If I were a woman considering running for office, I don’t know that I’d want to do it in a presidential election year.”

There are also well-documented institutional barriers to women running for office – whether it’s access to fundraising dollars or blatant sexism. Mothers on both sides of the aisle say they often face a question their male counterparts do not when they go out to campaign: “Who’s taking care of your children?”

“It’s true on both sides of the aisle that politics in DC is still a boys club,” Zelt said.

And for Republican women, the infrastructure to recruit and elect women hasn’t been nearly as powerful as on the Democratic side, in part because of the GOP’s long-standing aversion to identity politics. That began to change after the 2018 midterms – the huge success enjoyed by Democratic women that year inspired more Republican women to run in 2020. Women were just 14% of both Republican House and Senate candidates in 2018; two years later, that had increased to 17% of Senate and 21% of House candidates, according to CAWP.

The party apparatus also started to make female and minority recruitment a bigger priority, with the House GOP touting that all the Republican candidates who flipped seats in 2020 were women, minorities or veterans. The NRCC has followed suit in the years since.

But while EMILY’s List – which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights – is a major force on the left and plays in primaries to advance female candidates, comparable GOP groups haven’t always had the same resources or institutional support within the party.

In a prime GOP pickup opportunity in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, for example, former President Donald Trump and House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik both backed last cycle’s losing candidate, Joe Kent, over Leslie Lewallen, who had the backing of Winning for Women and VIEW PAC, which also supports female GOP candidates, in the August 6 top-two primary. Kent ended up advancing to the general election while Lewallen came up short.

Another possible reason why there may be fewer women running is what Dittmar calls toxicity. Congress, already an unpopular institution, saw repeated displays of dysfunction over the past year as House GOP leadership went through multiple speakership fights – notably among men.

Women are often motivated to run to try to make policy change, Dittmar said, and if the gridlock looks prohibitive, they may start to channel their energies elsewhere.

One place to look is the states – even though this is an off-year for gubernatorial elections, there are more women running for governor this year than four years ago during a similar cycle. Women have been about 20% of gubernatorial candidates this year, up from only 13% in 2020, according to CAWP data.

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