“Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams admonished her husband John when he set out 250 years ago to help his fellow founders invent the United State of America. Last Week the Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, essentially spit in Mrs. Adams’ eye.
If you paid close attention, watching live TV coverage of Republicans celebrating House passage of Trumpcare, known as the American Health Care Act (AHCA), you could occasionally see a lone woman, Washington State Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, peeking out from amid a sea of otherwise male faces behind the Rose Garden podium.
There are many reasons why so many see the repeal and replacement of Obamacare as a disaster. Among the contributing factors is surely that lack of political involvement from women.
Adding insult to injury, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced a clutch of 13 Republican Senators who will fashion that chamber’s version of the bill, they were all men. Where was Maine Republican Susan Collins, a Washington veteran with 20 years in the Senate?
They’re certainly not going to shut Collins up just by leaving her sidelined. She has had a lot to say, throughout the year, about potential changes to health care. She co-authored a bill in January, with Louisiana Republican John Cassidy, that would essentially leave the mechanisms of Obamacare intact if states choose. But, under her Patient Freedom Act, the federal government would pay through block grants that, according to her own public statements, would lead most states to replace the exchanges, mandates, and minimum coverage requirements with their own models.
In March, Collins criticized the House’s ill-fated AHCA attempt, particularly pointing to elements that would lead to dropped coverage and high premiums for older, rural Americans. She has been similarly dismissive of the new version that passed the House last week, saying that the Senate will be “starting from scratch.” On This Week, Collins followed Speaker Paul Ryan, who repeatedly cited Maine’s successful experience with high-risk polls as the model for AHCA’s approach. “In Maine, we had definite revenue streams supporting the high-risk pool,” Collins said. “The devil is in the details.”
By leaving Collins out of the Senate working group--and Alaska’s Lisa Murkoswki, and West Virginia’s Shelly Moore Capito, both of whom have also called for more moderate changes than the House AHCA--Republican leaders appear to be placing their bets on a narrow conservative path to passage. That might make sense; anything that looks like Collins’s proposal would probably never get through the House. But, the Senate can only lose two Republicans--there may be only five women in their caucus, but they can’t get to 50 without at least three of them.
The lack of women in the Rose Garden was conspicuous to many viewers, but hardly surprising: as I detailed earlier this year, a growing partisan divide in female representation has led to a virtually all-male effort to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare.
That disparity results in frequent bad “optics” like those just mentioned. But, to date, evidence is slim that the GOP has paid a price where it counts: at the ballot box. After all, Republican officeholders have risen to an extraordinary peak of election success—holding the Presidency, both chambers of Congress, and two-thirds of Governors and state legislatures—despite growing more and more male-dominated over the past 15 years.
There could be something different this year--factors that could make the gender disparity feel urgent for voters. One of those factors is the unique polarizing nature of Donald Trump, who won among white women nationally, but whose election prompted an unprecedented day of women’s protest marches the weekend of his inauguration. There was also the unique nature of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, which brought women tantalizingly close to seeing the first woman elected President.
Perhaps even more importantly, Republicans now control all the major parts of the federal government, for the first time since 2006. That has stoked fear and anger among many on the left, and particularly among progressive women, as they watch the GOP try to implement policies they could only talk about before.
It is probably not entirely coincidental that the divide between the parties in electing women began in the early 2000s, when Republicans also held the Presidency, the Senate, and the House. That led to huge Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008, driven in large part by women voters. The male-dominated GOP seems a lot less frightening when they are powerless to implement their rhetoric.
Indeed, now that they are actually wielding power instead of just talking about it, Republicans aren’t just scaring off voters. They seem to be alienating even some of the women holding office in their own party, potentially leading to a further shrinking of those already-slim numbers.
Already, three of the 21 women House Republicans have announced plans to leave Washington after 2018. A week ago, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida announced that she won’t run for re-election. Lynn Jenkins of Kansas has done the same, while Kristi Noem of South Dakota has declared herself a candidate for Governor. Others are rumored to be planning to join the exodus. Several more are facing difficult re-election prospects, which became even tougher after last week’s AHCA vote—both for those who voted for it and against it.
Let’s return to Susan Collins, the moderate Maine Senator who is becoming the face of frustrated female Republicans in Washington. Collins, not due for re-election until 2020, has become increasingly less reserved about running for Governor in 2018. Meanwhile, she was back on the Sunday morning talk shows this past weekend, barely hiding her disdain at the exclusion of all five women from the Senate GOP’s working group on the health care bill. “The leaders obviously chose the people they want,” she said on ABC’s This Week.
Meanwhile, Among The Democrats
The night before the Republican Rose Garden scene, and just a mile or so away, the annual EMILY’s List gala was packed with Democrats intending to make the 2018 mid-terms a test of the importance of women officeholders and candidates. The group, which supports campaigns of progressive Democratic women, put forward a parade of women officeholders to speak at the event – including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who pondered rhetorically “if America will ever be ready for a male President again.”
Driven by the election of Donald Trump, and fired up by the women’s marches in January, thousands of women have flooded EMILY’s List to enquire about running for office.
Perhaps an even better gauge comes from Massachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark, who this year was named Recruitment Vice Chair for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). She says that, for the first time, women comprise roughly half the candidates DCCC is in contact with.
“It is overwhelmingly women who woke up the day after the [2016] election and said to themselves, ‘What am I going to do? I want to be able to tell my daughters and grandchildren what I did,’” Clark says.
Already, 92 non-incumbent Democratic women are listed as 2018 candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University. The same tracker finds only 19 Republican women.
It’s all got Democrats hopeful that a women-led charge to the polls, to vote for Democratic women, will provide a boffo 2018 election cycle for the party.
But, most of that enthusiasm and energy is coming from women who were already regular Democratic voters. Getting them charged up, both to run for office and help other campaigns, will help. But for a big win—to take control of the House—they’ll also need to charge up women who didn’t wake up angry the day after the 2016 election.
That’s the challenge Clark sees, too. “As Democrats, we have work to do,” she says, “to re-introduce ourselves as the ones who are fighting for you.”
