Republican't

Next year, only a single woman will enter the 116th Congress as a freshman legislator from the Republican Party. The number of women in the GOP caucus will dwindle by as many as 10 representatives. Even as the 2018 midterms saw a record number of women elected to the House, those victories were utterly lopsided, and many news organizations picked up on this trend in the weeks following the election. The New York Times wrote on the rough election season for GOP women, and spoke to Kelly Dittmar about how even a handful of losses can have an outsize impact on women's representation in the GOP, since their numbers are so small to begin with. CNBC likewise published a story contrasting women's gains overall this year with losses in the GOP women's caucus. Carter Sherman, writing for Vice, interviews women Republicans that ran for office this year, and their frustrations with the party's inability to effectively recruit and support women candidates. The Associated Press also wrote about soul searching going on in the Republican Party following the elections, and how they hope to reform party priorities and infrastructure to solve the problem. In Forbes, filmmaker Wendy Sachs writes about her forthcoming documentary about the 2018 midterms, SURGE, and the difficulties they had in finding Republican women to add to their film. Sachs quotes Debbie Walsh in her piece saying, "If the goal is political parity, it can't happen with only one Party doing that work and getting more women engaged and involved."

 

Altered States

With women winning more seats in state legislatures than ever before, local news outlets have been writing about how the 2018 midterms have affected local races. In The Charlotte Observer, Jim Morrill wrote about the ways in which activism fed into volunteerism to propel the candidacies and elections of record numbers of women in North Carolina and around the country. The Gloucester Daily Times wrote about the number of women headed to the Massachusetts state legislature next year; the state has set records for its House but not its Senate. Greta Kaul wrote for MinnPost about diversity in Minnesota's local elections, including increasing representation from the state's Hmong community, but also notes that a decline in the number of Republican women in the state legislature led to an overall decline in the total number of women serving. "Long-term, big-picture, we're not going to get anywhere close to parity unless more Republican women run for office," CAWP's Jean Sinzdak tells Kaul, "and the Republican party makes a real effort at recruiting them." Vermont also will see the number of women serving in its legislature decline this year, as Seven Days reports; Vermont is currently well-placed among the states for women's representation in its legislature. The Associated Press, meanwhile, spoke to Debbie Walsh for an overview of how women fared in state legislative races around the country. Walsh noted the strong gains this year before leaving readers with a cliffhanger: "The only question that remains is whether 2018 was a one-off or a new norm." Tantalizing!

 

Pelosi Power Play

With the Democratic Party having been swept back into power in the 2018 midterms, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is positioned to once again assume the House speakership. Pelosi, however, remains a fixture in attack ads and messaging that target Democratic candidates, and the matter of her popularity has blossomed into a challenge to her leadership. Democratic candidates were repeatedly quizzed throughout the midterms as to whether they would support Pelosi, while the leadership positions of Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, and (Paul Ryan's chosen successor) Kevin McCarthy went largely uninvestigated. These pledges, or withholdings, of support led to a coalition of Democratic House members, as reported in The Washington Post , releasing a letter opposing her leadership. The New Yorker  writes about the rudderlessness of the challenge, as no candidate has emerged to run against Pelosi. Writing about the power struggle for CNN , Harry Enten notes that both in terms of electoral success and ideological fit, Pelosi actually seems like a good fit for the Democratic Party in 2018. For TIME , Alana Abramson spoke to Debbie Walsh about whether the opposition to Pelosi was a referendum on gender, and Walsh noted disparities in the way Pelosi was treated, "I think this is what women who try to attain and who do attain really high level leadership positions come up against. It seems that women are more likely to be victimized by this than men in leadership. ... [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer did not do as well with the Democratic Party in his chamber but there is no problem." The failure to produce any candidate for this opposition to Pelosi to coalesce around has led her opponents to begin softening towards her, according to The New York Times.   With today's vote in the Democratic Caucus confirming her nomination, it seems extremely likely that Nancy Pelosi, the nation's first woman Speaker of the House, will grab the gavel once again.