Probably unqualified, say Republicans.
Can't imagine
how this keeps happening:
Democratic congresswomen now outpace Republican congresswomen more than 3 to 1 in the House and 4 to 1 in the Senate. [...]
In a blistering assessment of the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee highlighted the need to attract more women to the party. The “autopsy” report said the GOP should feature more women as surrogates to speak for the party and increase its number of “influential female voices.”
What's that, you say? The party of vaginal ultrasounds and employer-based sexytime decision-making and there-is-no-pay-gap-you-silly-goose is having trouble attracting "influential female voices" to speak up for those things? How very surprising.
Please read below the fold for more on this story.
Fear not, though, Republicans have this figured out. It's not that Republicans are having a more difficult time attracting women as potential candidates, it's just that Democrats are using "affirmative action" to elect unqualified women.
[Republican consultant Katie Packer Gage, a described expert on how to tailor GOP messages to women and no I am not making that up] said Democrats have a “much more affirmative action philosophy,” preferring to force equality in the candidates they select, rather than examining their actual merits.
“We want to elect qualified people, and if they happen to be women, that’s a bonus,” she said. “It shouldn’t be the primary qualification.”
Well alrighty then. That's a real-life Romney-votin' Republican expert on womenfolk and how to talk substantively to womenfolk saying that Democrats only have more women officeholders in their party because they don't worry about things like "merit" or "qualifications." I think we're done here.
Note that you only call it an "autopsy" when the patient has died; the post-2012 Republican effort to appear more sane and reasonable to American women has definitely been reduced to the status of ex-patient. No, that patient has definitely shuffled off its mortal coil. It has joined the choir invisible. If Reince Priebus hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies.