While Donald Trump has inspired record numbers of Democratic women to run for office this year—and they’re winning their primaries—things are a little different for Republican women. About a third of Democratic House candidates are women and 42 percent of Democratic primary winners so far this year are women, according to the Rutgers University Center for American Women and Politics. For Republicans, those numbers are 14 percent and 13 percent.
“We’ve told a lot of women, ‘Don’t run this year,’” said Meghan Milloy, the co-founder of Republican Women for Progress, which helps to promote moderate female Republicans. “We’ve told them, ‘You’re a great candidate, if it were any other year you would win.’ We don’t want these women, who have such potential, to lose and get down and get out of politics.”
But the thing is, Republican women aren’t just swimming against the tide of the anti-Trump resistance. Their own party isn’t that thrilled to have them. Take Carla Nelson, a state senator running for an open House seat in Minnesota. Despite Nelson’s endorsements from the NRA and conservative women’s groups:
But in the primary on Tuesday, local party organizations are supporting Jim Hagedorn, who has run for the seat and lost three times, even in 2016 when Mr. Trump won the district by 15 points.
“Locally it’s different,” Ms. Nelson said. “All the good ol’ boys begged me not to run.”
And in addition to that record of losing, Hagedorn has a history of sexist, misogynist blog posts that would make him a prime target in a general election. But apparently to local Republicans, he’s preferable to a woman who’s already been elected to the state legislature. So, sure, Republican women will have trouble because so many women are fired up to vote against Donald Trump, which means voting against other Republicans in a year when Trump isn’t on the ballot. But Trump leads the Republican Party for a reason, and that reason is ultimately why despite Republican majorities in the House and Senate, Democratic women far outnumber Republican ones in both chambers of Congress. Republicans are not big fans of women. Period.