Kevin McCarthy, the current House majority leader who’s about to be the minority leader, tried on Thursday to put lipstick on the pig that is Republican diversity. It was a challenge for him:
“It was the year of the woman,” McCarthy said, referring to the crush of women who ran for office in 2018, though in the Republican Party, he conceded, “it wasn't that much.”
“We have room for improvement. If you look at, in the Democratic primaries where there was an open seat and it was a woman versus a man, a woman won 69 percent of the time. So of course they had more women coming forward. We can do better in recruitment, and that's what I'm excited about doing,” he said.
“We can do better in recruitment” is something of an understatement. If you look just at the candidates who filed to run for House this cycle, there were 356 Democratic women and just 120 Republican women; 183 Democratic women won their primaries to just 52 Republican women.
Despite acknowledging that room for improvement, McCarthy also advanced a couple of hilarious defenses. One, some Republican women ran for higher office, like Rep. Kristi Noem, who was elected governor of South Dakota, and Rep. Martha McSally, who lost the Arizona Senate race to Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema. Of course, House Democrats also had women who ran for higher office—like Sinema and Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who was elected governor of New Mexico—and somehow managed to increase representation in the House.
McCarthy’s other defense of Republican diversity was the best, though: “McCarthy on Thursday said Republicans had diverse candidates who were defeated in the midterms and offered up two newly elected military veterans, both white men, as a show of diversity in Republicans’ incoming class.” As if no white male veteran was elected to Congress ever before in recorded history, vs. a reality of a Congress that will include at least 92 veterans, with at least 17 veterans elected for the first time this year. And what do you know—three of them are Democratic women, while Republicans only managed to nominate three female veterans.
“Room for improvement,” indeed.