Women are stepping up to run for Congress like never before

Daniel Donner for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Monday January 01, 2018 · 9:00 AM PST

2018/01/01 · 09:00

A record-shattering number of women are planning to run for the House or Senate in 2018 as a major party candidate, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. And it is no surprise that this surge is coming entirely from the Democratic Party. The numbers are still climbing, but as of this writing, there’s 337 Democrats planning to run for Congress in 2018 compared to 205 in 2016 and 162 in 1992’s Year of the Woman. For current numbers see here; past cycles can be found here.

Part of that is the massive number of Democrats running for office in general. You can see a similar phenomenon for Republicans in 2010. Rough estimates based on FEC data indicate that the proportion of Democratic candidates who are women is also skyrocketing.

Below the fold, graphs for the Senate and House separately.

The graph for the House alone looks pretty much the same as the the graph above, as the House has more than 10 times the number of elections in 2018 as the Senate.

The graph for the Senate, however, is a little different:

Instead of four times as many women running as Democrats compared to Republicans, there’s only about twice as many. There are not many more than 2016, either. Each year, however, is not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison with every other year, as only a third of the Senate seats are up for election in each cycle.

Women are stepping up to run for Congress like never before

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