How to Get More Women to Run for Office—and Win

Last December, the Republican Conference of the 116th Congress gathered for our internal party leadership elections. As is tradition, we invited each of the incoming freshman members to the front of the room to welcome them to Congress as a class. The image was stark: In the line of the 29 newly elected Republicans, only one woman appeared — Carol Miller from West Virginia. Although the elections in 2018 ushered in a historic number of women elected to Congress — of the 88 newly elected members of the House of Representatives, 34 were women — the partisan breakdown of this new era of women leaders was remarkably lopsided. My Republican colleagues need to hear the obvious: We can and must do better, not just at recruiting women candidates, but at successfully electing them. Electing more women is important not just for the Republican Party, but for every American. The United States is better off as a nation when more women are making decisions, leading conversations, and crafting policy. Women legislators have more bipartisan legislative records than our male counterparts. We bring valuable and differing perspectives to policy debates. For example, women legislators understand that we need legislation to create environments conducive to working women. We know that the burden of child and home care often falls on women, even as we attempt to give our all to our careers. The Big Idea Stay informed with emails about everything new we launch in this and other Big Idea projects. Sign Up for Updates We know we need laws to combat issues like high maternal mortality rates and human trafficking — and my female colleagues are leading the way on these problems. Republican Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler from Washington successfully passed legislation to provide funding to research the reason for high maternal mortality rates in the United States. Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty from Ohio authored two pieces of legislation with Republican Representative Ann Wagner from Missouri to combat human trafficking. But we’ve got a long way to go to seeing as many women as men in U.S. politics. Out of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, only 106 are women. Out of the 50 governors, only nine are women. Women make up just 28.9% of state legislatures nationwide. How do we fix this problem? We must expand the pipeline of female candidates, get them the resources they need to run a successful campaign, and help them share their unique stories to win over voters. To that end, I launched E-PAC after the 2018 midterms, to engage, empower, elevate, and elect more Republican women. But bringing more women into politics is not simply a recruitment challenge; in fact, we’ve seen a surge of women wanting to run for office on both sides of the aisle. Working closely with Susan Brooks at the helm of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s (NRCC) recruitment arm, we have had conversations with more than 300 women interested in running for federal office as Republicans. By September 2019, 105 women had filed to run for Congress on the GOP ticket. For the first time in the history of the NRCC, more than half of the top-tier Republican candidates considered “on the radar” are women. I believe this is due to the successful recruitment and early promotion and funding of these women candidates. The real challenge is in funding female candidates and ensuring that women have the same resources men have to tell their stories and promote their candidacy. E-PAC focuses on infusing campaigns with early donations to help propel candidates sooner, so they have adequate time and resources to tell their stories to voters and create coalitions within their communities. (Historically, male candidates have benefited from fund-raising advantages, because they’re more likely to have already served in state and local government, giving them name recognition in their communities and a pipeline into federal office.) We are also working with women candidates — particularly first-time candidates — to more effectively structure the nuts and bolts of their campaigns, so they can go from winning the primary to winning the general election. This often means facilitating tough mentorship conversations with candidates about campaign budgets, the most important issues, the use of their time, fund-raising goals, congressional district data, and digital and advertisement strategies. I believe our work is starting to pay off. Some of our strongest Republican candidates in the 2020 cycle are women, including Nicole Malliotakis in New York and Ashley Hinson in Iowa. But if we want to see more Republican women, and more women in general, get elected, we need to continue to build on these efforts. We will not solve the issue of electing more women into positions of political power and influence in just one election cycle. But over time, I hope the efforts of E-PAC and other political action committees will help women representing a wide ideological range of both political parties lead in the halls of Congress and beyond. The Big Idea

How to Get More Women to Run for Office—and Win

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