The Truth about Why Democratic Women are Losing
October 13, 2010
by Anna Belle Pfau
|As reported recently in Politico, Democratic women are in danger of losing electoral ground in the midterm. This stunning development threatens to decrease the number of women in Congress for the first time in 32 years.
Here’s what you won’t read in the article: If Democrats emerge with fewer women in Congress this year it will not be just because of a Republican wave (or avalanche); it’ll also be because the Democratic Party and its national apparatus have statistically defunded more races involving women than men. Are we to believe that Democrats support women when they’re financially abandoning them in droves? Consider that the Democratic Party a) purports to support women; b) currently holds 255 seats in the House, 199 males/ 56 females; and c) is defunding races in a gender ratio of 3 women for every man? If nothing else, Democrats don’t care about holding their ground on the progress for women they’ve made.
The funding cuts are happening on the House side, and involve funding for ads that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) had earlier promised candidates for the last month before the election, a critical time for campaigns. The DCCC has recently cut or eliminated this funding for Betty Sutton, Ann Kirkpatrick, Mary Jo Kilroy, Stephanie Sandlin, Kathy Dahlkemper, Suzanne Kosmas, Debbie Halvorson, Dana Titus and Carol Porter-Shea. That’s 9 out of 56 Democratic females, or roughly 16%, and may not be a complete list. In Sandlin’s case, as the Wall Street Journal reports:
U.S. Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin will be getting about $150,000 less than the $500,000 in ad spending that had been expected from national Democrats in the final weeks of her re-election campaign.
The DCCC has also recently announced funding cuts for incumbents Steve Driehaus, Harry Mitchell, Leonard Boswell, Chet Edwards, John Spratt, and Larry Kissell.
Some will say this is a matter of triage, and these candidates aren’t performing well enough to justify funding. But some of us are asking how deep Democrats’ commitment to women really is. If having women in their caucus is so important to them, and if they are so worried about decreasing those numbers, they should put their money where their mouths are and step up the funding to protect these valuable seats. We can’t afford to lose any women in Congress, regardless of party, but it can’t all be the job of voters to make it happen. The nation has to see the parties are investing in women with all the vim and vigor they are men.
Democrats appear to be using familiar scare tactics to try to drive women to the polls in three weeks. It remains to be seen if such a strategy will work this time around, though it has been a successful strategy in the past. In addition to the typical abortion boogey-man popping up here and there in the press, Democrats are pushing stories about how Congress will lose women if voters don’t support Democratic women. Andrea Mitchell is the most recent journalist to cover the story:
Andrea Mitchell has also covered the story. She says gender matters, and we think she’s right. What do you think?
Actually you should do your homework. DCCC did not cut off funding in AZ-5. Here’s today’s CQ Politics story:
DCCC Ramps Up Spending as GOP Groups Prepare to Flood Airwaves
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmsp.....op-stories
You can also find this info on the FEC website. DCCC is spending about $240k per week.
Reading this I wonder a loud “Does anyone still truly believe that the Dems are pro woman?” Why would any woman vote for them? Support them? Let us not forget that the House Speaker has consider control over the DCCC and appointed its Chair…Pelosi like our Chat about NOW CA last week, seems more concerned with the liberal agenda then in encouraging and supporting women.
Interesting article. When did the Democrats get taken over by the sexist pigs? Or maybe they were always against women but now they are being more obvious with their behavior.
Jenn, AZ-5 is Harry Mitchell’s seat, so that just kind of proves my thesis. Maybe you should do your homework.
As for Kirkpatrick and Titus, this is just being announced today, and is a change from what was previously reported. Also from the article you cite:
Which again backs up what I said in the article.
“When did the Democrats get taken over by the sexist pigs?”
Unfortunately, liberalism to most men always meant drugs and consequences-free screwing. Liberalism to minorities meant lots and lots and lots of work.
And it’s the male view that’s become the dominant one, of course. Liberalism means living like a college idiot your whole life — porno on demand and booze and pot when you want it. (And I say that as someone who doesn’t mind the current legalization scheme much at all.)
But no matter how you slice it, men think being liberal means sex, drugs, and partying. And when has that attitude ever been good for women? It’s one giant frat party as far as they’re concerned.
And conservatism means you don’t LET your woman work because it makes you less of a man. It means if you bang her and she gets inconveniently knocked up, she gets sent to a home someplace for nine months for shamed sluts and gives up the baby. For liberals, it means you demand she get an abortion so it doesn’t impact your wallet.
Neither side has room for the real human beings that women are.
Janis you nail it. But Anna Belle puts up the evidence we need to expose that women shake up their idea they share the issues with democrats. underfunding women candidates is a huge issue no one knows about.
Good article, Anna Belle. Female Dems really are being thrown under the bus, by the Dem party.
Republicans would probably be doing it to, but there’s an interesting dynamic going on. The female candidates are the ones bringing the excitement to the party, so they’re holding the cards right now. It also helps that some of the conservative women are flat out telling critics from their own party, “buck up or stay in the truck.”
Exactly right, Anna. I have been watching for a couple of months as Dem woman after Dem woman is added to the casualty list, wondering if anyone was going to notice it.
It happened in 2006, too.
That year Nancy Pelosi had something to do with promoting a fresh slate of women and Rahm Emmanual had something to do with financially undermining those candidates. As a result, Dem women were the losers in a Dem wave year. Read that again: In a Dem wave year, Democrats could not manage to get women elected. That tells us a lot about where the Democrats’ priorities are with regard to women, and also helps explain why we are so expendable to them.
So I wasn’t surprised to see it happening again. And I wasn’t going to keep my mouth shut about it anymore.
Thanks Bes and Bruce, Janis and yttik.
Bruce, I think a lot of women are beginning to question their allegiance. I see a willingness to question and a shift in rhetoric more and more in the media.
Bes, I think Democrats have been like this for a while (maybe always), but a collective click moment happened within a subculture of women in 2008, and the culture is evolving as those ideas spread. We just notice it more now.
Janis, there are definitely problems on both sides. However, Republicans are making gains in building confidence among women, that they and their ideas have a chance to be taken seriously. We’ll see where it goes. But Democrats seem to be regressing, and not just in the area of women’s rights. Have you seen what the gay community has been dealing with lately?
It’s definitely a wait and see game on the right, yttik; it’s the left that needs prodding.
Amy Re your article over there on the left: Bravo Amy for telling like it is…Whitman is a pro choice feminist- a successful business woman- but because she doesnt have a D after her name the left thinks she is fair game. There will never be parity of men and women in office unless groups like NOW get behind women like Meg. Understand now that NOW National has called upon Brown to fire the staffer- and seems as if Terry is walking back the NOW CA endorsement and distancing national from it. Dont know how you can take all that crap piled on you when the file your articles over there- but I for one appreciate it. Will the article be posted here
Well here’s where $2.5mm of the money went -to Harry Reid!
http://www.politico.com/news/s.....43543.html
Just to be “fair and balanced” , when you go to the NRSC.ORG site…they have no micro site for Delaware. As you may recall when Christine was nominated the men at the NRSC including Sen Cronyn went ballistic and they haven’t given her any substantive help and do not include her on their website as a Delaware microsite as they do the other campaigns
I am not disputing any of what you’ve written here but I would really ask that you consider a couple of other points to put what you believe in perspective:
1. The very respected and very non-partisan Center for American Women in Politics has repeatedly been quoted talking about how, while more GOP women ran this year as compared to GOP women in previous years, Democratic women have still outnumbered them and in addition, the Dem women won many more primaries. You can look here at a great summary document:
http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/fa.....nSum10.pdf
2. The GOP Young Guns program is an abomination when it comes to promoting women. I’ve written about it since it was first unveiled and its failure to include, even before primaries, more than 25% women is deplorable.
Now – the DCCC’s Red to Blue is also pathetically devoid of women, and I’m no fan of the party – never have been though I am reliably left of center, which I’ve always been except for a couple of issues (casinos and Israel, typically).
However, the Young Guns involved, at its beginning, something like 75-90 total individuals who were tapped at different levels. Few women who were recruited for it made it to the general elections.
But the fact that so many of the men recruited and who won primaries are going on to run against Dem women is a large reason why there may, emphasis on may, be a decline in the number of women in Congress.
Now – will those women lose because they are women? I don’t believe that at all – they are candidates just like the men.
But my point is, couldn’t BOTH parties have done better – can’t they always do better for the foreseeable future – in identifying and supporting more women?
If BOTH the parties cared enough – if women made both the parties care enough – about the value of gender parity in our elected governments, then we would see more women v. women races just as much as we see men v. men.
Anyway – I apologize if I’ve gone into a lot of detail – this is a passion of mine: that there be recruitment and support of women, by those folks charged with doing that in the formal parties, with far greater gender balance. It’s really shameful and so unnecessary and potentially harmful that they don’t.
No one has clean hands, sadly. But every election cycle, they do get a chance to redeem themselves. If only they would, hm?
Thanks.
Jill, I think you make cogent remarks about the state of support of women within the parties. TNA exists to demand that both parties (all parties, really) cater to women and their issues. I agree that both sides could do better.
These days I write more about Democrats than I do Republicans for two reasons: 1) Democrats currently hold power across the board at the national level; and 2)Democrats have the worse record right now when it comes to sexism and support for women and their issues.
Republicans may catch back up to the sea of sexism inundating the Democrats. If and when they do, I’ll be there to write about that too.
Thanks- I might quibble about who’s the worst in this regard but ultimately we need everyone to be fighting all instances – the specific tally is less important to me than getting us to all agree that it needs to be eradicated.
Well this is disturbing:
Why Women Still Won’t Vote for Women
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion.....-democrat/
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