Women and Politics

This post was submitted by Jean Qiao, WCF Communications Fellow

Regardless of which party you identify with, there is one faction that the 2010 election cycle shouldn’t ignore: Women. But according to Roll Call, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) doesn’t seem to be focusing on recruiting strong female candidates.

Roll Call called out the lack of female Republican candidates  in some of the most competitive House races around the country. In the Young Guns program—a program sponsored by the NRCC that provides fundraising for Republican candidates—the lack of viable women candidates is astonishing:

“Out of the top 10 candidates in the NRCC’s ‘Young Guns’ program, there is one woman: Montgomery City Councilwoman Martha Roby in Alabama. The next tier of 20 ‘Contenders’ in the program includes two women, and the lowest tier of ‘On the Radar’ candidates has only one”.

As WCF President/CEO Sam Bennett said in her interview with Fox’s America’s News HQ,  in order for the GOP to succeed in increasing their 4%  representation in U.S. Congress in this election cycle, they must recruit more women. America is hungry for the middle ground, and female moderate republican women (read: Dede Scozzafava) are the way to deliver that.

However one promising tidbit is that the NRCC has seemed to pick up the most important thing about women running for political office; the simple yet powerful three-letter word: ASK. Women must be asked an average of six times before they seriously consider running for office. And the efforts made by the NRCC seem to have paid off for State Rep. Jackie Walorski who is now running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in Indiana:

“The NRCC ‘started calling me three or four years ago,’ Walorski recalled. ‘They called me constantly to try to get me to run. I got so tired of hearing from them, I told them to stop calling me’”.

One can only hope that the NRCC continues their efforts on recruiting and supporting women candidates.

We’ve said this too many times. Women bring a new palette of ideas and knowledge, which simply cannot be ignored in a country where a majority of the population is female. Women are the key to fixing our broken government. Currently, only 17 Republican women currently serve in the House of Representatives. If the GOP wants to shift the balance in Congress this year, they must turn to moderate women.

Tags: elections, female candidates, Jackie Walorski, moderate republicans, NRCC, republican women, she should run