{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://susanwbrooks.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/brooks-says-house-gop-women-looking-for-answers-as-their-ranks-shrink-to", "Brooks says House GOP women looking for answers as their ranks shrink to lowest level in 25 years", "2018-12-13", "2018", "2018-12", "Republican", "House", "IN", "Susan Brooks", "B001284", "susanwbrooks.house.gov", null, null, "legacy", "WASHINGTON  U.S. Rep. Susan Brooks said she is in mourning for her defeated female Republican colleagues.\nEveryone is struggling right now for answers, the Indiana congresswoman said. Fifty-two Republican women ran for Congress  And only 13 of us made it across the finish line.\nThat will be the lowest number of Republican women in the House in a quarter-century.\nEven the Republican who was supposed to succeed Brooks as co-chair of thebipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues California Rep. Mimi Walterswas among the November casualties.\nSusan Brooks: One of few Republican women in the House says, 'It causes you to question'\nDays after House Republicans lost their majority and gathered to choose new leaders from their shrunken ranks, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik stood up at the closed-door meeting and asked her colleagues to look around.\nThis is not reflective of the American public, Stefanik said of the overwhelmingly white and male group of new and returning lawmakers. We need to do better.\nBy contrast, voters elected a record 89 Democratic women to the House. Republicans have never had more than 25 women, a record set in 2006.\nThere will be only one Republican woman in the freshman class: Carol Miller of West Virginia.\n(In the Senate, Republicans expanded their number of women by one to seven. The number of Democratic female senators will remain the same at 17.)\nWhile there's been much attention on this election's Year of the Woman, which sent a record number of women to Congress and to state legislatures nationwide, there's been less focus on the diminished ranks of Republican women.\nStefanik is frustrated that there hasn't been more introspection.\nSome people are scratching their heads, wondering why those larger conversations aren't happening, Stefanik told USA TODAY.\nSome GOP women narrowly lost and would have done better in a year when all Republicans weren't facing headwinds.\nBut even in good years for the GOP, such as when they took over the House in 2010, Republican women have not expanded their ranks the way Democrats have.\n 'You need to be more proactive' \nExperts say Republicans don't have the same supports for female candidates that Democrats do to help recruit candidates, raise campaign funds and win primaries. That's hard to do, said Idaho State University assistant professor Malliga Och, when the party tends to be dismissive of identity politics as something that lowers the quality of candidates. \nYou cannot just say, `Oh, women should be there,' and wait for the women to come, said Och, who studies women in politics. You need to be more proactive.\nAnd as more women identify with the Democratic Party as shown by the 19 percentage-point gender gap in votes for House candidates the pool of potential candidates Republicans can draw from shrinks.\nWe have especially failed to bring our message to, and connect with, women and racial minorities, Utah Rep. Mia Love, the only black Republican woman in Congress and one of the five female House incumbents defeated in November, wrote in an opinion piece published Wednesday.\nThe losses Republican women suffered at the state legislative level also reduced the pipeline of potential congressional candidates.\nFor the party, the optics of it are terrible, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.\n How the parties diverged \nThe parties' paths started diverging in 1992, the lastYear of the Woman.\nIn the 1980s, Republican women in Congress made up a slightly greater share of their caucus than Democratic women did in theirsthough the numbers on both sides were small.\nIn the 1990s, Democrats began significantly expanding the share of women in their caucus with help from groups like EMILY's List, which raises money for female Democrats who support abortion rights.\nRepublican women, on the other hand, were finding it harder to win primaries as the party became more conservative on abortion and other issues, Walsh said.\nIn general, the party shifted to the right, shesaid. The resources for Republican women weren't there. They were only building on the Democratic side.\nBrooks, who was first elected in 2012, said Republican women don't have the national fundraising network or as many donors who will contribute the maximum.\nI've been saying this ever since I've been here, she said, The women in the Republican Party have not been supported financially and have not had the fundraising success that many of our male counterparts have.\nRepublicans have made periodic attempts to address such issues.\nEvery cycle there's one or two PACs that come up that want to elect more Republican women, Och said. And in a cycle or two, they disappear.\nStefanik, the first woman to lead recruitment efforts for the campaign arm of House Republicans, took the job in 2017 to focus on finding more women and nontraditional candidates for this year's election.\nAlthough 120 Republican women filed to run, 52 were nominated one short of the GOP record set in 2004. While more than 43 percent of the Democrats' House candidates were women, only 13 percent of Republicans were.\nRepublican women who won their party's nomination also didn't do as well as their male counterparts in the general election.\nStefanik felt restricted by the party's policy of not getting involved in primaries, which she said impedes efforts to nominate more women. Now that her leadership role with the National Republican Congressional Campaign is over, Stefanik plans to focus her own political action committee on giving early support to female candidates.\nThe party needs to have a wake-up call, she said.\nBut Rep. Tom Emmer, the Minnesota Republican who is taking the reins of the NRCC, said it's wrong to have anyone other than primary voters decide who is the best candidate.\nWe do need to emphasize that we're looking for more women. There's no question we need to ask that. But just because of your gender does not mean you are the right candidate, Emmer said. If we had had the right candidates, we would've had a lot more of them get through the primaries.\n Addressing family issues \nIn addition to finding candidates from all different walks of life that actually reflect that community, Emmer said, Congress should address issues like flex time and housing allowances that would make it easier for women to have families and serve in Congress.\nThere are a lot of women that, I will tell you, they should be the ones in the state legislature or in Congress, but instead their husband is doing it, Emmer said, because they've made the decision that they're going to be the one operating the household.\nEmmer, the New York Times reported,got the job of NRCC chair over Missouri Rep. Ann Wagner who has worked on past GOP efforts to better engage female voters and recruit female candidates.\nDemocrats, meanwhile, chose women to head their 2020 campaign committees for House, Senate, gubernatorial and state legislative races.\nIllinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, Emmer's Democratic counterpart, hopes to increase the number of Democratic women, who will make up nearly 40 percent of the party's caucus. Finding candidates who will bring more gender, ethnic and religious diversity to the caucus will be a major part of her recruitment effort.\nBustos, however,hopes diversity will also grow on the Republican side because the composition of the House will never match the 51 percent of the population that's female with Democrats alone.\n\"If the makeup of Congress truly reflected the makeup of America then we would be a much better country and a better world,\"Bustos said.\n A higher value \nPolls and academic research show Democrats place a higher value on electing more women to Congress than Republicans do, according to Republican pollster Christine Matthews.\nWyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the one Republican woman who will be in House leadership next year, told Fox News after the election that the party needs to make sure it's recruiting female candidates. But she dismissed the idea that Democrats should be applauded for electing more women, saying many of those newly elected are socialists whose ideas would hurt the country.\nIt is very important for us to recognize that women make bad policy too, said Cheney, the incoming chair of the House Republican Conference. So we need to have diversity. But we also need to make sure we understand that just being a woman doesn't mean that you're going to do the right thing.", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://susanwbrooks.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/brooks-says-house-gop-women-looking-for-answers-as-their-ranks-shrink-to"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.8738404139876366, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}