Record-breaking number of Senate wins for women

After wins by five women in Senate races, one of every five members of the chamber will be female come January. New Hampshire will soon have an all-women congressional delegation and governor. And 78 women are on track to be sworn in to the House in the 113th Congress, an all-time high.

In 1992, history was made when four female Senate candidates were elected, including Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer in California. The election of 2012 is bound to earn a chapter in the next edition of that book.

Democrat Elizabeth Warren will become the first female senator from Massachusetts when she takes the oath of office; ditto for Democrat Mazie Hirono in Hawaii. Rep. Tammy Baldwin’s election against four-term Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson will make her both the first female senator from the state and the first openly gay senator.

Republican state Sen. Deb Fischer got in on the action, too, tamping down a spirited comeback attempt by one of the state’s best-known ex-pols, Democrat Bob Kerrey. Fischer will be one of four female Senate Republicans in the next Congress, joining Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and Kelly Ayotte (New Hampshire). Their ranks will shrink by one because Sens. Olympia Snowe (Maine) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas) are retiring.

But the command performance of women — Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley, who lost her Senate bid in Nevada, was one exception — was mostly a boon to Democrats. And as the results were pored over Wednesday, some said that was no accident.

In almost every race where a Democratic woman won, party leaders argued that Republicans played a role by pursuing a social agenda that jolted women to the voting booth.

(Emily’s List, which works to elect women who support abortion rights, watched its membership quintuple over the past two years and raised $51.2 million dollars to support its mission, President Stephanie Schriock said.

“After 2010, we were a little concerned about whether or not our recruitment was going to be OK,” she said. But the GOP’s “regressive” platform, she argued, included ideas that “were not just concepts, they were pieces of legislation they wanted to turn into law.”

The party successively coined the “war on women” catchphrase in early 2011, shortly after Republicans took control of the House and voted on several anti-abortion bills — including one that would have changed the definition of rape to “forcible rape.” The language was subsequently removed. Then came a fight to defund Planned Parenthood and the images of an all-male panel testifying on birth control, followed by Sandra Fluke.

Finally, there were GOP Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock making remarks on pregnancy and rape that dominated news cycles for days and probably sunk their campaigns.

“I think it’s a combination of women paying attention to whether or not government is going to make critical decisions about their own health care and the economic impact of that,” Sen. Patty Murray, chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC.

Majority Leader Harry Reid said he is “looking forward to working with so many great, accomplished senators next year. I’ve talked to virtually every one of them.” He added, “When I came to the Senate, Barbara Mikulski was it as far as women. Now, about a third of our caucus is going to be women. Remarkable work done by all these great senators-to-be.”

Women’s issues were also big campaign topics in states where Democratic men won. According to CNN’s exit polls, Democrat Chris Murphy trounced Republican Linda McMahon among women voters. Though McMahon ran as an abortion-rights supporter, Murphy convinced voters she’d enable a Republican majority to restrict access to women’s health care.

While Democrats celebrated, disappointment abounded for conservatives and leaders in the anti-abortion movement.

Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, said the presidential loss could be blamed on a “weak, moderate candidate handpicked by the Beltway elites and the country club establishment wing of the Republican Party.”

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which opposes abortion rights, told reporters at the National Press Club on Wednesday that Democrats were able to win the so-called war on women because Republicans were ill-prepared or didn’t engage.

“We had a de facto truce on social issues on one side but a full embrace of the war on social issues [on] the other side,” Dannenfelser said. “On abortion, Obama got to completely define what that issue was, and what was it? Rape. Abortion meant rape in the minds of many voters because the debate was not fully engaged.”

In an interview following the press conference, Dannenfelser said that “in almost every demographic,” support for the anti-abortion movement was growing, and the president still lost ground among the female electorate. Republicans, she said, either did not engage on the abortion issue or, when they did, did so poorly.

“If you look at the gender gap, it was a couple of points less for [Obama] than there was last time, so when you are getting 2 points less, that doesn’t sound like a great investment of millions of millions of dollars fighting this war on women,” she said. “We are going to spend morning, noon and night raising money, on the phone doing all we can do so the next time, we can be ready and answer the toughest questions and expose the other guys’ weaknesses. The response was nonexistent this time.”

Still, she said candidates like Mourdock and Akin weren’t helping the cause.

“If at this point, you as a candidate are surprised by a question on abortion on the political stump, you are not worthy to be called a candidate,” she said. “We’re going to look how we endorse and train candidates. From now on, they will not be sent in the field with our support until they know how to talk about the issue.”

Source:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83548.html