On Capitol Hill, the news wasn’t much better. Women held on, but just barely. For the first time since female candidates started running in earnest for Congress, the numbers were flat. The new Congress will have the same number of women as the last session, though with a slightly more Republican tilt, reflecting the overall trend. Looking at the meager gains, American University professor Karen O’Connor said the glass ceiling turned out to be “a steel trapdoor.”
Yet the numbers don’t tell the full story. If North Carolina can elect a woman to succeed Jesse Helms, the voice of the angry white man, anything is possible. Even if that woman is Elizabeth Dole, with her name recognition and her ample resume, history was made. Once you get outside the cities and into the small rural towns, most voters think Bob Dole should be the one making speeches while Elizabeth gazes on adoringly. Her election is a significant cultural breakthrough. So is Nancy Pelosi’s elevation to leader of the House Democrats, the first time a woman in either party has won the top job. How Pelosi handles herself and the positions she takes will help define the Democratic Party as it moves into the 2004 presidential cycle. Voters think women are better at setting priorities, especially in tough times. Republicans want to demonize her as a way-out liberal for supporting gay marriage; she’ll focus on what’s good for mainstream America, beginning with proposals for rebuilding the economy. “It’s not right or left, it’s forward,” she says.
Democrats lost critical mass in this election, but the women still standing are among the party’s most compelling figures. Hillary Clinton is widely presumed to be readying a presidential run in 2008, six years from now, and she’ll need all that time. Her negatives are twice as high as her positives. Republicans used her in ads to rally their voters. In Indiana, the GOP ran television spots against Democrat Jill Long alleging her close friendship with Hillary, whom Long says she had maybe met twice in her life. Hillary is said to be frustrated at the party’s squandering her husband’s “third-way” politics, but she is so polarizing that she can’t speak out publicly without inflicting further damage on Democrats.
There is a lot of excitement about the potential of new Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, whose centrist politics and appealing persona prompted conservative commentator George Will to suggest changing the Constitution to permit a foreign-born American citizen to become president. (Granholm was born in Canada.) But if Democrats want to draw clear distinctions with Bush, they shouldn’t look to Granholm. She ran on a pledge of no new taxes for corporations, even though her states is facing a billion-dollar deficit. Republicans control the state legislature and she’ll need their help, along with the Republicans who run things in Washington. Granholm promised that her administration will “tighten the belt but not the heart.” She started out with a 20-point lead, but won with less than 2 percentage points. White women pulled away from Granholm, and she owes her narrow election to African-Americans, a reality that will weigh on her as she cuts back government expenditures.
The damage Democrats suffered in this election is deeper than the handful of losses in Congress. State legislatures, once a stronghold for Democrats, are trending Republican; the party lost 50 seats in New Hampshire alone. Democrats also lost real ground among seniors, married women and white, non-college-educated women (and men). Only 36 percent of the Democratic base showed up on Election Day compared to 43 percent of the Republican base. There was a record-high turnout of Christians, who love Bush.
The good news for women is that gender was not an overriding factor in these elections; it’s also the bad news if you’re Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. She lost white women in Maryland by a wide margin and couldn’t recover even in a state with 5-to-1 Democratic registration. Analysts initially thought the wave of sniper shootings centered in Maryland would benefit Townsend against her pro-gun Republican opponent, but the horrific episode turned out to hurt her. Women are so security conscious that the sniper attacks reinforced their fears, and sent them to the safety of the candidate they perceived as stronger, Republican Robert Ehrlich.
Eighty years after women won the vote, they are still learning how to run for office themselves. Republican media consultant Bob Farrell says women, in an effort to show their fitness for public office, mistakenly think voters want to know “what a great trusting mom I am” and how they’re not going to leave their family behind. Research into women running for governor reveals that voters have a bias against women with young children because they think they’ll put their family first when voters want the election to be about them and improving their lives.
