A point of personal privilege, so please indulge me. I’ve been working on my master’s degree in American Politics since 2016. I will graduate on May 14th. My intention was to get a PhD, but I realized there was too much math involved. I did, however, take two of the 4 required math courses for the PhD and I am a believer in advanced math and the fact you have to learn it when you are young. My wonderful husband helped me with my homework and could remember what he was taught at 16, but I could not remember what was taught in class that week. I guess that is #oldmind. My area of study is women’s electoral success in the Republican Party. Below is a short analysis of the conclusion of my final paper as it relates to the 2020 election because GOP women had a banner year in 2020.
After a terrible 2018 where the GOP lost control of the House and recorded the lowest number of GOP women in Congress in a generation, Republicans made an unprecedented effort to recruit and elect women—and it worked. In the House of Representatives, we went from 13 GOP women in 2018 to 33 in 2021. That is a bigger increase than the “Year of the Woman” in 1992. Going against historical norms, the new women were more conservative than their male counterparts and the current women’s caucus (my word, they do not actually meet as a caucus) has members as ideologically different as Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Elise Stefanik (R-NY) of New York was key to making this happen and now, as always happens with success, the NRCC is actively recruiting women like never before.
I’m in the final phase of editing my paper and I’ll make it available to you when I finish so you can read it if you want to and tell me what you think.
