Women face a flood of resistance on GOP ticket

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, Calif. — Diane Harkey, the Republican candidate for California’s 49th Congressional District, recognizes that President Donald Trump “doesn’t make women real comfortable.”

Men just have a different style, she said: “They’re more warrior-oriented. We are a little more consensus-builders.”

But she laughs off the idea of campaigning as a woman. “I want all voters; I like men too,” she said. “I don’t think it helps to talk about gender.”

It may be the year of the woman in midterm campaigns across the country, but Harkey is not embracing it here in one of the nation’s most hotly contested congressional elections. The passion is far more evident 30 miles south of here, in the offices of a new group called Flip the 49th, whose weekly protests after Trump’s inauguration drove the Republican incumbent, Darrell Issa, from his seat. Now, it is working feverishly to elect the male Democrat running against Harkey.

“She’s anti-health care, antigun control, anti-family, anti-immigrant, anti-environment,” said Mary Schrader, a Flip volunteer who was a Republican until 2016. “She’s completely out of touch with the women in her district.”

This is the bind for Republican women running for office in the Trump era. The energy among women that started with the marches after the president’s inauguration is against them — surveys have shown that 70 percent of the membership of local resistance groups, and almost all the top leadership, are women. And having long resisted identity politics, Republican women are reluctant or unable to claim

ROZETTE RAGO / THE NEW YORK TIMES Republican Diane Harkey views the scene Aug. 4 at the opening of her campaign office in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. The energy in the midterms is working against female Republican candidates who are reluctant or unable to claim any advantage to being a woman among voters.