Republican women have more leverage than leaders realize

Women are likely to play a decisive role in the coming midterm elections. Polls suggest a gender gap between the parties that could easily cost Republicans control of Congress. A recent

CNN poll showed that just 33 percent of female respondents said they were planning to support Republican candidates next month, whereas two-thirds were inclined to favor Democrats. Republican leaders, most of whom are men, have taken note of this problem, and are disappointed in women for creating it. In their view, it would be incredibly selfish for Republican women to abandon the party, considering the circumstances.

“Think of your son. Think of your husband,” President Donald Trump said last week at a Mississippi campaign rally at which he also mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the professor who had accused his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, of sexual assault decades earlier.

In my experience, most women do think about their sons. My mother, who has four sons, also thinks about her daughter. The same is true of my father. And since Republican leaders are worried about men being unfairly maligned, it’s ironic that they’ve given the impression that men, as a group, are incapable of caring about women and recognizing their humanity.

Some men are capable of understanding why I find it objectionable that Republican leaders displayed so much contempt for women during the course of Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. Even before Ford came forward, it was clear that women voters would be a major factor in this year’s midterms, and yet Republican leaders seem to think that these women have absolutely no leverage, as a group.

The explanation may be that as a practical matter, Repub-

lican women aren’t in a great negotiating position. American politics is extremely polarized, as we all know. And — at the risk of sounding reductive — a defining characteristic of most Republican voters is that they actually are Republicans, or conservatives, rather than Democrats. That being the case, the influence that Republican women might wield over their party’s leaders is constrained by the fact that they would prefer not to defect.

Beyond that, dissent isn’t exactly encouraged in Republican circles. In fact, the only Republican senator who voted against Kavanaugh, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, may be formally reprimanded by her state party for doing so.

Objectively, that seems like an insane thing to do. Murkowski hasn’t been accused of any kind of misconduct. She just came to a different conclusion than her Republican colleagues, several of whom had, by their own account, struggled with the question too.

With that said, it’s actually not unprecedented for a Republican leader to be reprimanded on the basis of disagreement. In 2017, the Republican Party of Texas formally censured Joe Straus, the outgoing speaker of the Texas House, over his refusal to toe the party line on issues such as the “bathroom bill” that defines access to public restrooms . And many Republican voters, I think, are sympathetic to the arguments that conservatives who openly criticize the party, or its leaders, are ultimately letting down the cause, if not emboldening an increasingly aggressive left.

And yet Kavanaugh’s confirmation process elicited a lot of grossly misogynistic commentary, some of which came from the president. And some Republican women were troubled by that, even if they were also troubled by the notion that their sons and husbands might, in theory, be falsely accused of sexual assault for no apparent reason.

Those women may go on to vote for Republicans next month, and I wouldn’t criticize them for that. In fact, I would advise Democrats against leveling such criticism, even if they feel very strongly that Republican women are voting against their own interests; such assumptions are condescending and obnoxious.

But I would remind Republican women that they do have leverage over their party. That’s just a matter of electoral arithmetic. And the Republican leaders who sneeringly dismissed many of their concerns as selfish, or hysterical, aren’t always allergic to identity politics. In fact, when men make such claims, they often get results, rather than a shower of vitriol.

Kavanaugh’s confirmation is arguably an example of that, but there are others. Last month, the Fort Bend County GOP apologized for its decision to use Ganesha, a Hindu deity, in a political ad; it’s fun to trigger the liberals, perhaps, but it’s risky to offend Hindu voters in Texas’s 22nd Congressional District.

It would also be risky to offend Latino Republicans, at the moment, since several of the Democratic statewide candidates are within striking distance of the Republican incumbents. And I’ve been mildly haunted by a question one such friend asked me, a few weeks ago, as we were discussing the polls.

“Do you think the GOP has learned its lesson?” he asked.

Realistically, I don’t. But I was heartened by the question, at least; and have thought about it often over these past few weeks, as Republican leaders told women, once again, to turn the other cheek.