Women staking a claim

While the extent to which the reversal of Roe v. Wade has influenced the big increase in women running for statewide and Federal office may not be clearly known, the rise in and of itself is remarkable.

The post-primary landscape reveals new records set for the number of women running both for Congress and for Governor:

U.S. House: 776

U.S. Senate: 84

Governor: 86

The 168 Black women represent new records set for number of Black female candidates for all 3 offices.

The 95 Hispanic women represent new records set for the number of House and Gubernatorial candidates.

While these numbers are encouraging, a steep slope remains:

• Only 24% of current House members and 28% of Senators are women
• Only 18% of Governors are women
• There are 19 U.S. states that have never elected a female governor
• Only 58 women have ever served in the U.S. Senate…none before 1932

Under-representation of women on the Senate and Gubernatorial ‘benches’ from which Presidential candidates are most often drawn continues to limit opportunities for women to achieve national visibility on the political stage. 

Although third parties have run women for the presidency far more often than men, women have appeared on the national tickets of the two major parties only four times, and only once as President:

• Geraldine Ferraro (1984)
• Sarah Palin (2008)
• Hillary Clinton (2016)
• Kamala Harris (2020)

The numbers leave little doubt that partisan divide is not only the biggest obstacle to racially-balanced representation, but also to one that is gender-balanced.

A staggering 71% of female candidates ran as Democrats this year.

And while White and Latina candidates were distributed almost evenly between parties, 70% of Black candidates ran as Democrats.

In House races, Black women running as Democrats outnumbered those running as Republican by almost 3:1.

In Senate races, the number of Black women running as Democrats outnumbered those running as Republicans by almost 4:1.

The cracks in the political glass ceiling are spreading, and2022 is shaping up to be the year that it finally shatters.