Why fewer women (and men) are running for Congress this year

By Simone Pathe and Hien An Ngo, CNN

(CNN) — Vice President Kamala Harris is making history as just the second woman to lead a major-party presidential ticket – and, notably, the first Black woman and first South Asian. But lower down the ballot, fewer women are running for office this year.

After several election cycles that saw a record number of female candidates make bids for Congress, the decline across both parties and chambers is striking – especially among Republicans.

The number of Republican women running for the House this cycle dropped about 36% from 2022, while the number running for Senate dropped by about 45%, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. For Democrats, the decline in total number of female candidates from two years ago was smaller – a 7% drop for the House and a 9% drop for the Senate.

But the numbers among women may not tell the whole story. That’s because the number of men running for office has declined, too, which strategists on both sides of the aisle chalk up to this being a presidential election year with a particularly narrow House battlefield compared with the 2022 midterms.

But even as a percentage of total candidates, the number of women running for the House this year is down from 2022, when a record number of them won election to the 118th Congress.

As a percentage of total candidates within their party, Republican women have had a more significant drop in 2024, making up 18% of total House GOP candidates compared with 21% during the 2022 midterms. (The percentage for Democratic women has stayed relatively constant since 2020.) In the Senate, women make up a higher percentage of Democratic candidates than they did two years ago, but it’s the opposite for Republican women.

“The fact that you have a steeper decline in those numbers tells me there’s something going on with Republicans,” said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at CAWP.

What exactly is going on, however, is harder to pinpoint.

A different kind of map

In 2022, historical expectations over the party out of power picking up seats in the first midterm after a presidential election contributed to high candidate interest among Republicans.

“Last cycle, people were talking about a red wave, and so you had a lot more people coming out to run,” said a House Republican strategist.

And that interest contributed to electoral success for GOP female candidates, even if the so-called red wave didn’t materialize. A record number of Republican women serve in the 118th Congress, although they’re still a small minority.

Two years later, recruitment across genders has looked somewhat different with fewer seats in play and the 2024 presidential contest dominating. “It took more convincing to get candidates to jump in,” the strategist said, noting that it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing since it helped avoid some competitive primaries.

One reason for the smaller House landscape this year – there are only about two dozen so-called crossover districts. These are the seats held the party that did not carry the district at the presidential level – and a sizable majority of these seats are currently held by Republicans. That disparity – a reflection of overall House GOP success in 2022 – suggests that there are fewer opportunities for Republicans to run as challengers.

That smaller playing field can also be seen in the House campaign committee’s target lists. The National Republican Congressional Committee, for example, is targeting about 40 seats this year, down from some 75 seats they went after in 2022.

Of the NRCC’s initial 26 “Young Guns” candidates — those who have met various metrics for support and are regarded as strong recruits — seven are women.

“With fewer competitive seats up for grabs, fewer candidates in both parties are running overall, but there is still very strong interest and enthusiasm from Republican women recruits,” Danielle Barrow, executive director of Winning for Women, which works to elect GOP women, said in a statement.

2022 wasn’t just a midterm election; it was also a redistricting year, meaning that the redrawing of congressional lines across the country (following the 2020 US census) shook up the House map that year.

As such, there were more open-seat contests in 2022, which, as Dittmar noted, tend to attract a higher number of candidates on both sides with no incumbent running. However, Dittmar said, about 50% of the open seats this year favor Republicans, which wouldn’t explain the disproportionate drop among GOP women running.

The challenge of running, especially in a presidential year

The future president’s ability to enact an agenda would depend on the balance of power in Congress. But House and Senate candidates are hardly the main attraction when there’s a race for the White House sucking up attention and resources.

“Overall, women are smart, and they know it’s very difficult to win elections, and when you’re competing with a presidential ticket, no matter which side of the aisle you’re on, you’re already facing an uphill battle,” said Lauren Zelt, executive director of Maggie’s List, a PAC that helps elect conservative women. “If I were a woman considering running for office, I don’t know that I’d want to do it in a presidential election year.”

There are also well-documented institutional barriers to women running for office – whether it’s access to fundraising dollars or blatant sexism. Mothers on both sides of the aisle say they often face a question their male counterparts do not when they go out to campaign: “Who’s taking care of your children?”

“It’s true on both sides of the aisle that politics in DC is still a boys club,” Zelt said.

And for Republican women, the infrastructure to recruit and elect women hasn’t been nearly as powerful as on the Democratic side, in part because of the GOP’s long-standing aversion to identity politics. That began to change after the 2018 midterms – the huge success enjoyed by Democratic women that year inspired more Republican women to run in 2020. Women were just 14% of both Republican House and Senate candidates in 2018; two years later, that had increased to 17% of Senate and 21% of House candidates, according to CAWP.

The party apparatus also started to make female and minority recruitment a bigger priority, with the House GOP touting that all the Republican candidates who flipped seats in 2020 were women, minorities or veterans. The NRCC has followed suit in the years since.

But while EMILY’s List – which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights – is a major force on the left and plays in primaries to advance female candidates, comparable GOP groups haven’t always had the same resources or institutional support within the party.

In a prime GOP pickup opportunity in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, for example, former President Donald Trump and House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik both backed last cycle’s losing candidate, Joe Kent, over Leslie Lewallen, who had the backing of Winning for Women and VIEW PAC, which also supports female GOP candidates, in the August 6 top-two primary. Kent ended up advancing to the general election while Lewallen came up short.

Another possible reason why there may be fewer women running is what Dittmar calls toxicity. Congress, already an unpopular institution, saw repeated displays of dysfunction over the past year as House GOP leadership went through multiple speakership fights – notably among men.

Women are often motivated to run to try to make policy change, Dittmar said, and if the gridlock looks prohibitive, they may start to channel their energies elsewhere.

One place to look is the states – even though this is an off-year for gubernatorial elections, there are more women running for governor this year than four years ago during a similar cycle. Women have been about 20% of gubernatorial candidates this year, up from only 13% in 2020, according to CAWP data.

But even after the US -set a record last year for the number of female governors serving concurrently – with 12 – more than a third of the country is yet to elect a woman as governor.

Quality over quantity

The decline in the number of candidates running, however, doesn’t necessarily mean there will be fewer women coming to Congress next year. The more important gauge of women’s success may be seeing how many emerge as nominees and how many are then positioned to win in November.

“The candidate number in and of itself doesn’t mean doom and gloom if that smaller number of women is the most competitive and most likely to make it through,” Dittmar said of the nominees.

And Republican women who work on recruitment and campaigns are excited about the kinds of candidates they’re seeing this year.

“If there was any good news to point out, it’s the candidate quality,” said Zelt.

“At the end of the day, it’s not just a numbers game for us. We want to grow the ranks of GOP women, but we’re committed to ensuring it’s with thoughtful, serious, qualified leaders,” Winning for Women’s Barrow said in her statement.

“We have an impressive bench of eager, strong, and qualified women candidates,” she added, specifically pointing to New York’s Alison Esposito, North Carolina’s Laurie Buckhout and Alaska’s Nancy Dahlstrom, all seeking seats seen as GOP pickup opportunities.

Julie Conway, the executive director of VIEW PAC, agreed that the caliber of female recruits – and where they are running – is what’s most important.

“The playing field has dictated how many competitive races we have, but the good news is we’re focused on quality over quantity this time,” she said. “We can run women in seats that aren’t winnable, but there’s not much sense in that.”

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