Higgins: Diana Rauner proves she #39;s a single issue, anti-Republican elitist
Higgins: Diana Rauner proves she #39;s a single issue, anti-Republican elitist.
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Higgins: Diana Rauner proves she's a single issue, anti-Republican elitist - Video
By Melody Crowder-Meyer and Benjamin Lauderdale September 29 at 9:00 AM
One mightdisagree about the causes or consequences, but a lot of people seem to be certainthat the Republican Party has a Women Problem. Women are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, and they more often cast their votes for Democratic candidates. And Republican officeholders display a particular (although hardly exclusive) talent for gender-related snafus with electoral consequences.
What is the Republican Party to do? Both practitioners and political scientists suggest one potential solution: Get more Republican women on the ballot and into elected office. On average, Republican women are perceived as more moderate than Republican men and might therefore appeal more to independent and Democratic voters in general elections. Women in office from both parties are more likely than their male counterparts to sponsor and pursue legislation with particular relevance to women, and one might hope (though some counter-evidence exists) that female candidates would less frequently commit gender-related gaffes. If the solution is this simple, why arent more Republican women running for and holding office? Why do women compose only 8 percent of the Republican House caucus, compared to 29 percent of the Democratic caucus (a gap that holds in other offices as well)? Our research explores one explanation for this party gap in womens representation by using a new method to examine the supply of female candidates for each party.
Who runs for Congress? Not your average Jo(sephina). New representatives are typically middle-aged, highly educated, strong partisans, working in high status occupations. However, determining how many men and women with these profiles are present in each party is complicated. Even large surveys like the General Social Survey contain too few individuals with these characteristics to draw conclusions about their presence in the broader population. So, we devised a somewhat unusual use of (nonparametric) regression, modeling the probability of being female as a function of the characteristics mentioned above. This enabled us to look at the proportion of women among those with most of these likely candidate characteristics and make small extrapolations to the proportion of women in the population with all of these desired characteristics. For more details on this methodology, please see our published paper in the new open-access journal Research & Politics and for even more details see the online appendix.
Our analysis demonstrated a few things about the supply of female candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties, which are highlighted in these figures. The figure on the left displays our estimates for the percent women in the pool of likely candidates middle-aged, strong partisans, with high levels of education and occupational prestige in each party. The figure on the right displays the actual trend in the percentage of women among newly elected U.S. House representatives over time. There are three big points to take away from these figures.
First, the supply of women with likely candidate characteristics differs by party. While the parties had a similar and small proportion of women in their candidate pools at the beginning of the period we examine, by 2012 there were many more women in the Democrats pool (56 percent) than the Republicans pool (26 percent). Now, in terms of sheer numbers of individuals, there is ample supply of qualified women candidates in the United States to fill all of the congressional ballot spots in both parties many times over. However, the larger proportion of women in the Democratic candidate pool relative to the Republican candidate pool means that if the parties pay no special attention to candidates sex, the Democrats will end up selecting more women. Parties and primary electorates care about many attributes of candidates other than gender, so the percentage of women among selected candidates is likely to continue to reflect the percentage of women among Democrats and Republicans with these other attributes, resulting in significant gaps in womens candidacies by party.
Second, this gap is unlikely to change in the near future. By looking at highly educated, professional, strong partisans in our data who are younger than typical candidates, we can project the likely pool of candidates a little bit into the future. While uncertainty is always greater when trying to predict the future, our model suggests the gap in the percentage of women in each partys pool of candidates in upcoming elections is likely to remain at least as large as it is today.
Finally, the supply of women isnt the only reason for womens lower representation in elected offices. There is another big gap revealed in these graphs between the supply of women candidates on the left and the actual percentage of women elected to office on the right. For example, although we estimate a 56 percent female Democratic pool and 26 percent female Republican pool in 2012, women composed only 31 percent of new Democratic representatives and 9 percent of new Republican representatives that year. So, its not just the Republicans who have a women problem in fact, both parties are electing far fewer female candidates than we would expect, at least given our definition of likely candidate characteristics.
One possible explanation is that we are estimating too broad a definition of the characteristics that potential candidates hold, and women are more rare in the pool of candidates defined by a more stringent set of characteristics. Other research helps identify some other explanations for this difference, including gender gaps in recruitment, political ambition or perhaps even voter biases. But whatever the explanation, its clear both parties have some work to do if they want their caucuses to look more like the populations they represent.
* Melody Crowder-Meyer is an assistant professor of politics at Sewanee: The University of the South. Benjamin Lauderdale is an associate professor in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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Monkey Cage: Why the Republican Party doesnt have more female candidates
CONCORD, N.H. A Republican Senatorial candidate from New Hampshire has rejectedhis partys recent adoption of a pro-life platform that expressed the personhood and subsequent right to life of unborn children, and is instead declaring his support for a womans right to choose.
Scott Brown, a former Massachusetts senator who now resides in New Hampshire, is running against Democrat Jeanne Shaheen to represent the people of the state before Congress. Last weekend, the New Hampshire Republican Party adopted a platform outlining its belief inthe pre-born childs fundamental right to life and personhood under the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as its support for the Life at Conception Act.
Shaheen blasted Brown and the party for the language used in the platform, calling it disturbing.
The message from Scott Brown and his Republican Party is disturbing, alarming and clear: they believe they should make the decisions about birth control and health care for women in New Hampshire and around the country, she wrote in a statement. They are dangerously wrong, and by signing on with Tea Party extremists, theyre showing just how irresponsibly out of touch they are with the needs and rights of women.
But Brown and spokespersons for Browns office quickly distanced themselves from the partys beliefs on the right to life.
Im a pro-choice, independent Republican, Brown stated Monday before an audience at theRudman Center at the UNH School of Law.So I dont agree with that particular part of the platform, however I have always felt that we are a big tent party, we have the opportunity to agree or disagree.
Scott Brown is pro-choice and will protect a womans right to choose, Brown spokeswoman Elizabeth Guyton later reiterated to reporters.
Keith Mason of Personhood USA expressed his disappointment in Brown on Thursday, classifying Browns stance as extreme opposition to the state party platform.
Can you imagine a Democratic Senate candidate doubling down on his unqualified hostility for the Democratic Party platform on such an important issue? he asked. Theres no way the Democratic party bosses would allow it to happen. This is a clarion call for the Republican Party to stand up to poseurs in its own party who undermine principles of human rights and dignity.
Scott Brown has staked out an extreme position on abortion that contradicts the conservative values of his electorate, Mason continued. I commend the New Hampshire Republican Party for following in the steps of President Reagan by taking this principled stand on the most important human rights issue facing our nation.
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Republican Senatorial Candidate Rejects Partys Personhood Platform, Declares Abortion Support
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. Republican Jeff Bell spent three decades in Washington working on policy and wrote a book promoting all aspects of social conservatism. But so far his campaign for the U.S. Senate has centered on just one issue: returning the United States to the gold standard.
It's an idea that his opponent, Democratic incumbent Cory Booker, dismisses as "defunct and debunked," which is pretty much how most economists seem to see it.
But a group of conservative thinkers pushing for the change is undaunted.
"It wouldn't be the first time that the majority of Ph.D. economists were on one side and Jeff was on the other and he turned out to be right," said John Mueller, who runs the economics and ethics program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, referring to the idea that Bell advanced in the 1970s that cutting taxes could stimulate the economy.
Under the gold standard, the value of the dollar would be fixed to a certain amount of gold.
Through much of the U.S. history, that was the case. But since 1971, the U.S. has had fiat money that is not backed by gold or anything else.
Bell and other supporters of the gold standard say it would be a way to keep prices stable. He says the current means of controlling prices near-zero interest rates from the Federal Reserve is making it hard for small businesses to get loans and expand. Bell says that's a major reason that the economy is growing slowly years after the Great Recession.
"We are in a situation of stagnation," Bell said earlier this month in a speech to a real estate conference in New Brunswick. "Why don't they let market interest rates return to our economy?"
Like other supporters of the gold standard, Bell is an acolyte of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, the late congressman, secretary of housing and urban development and vice presidential nominee who made the call for cutting taxes to stimulate the economy part of a national debate in the late 1970s. Bell, now 70, won the Republican nomination for a New Jersey U.S. Senate seat in 1978 largely by advocating the kind of Reagan-era tax cuts some credit with spurring the economy.
Back in 2012, IGM Forum, which surveys academic economists from U.S. institutions including Yale, the University of Chicago and Stanford, asked panelists whether they agree that the gold standard would mean more employment opportunities and price stability for average Americans. Every member who answered the question disagreed or strongly disagreed with the notion.
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For GOP New Jersey Senate candidate, the gold standard is the issue of the election
Published September 29, 2014
The simmering bipartisan battle over whether the Senate will try to swiftly replace retiring Attorney General Eric Holder heated up Sunday, with a top Senate Republican saying such a move would show the desperation Democrats feel about possibly losing control next month of the upper chamber.
It does need to wait, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, chairman of the Senates Republican Policy Committee, told Fox News Sunday." I am opposed to any successor during the lame-duck session.
Political analysts essentially give Republicans a slightly more than 50 percent chance of winning a net total of six seats on Nov. 4 to take control of the Senate. However, the GOP would not officially take over the chamber until January.
Barrasso said if the Democrat-controlled Senate appoints a President Obama nominee it will mark the first time since the Civil War that an attorney general has been appointed in a so-called lame duck session -- the period between when new senators are elected and the other party takes control of the chamber.
Though Republicans are no fans of Holder, Barrasso said any attempt by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to swiftly replace him would be the final act is his failed leadership of the chamber.
Holder, who resigned on Thursday, is the countrys first black attorney general and is considered an unflinching champion of civil rights in enforcing the nation's laws.
He led the Justice Department since the first days of Obama's presidency and is the fourth-longest serving attorney general in U.S. history.
However, he has faced strong criticism during his tenure -- at times bipartisan -- for a succession of controversies including a failed plan to try terrorism suspects in New York City, the botched gun-running probe along the Southwest border that prompted Republican calls for his resignation, and what was seen as a failure to hold Wall Street accountable for the financial system's near-meltdown.
The Republican-controlled House voted two years ago to make Holder the first sitting Cabinet member to be held in contempt of Congress -- for refusing to turn over documents in the gun-running operation known as Operation Fast and Furious. The administration is still fighting in court to keep the documents confidential.
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Top Republican says Holder replacement not one for lame-duck Senate - VIDEO: Dr. Carson reacts to Holder resignation