A record number of women are headed to statehouses and Capitol Hill in 2019. One hundred women were elected to the U.S. House, which means that at least 121 women will serve in the 116th Congress – up from the current 107.
Twelve women were elected to the U.S. Senate. This new record shatters the 1992 “year of the woman” in which five women were elected to serve in the Senate.
Media outlets have been quick to attribute women’s candidacies and successes to the Democratic “blue wave.” This generalization ignores places like Alabama, where voters elected a Republican as its first female governor and passed a measure that recognizes and supports “the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children” and another measure that allows the display of the Ten Commandments on public property and in schools.
In South Dakota, voters also elected a Republican female governor and rejected progressive-backed measures that would have revised campaign finance and lobbying laws as well as increased taxes on tobacco products.
As a scholar of politics and social movements, I’m often asked to explain these contradictory outcomes.
Here are three things to keep in mind about women and politics as a new Congress prepares to take office.
1. Women vote more than men, and not all are Democrats
How women vote is often not well explained in news coverage. Journalists emphasize that women vote more than men and that more women tend to identify as Democrats.
This is true. If you look at gender alone, 54 percent of women identify as Democrats or lean Democrat, and only 38 percent of women identify as Republican or lean Republican.
The problem is that these numbers miss key demographic differences that divide women’s votes. A lot of white, married women vote Republican. According to the Pew Research Center, 47 percent of white women identified as Republican or Republican-leaning and 46 percent of white women identified as Democrat or Democrat-leaning in 2016.
This thin margin among white women was clear in the 2016 presidential election: 45 percent of white women voted for Hillary Clinton and 47 percent voted for Donald Trump. Compare this to women of color: 98 percent of black women and 67 percent of Hispanic women voted for Clinton in the 2016 election.
2. Conservative feminism
