Democratic women are overperforming in 2024 primaries; Republicans lag behind
Originally published by Meredith Conroy for ABC
Today, Democratic women make up 41 percent and Republican women make up just 15 percent of their respective parties’ members of Congress. And of the 12 female governors currently serving, eight are Democrats. That discrepancy is due in part to what happens in the parties’ respective primaries, where interest groups and candidates spar over the direction of their parties and just which candidates should represent them. While this year’s primaries are far from over, we wanted to check in on how women have done in the first 17 states to hold primary elections for some mid-cycle clues as to whether Democratic and Republican women are maintaining the progress they’ve made in recent election years.
As we have for past primaries, 538 is collecting a trove of demographic and political information (such as endorsements, race and ethnicity, and gender) for every major-party candidate running for Senate, House or governor in the 2024 election cycle. This update takes a look at where women have run, and where women have won, in these primaries through May 21.* Our analysis of this data shows that the overall share of women running and winning in primaries thus far in 2024 is slightly lower than it was at the close of the 2022 primary cycle. But there’s a notable partisan split: Democrats are nearly keeping pace with the previous cycle, while Republicans seem to be passing up opportunities to add more women to their ranks.
How many women are running and winning?
To identify female candidates, we rely on lists from the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University, which has been reliably collecting data on women running for office for decades. Democrats have been electing more women to Congress than Republicans since the 1990s, due in large part to a strategy that has emphasized recruiting and supporting female candidates. In 2018, that strategy was supercharged, when many more Democratic women showed interest in running in the wake of Trump’s election and as the #MeToo movement was gaining momentum. Democratic women have continued to run in large numbers since then, and this year appears to be no exception.
Meanwhile, Republicans saw their own surge of female candidates back in 2010, as women who had taken on a leading role in the Tea Party movement decided to run. The number of GOP women declined in subsequent years, before surging again in 2020 and 2022, but the 2024 numbers so far signal a drop-off.