Republican women did their part to prevent a blue wave
By Ellen Troxclair, Published in The Washington Examiner
In the months and years leading up to the 2020 election, no voter group was more obsessed over than suburban women. Seen as crucial to a Biden victory, headlines such as “Why Trump is losing suburban women” and “Female, suburban voters key to this election” were seemingly everywhere.
Now that the dust is beginning to settle, it’s clear that something aside from their feelings about President Trump was driving many women to the polls: the desire to elect Republican women to Congress.
And that they did. Female Republican congressional candidates made history by winning 13 seats, flipping an astonishing six seats from blue to red. When Democratic women made their historic gains in 2018, the news media called it the “Year of the Woman.” This year is most certainly the “Year of the Republican Woman."
Democrats have outpaced Republicans when it comes to electing women. The Left has seized on that trend, especially following the 2016 presidential election, by crowning themselves as representatives of the fairer sex and expressing it through the Women’s March and celebrity advocates like Taylor Swift.
With the Democrats' gains in 2018, their dominance seemed firm. But a problem has now emerged: Women, it turns out, are not brainwashed robots who fall in line with the pervasive political indoctrination of the time. We do have minds of our own and care about the whole spectrum of political issues beyond reproductive rights.
If trying to navigate a political jungle still overwhelmingly dominated by men wasn’t enough, Republican women these days also have to put up with incessant shaming from their fellow women. Imagine my wide-eyed disbelief when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright proclaimed, “Just remember, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” implying that women who did not vote for Hillary Clinton were deserving of eternal damnation.
Yet something good came from this relentless, condescending attitude from the Left: It awakened a sleeping giant of right-of-center women who were frustrated and fed up and decided to do something about it. Ahead of the 2020 election, a record number of Republican women, 227 to be exact, filed to run for U.S. House seats. Ninety-four of them went on to win their primary elections earlier this year, nearly doubling the previous record high.
From Florida to Colorado, New Mexico to Michigan, the 13 newly elected GOP congresswoman blew past even the highest expectations to nearly double the female representation on the right side of the aisle. This is an impressive and long-overdue accomplishment.
While the media has fawned over Democratic NEW YORK Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, propelling her to become a household name recognizable simply by the initials "AOC," other female leaders like Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik have been mostly ignored or belittled — or worse, defined in news reports not by her own significant accomplishments but only by her posture toward Trump.
Conservative suburban women are tired of being written off and are ready to be written about. This new class of accomplished, tenacious, and admirable women are well-deserving of the attention.
Beth Van Duyne is a single, working mother of two who became the first female mayor in her hometown of Irving, Texas. She will now represent Texas's 24th Congressional District. In Florida, Maria Elvira Salazar was raised by Cuban refugees who fled Fidel Castro’s oppressive communist regime. She put herself through college and became an award-winning news anchor. Now, she will represent Florida's 27th Congressional District. Nancy Mace was the first woman to graduate from The Citadel’s Corps of Cadets, shattering a glass ceiling and paving the way for many others to follow in her footsteps. She unseated Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham to represent South Carolina's 1st Congressional District.
Just like the now-famous bartender from the Bronx, each of these women has a story that deserves to be told in the pages of glossy magazines and Netflix documentaries. If we truly care about women’s progress, this momentous election, and the women won their share, have earned the coverage, not only to celebrate their own tremendous unexpected victories but also to celebrate the significant progress of equal representation in our country. So far, it's been crickets.
The willingness of these newly-elected congresswomen to step up gives a voice to a large swath of women who who are so, so tired of being sequestered and have been drowned out by an endless parade of pink hats, gender shaming, and socialist "Squad" coverage.
The “blue wave” may not have materialized quite as the pundits expected, but the tsunami of GOP women is the story that should be making more of a splash.
Ellen Troxclair is a bestselling author of Step Up: How to Advocate Like a Woman and the youngest woman to ever serve on the Austin City Council.