VANDERBILT POLITICAL REVIEW
DOMESTIC
An old-boys club no more
Democrats are vying to win with women in 2014
by CHRISTOPHER JERROLDS ‘14
A
total of ninety-nine female members of Congress – twenty U.S.
Senators and seventy-nine members of the U.S. House of Representatives – hold seats in the 113th Congress.
This Congress consists of greater female
representation than any other Congress
in the United States’ history, and, after
the last election, political commentators
deemed 2012 the “Year of the Woman.”
However, this representation is not
evenly dispersed between the two parties.
Over three-fourths of this representation
belongs to the Democratic Party, and liberals are aggressively using the “war on
women” as a wedge issue to win elections, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Democrats are pointing to Republicans’
20
Alison Grimes (D)
opposition to issues like equal pay and
women’s reproductive rights as examples
of Republicans pursuing legislative and
rhetorical attacks on gender equity – and
it is working. In 2012, female voters
helped reelect President Barack Obama
by voting for him by a twelve-point margin over his opponent, former Governor
of Massachusetts Mitt Romney. Even
more, President Obama won the vote of
two-thirds of single women, capturing
almost a quarter of the total votes cast
according to The Economist. This demographic has been called a new solid voting bloc for Democrats, which is electorally promising. Unmarried women are
one of the fastest growing groups in the
U.S. – increasing from forty-five million
in 2000 to fifty-three million in 2012. The
Economist argues that although the demographic groups overlap, this increase has
distinguished unmarried women as the
largest group of eligible voters in the nation. Looking towards November, Democrats are playing to this advantage in the
very terrain that has been hostile to Democratic candidates in recent elections.
More specifically, in 2014, Democrats
are trying to become competitive again
in the “Solid South.” The Solid South
consisted of fourteen states – sweeping
from West Virginia to Texas – that reliably voted for Democratic candidates
from the end of Reconstruction until the
passage of the Voting Rights Act. Since
the 1960s, however, this bloc has broken away from this tradition and shifted
towards becoming one of the most consistent regions of Republican support.
To highlight how conservative the region has recently become, twelve out of
the fourteen states in the “Solid South”
voted for Mitt Romney over Barack
Obama, and half of those states voted
for Romney by a twenty-point margin or
more. Additionally, twenty of the twenty-eight Senators, over seventy percent
of the members of the House of Representatives, and ten of the fourteen governors in the region belong to the GOP.
Still, Democrats in four states – Kentucky, West Virginia, Georgia, and Texas
– from the former “Solid South” are looking to change course and win back representation in their former territory this
November. They are using the “war on
women” and targeting key demographics,
like unmarried women, to lure voters that
will be sympathetic to their candidates.
With formidable female candidates, Democrats are keeping the races competitive.
In Kentucky, Alison Lundergan
Grimes (D) is trying to take out U.S.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) in one of the most high-profile
races of the 2014 election cycle. Grimes
currently serves as the Secretary of State
of Kentucky and, at age thirty-five, is
the youngest woman serving as a secretary of state in the country. Having recently won a statewide election for her
office, Democrats believe Grimes has
the potential to pick up the seat for her
party. Her roots run deep in Kentucky’s
Democratic politics, as her father served
as a state representative and the Kentucky Democratic Party Chairman. Her
family also has close connections to the
Clintons, and The Washington Post reported that former President Bill Clinton has already been to Kentucky to
campaign for Grimes. As Senator McConnell is currently battling a Tea Party
primary challenger, Democrats hope
to see the Senate leader weakened or
knocked out before the general election.