The 2018 midterm election is still more than one year away, but already candidates on both sides of the aisle are launching campaigns for the House and Senate. Among the early entrants, one pattern stands out: a growing number of them are female Democratic candidates, like Tritch and Bell, who have challenged Republican incumbents.
Since Mr. Trump took office, women are paying more attention to politics than men, according to a Pew Research Center poll released last month. Fifty-eight percent of female respondents said they were following politics more closely, compared to 46 percent of male respondents.
Liberal women also appear to be outpacing men when it comes to political activism in the early days of the Trump era. The Pew poll found that 17 percent of Democratic women, compared to 12 percent of Democratic men, have attended a protest since the 2016 election ended. Among college-educated Democratic women, the number was nearly 30 percent.
It’s still too early to know exactly what impact the wave of female Democratic candidates will have next year. But they could become a factor in an election where the Democratic Party and liberal groups will seek to regain control of the House and rebuild the party at the state and local level.
Still, some observers drew a parallel between next year’s election and 1992, when scores of women like now-Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., ran for office for the first time. At the time, some were motivated in part by the way the all-male Senate Judiciary committee treated Anita Hill when she testified against Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination. In all, four Democratic women were elected to the U.S. Senate that year, and 1992 became known as “The Year of the Woman.”
