{"id":74654,"date":"2020-01-30T18:47:17","date_gmt":"2020-01-31T01:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/out-of-100-colorado-lawmakers-only-seven-are-republican-women\/"},"modified":"2020-01-31T01:47:17","modified_gmt":"2020-01-31T01:47:17","slug":"out-of-100-colorado-lawmakers-only-seven-are-republican-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/out-of-100-colorado-lawmakers-only-seven-are-republican-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Out of 100 Colorado lawmakers, only seven are Republican women"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Rep.
Rep. Kim Ransom, R-Douglas County, right, on the Colorado House floor with her Republican colleagues on Jan. 8.<\/span>Kathryn Scott\/via The Colorado Sun<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Two decades ago, Republican women outnumbered their Democratic counterparts in the state Legislature.<\/p>\n

Today, there\u2019s just one Republican woman in the state Senate and six in the House. That compares with 37 Democratic women in the two chambers.<\/p>\n

The Colorado Republican Party is looking to reverse the trend. The party on Wednesday announced a new Women in Action program to get more women candidates \u2013 and voters \u2013 involved ahead of the 2020 election.<\/p>\n

\"Brown\"
Brown<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The party\u2019s vice chairwoman, Kristi Burton Brown, is leading the effort, with several other prominent GOP women listed as founding members. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the top priorities at the state party,\u201d Brown said. \u201cOne of our main priorities is recruiting and training women around the state, and just getting them involved in our ground efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n

The program is designed to trumpet President Donald Trump\u2019s<\/a> record and help to engage women voters through door-to-door canvassing efforts.<\/p>\n

In Colorado at the start of the year, 38% of registered women voters were unaffiliated, 34% were Democrats and 26% were Republicans. Among all voters, 41% were unaffiliated, 30% were Democrats and 28% were Republicans.<\/p>\n

Even though women are a smaller segment of the GOP, Brown noted that women lead the Republican Party in seven of Colorado\u2019s 11 largest counties.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have women in our top leadership spots, and those are the kinds of women that are being trained and actively being connected and participating in their communities, and they can become elected officials at some point if they want,\u201d Brown said.<\/p>\n

One area of focus is the General Assembly. Out of 100 lawmakers in Colorado, 44 are women, ranking the state second in the nation for women lawmakers. Of the Republican lawmakers, men outnumber women 15 to 1 in the Senate and 17 to six in the House. (One House seat previously held by a woman is vacant.)<\/p>\n

The fact that Democratic women outnumber their Republican counterparts fits a national trend, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, which found 68% of women in state legislatures nationwide in 2019 were Democrats.<\/p>\n

To get more women elected, the Republican Party will need more women to run for office.<\/p>\n

In 2018, only 25 women appeared on the GOP primary ballot for state or legislative office, compared with 83 men, a review shows. On the Democratic side, it was nearly even, with 64 men and 63 women.<\/p>\n

Over the last 10 election cycles, the number of women candidates running as Democrats consistently outpaced their GOP counterparts, according data compiled by the Center for American Women and Politics. The real leaps began in 2004 when Democrats took control of both the state House and Senate.<\/p>\n

The only current Republican woman <\/a>holding a statewide position is Heidi Ganahl, a member of CU Board of Regents. Republican Sue Sharkey of Fort Collins holds the 4th Congressional District regent seat.<\/p>\n

The lack of female Republican candidates is even a concern among Democratic women, like state Sen. Faith Winter of Westminster, who\u2019s been training women to run for office since 2005. Winter defeated incumbent Republican state Sen. Beth Martinez Humenik in 2018.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur democracy is better when we have a variety of backgrounds and voices,\u201d said Winter, who works as national program director for the nonpartisan group Vote Run Lead, which encourages women to run for office.<\/p>\n

One big obstacle: Women tend to be Democrats<\/em>It isn\u2019t just Colorado experiencing a dearth of Republican women in elected office.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 2018, we had a record number of new women elected to Congress. Only one of them was a Republican,\u201d said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem is where women align on the partisan issues, Walsh said. \u201cWomen are more likely to be Democrats,\u201d she said. \u201cWomen see government playing a bigger role in their lives and an important role in their lives. Things like family medical leave, Social Security, unemployment insurance, all kinds of aspects of that social safety net, because we know that women make less money than men do.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even when women run as Republicans, they find it tougher to win. The women on the Democratic side were more successful in Colorado than Republican women from 2000 to 2018. In 2018, for example, Democratic women won nearly 68% of their legislative races compared with 17% for GOP women.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it goes through cycles,\u201d Brown said. \u201cI think some of the Democratic women candidates have beat Republican women candidates. So it\u2019s not as if we weren\u2019t running women. 2018 was a bad year for Republicans.\u201d<\/p>\n

And once elected, some women find it hard to rise<\/a> through the political ranks.<\/p>\n

Former state Rep. Polly Lawrence of Douglas County served as assistant Republican leader for two years starting in 2015, but she couldn\u2019t get the votes to win the top GOP post so she didn\u2019t run. State Rep. Patrick Neville, who is more conservative than Lawrence, won the minority leader position.<\/p>\n

In the 2018 election, Lawrence was the only Republican woman running for statewide office but finished last in a three-way GOP primary for state treasurer. Lawrence said she got pushback for being a woman running for statewide office. \u201cHaving worked in construction for 30 years, it surprised me.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the GOP, ideological differences are source of tension<\/p>\n

The Republican Party\u2019s rightward shift in recent years also makes it harder for women candidates who are more moderate in their beliefs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Republican Party has moved further and further to the right,\u201d said Walsh, the Rutgers researcher. \u201cMany of the Republican women who were serving in the \u201970s and \u201980s in legislatures across the country tended to be more moderate than their male counterparts. And they found it more and more difficult to make it through primaries where the most conservative Republican voters are turning out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lola Spradley, the first Republican state House speaker, who took the helm in 2003, agreed that some of the women with whom she served likely wouldn\u2019t get elected today because of their more moderate views on issues such as abortion or same-sex marriage.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Republican Party has been a little tough on people who don\u2019t agree with them on all the social issues,\u201d said Spradley, who lived in Beulah while she served. \u201cIf I was in my old district, I could get elected today because my old district was a pretty rural conservative district and my values haven\u2019t changed and their values haven\u2019t changed. But I don\u2019t think that\u2019s necessarily true for other districts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"State
State Sen. Vicki Marble, R-Fort Collins, is the only Republican woman in the Colorado state Senate. She is pictured here with Senate GOP leader Chris Holbert, R-Parker, on Jan. 4.<\/span>Kathryn Scott\/via The Colorado Sun<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Suzanne Staiert, a former deputy secretary of state now running for state Senate, said she\u2019s getting support from Senate Republicans, all but one of whom are men. She\u2019s running in Senate District 27, based in south Aurora and Centennial, for a seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Jack Tate, and may face a male challenger in the June 30 primary.<\/p>\n

Staiert said parental responsibilities can make it hard for women to run. She\u2019s a single parent of three daughters, the youngest is now 15. \u201cThat\u2019s a big factor, when you have young children and the demands of that schedule,\u201d she said. \u201cYou have to make choices of what you want to do, what you want to spend your time doing or what you can spend your time doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, many of the Republican-leaning districts are far from the Capitol, she said. \u201cA lot of those Republican seats are now rural seats and those women can\u2019t necessarily move to Denver for a certain amount of time and leave their kids at home,\u201d Staiert said.<\/p>\n

Democratic infrastructure supports women candidates<\/em>When it comes to women running for office, Walsh said Democrats often put more value in the fact the candidate is a woman.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Republican Party really shuns the concept of identity politics,\u201d Walsh said. \u201cThere is a philosophy within the Republican Party that the best candidate will rise to the top. That is not to say that they don\u2019t think it\u2019s a good thing to have women in office or a good thing to have more people of color, but there is not a belief that the politics and the policy will be better with that kind of diversity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is intrinsically part of the Democratic Party, a belief system that women and people of color can represent their communities better than white men can.\u201d<\/p>\n

One more factor that hurts Republican women is the lack of resources, especially compared to Democratic side, where organizations train women to run for office and political action committees provide financial backing to candidates.<\/p>\n

Colorado has PACs at the state level to support women, including Blueflower Fund and Blueflower Action, and Emerge Colorado to train candidates. There\u2019s no state-level Republican counterpart.<\/p>\n

Lawrence, who now works as a policy consultant, said Republicans need to put more energy toward recruiting women to step forward as candidates. \u201cWe do need to take a little bit more time and encourage women to run, because they do bring a valuable voice and they bring a different perspective that I think is very valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brown is optimistic the new state GOP effort can help reach more women in 2020. \u201cWe have plenty of women coming through the pipelines who are going to continue to run,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The Colorado Sun is a reader-supported, journalist-owned news outlet exploring issues of statewide interest. Sign up for a newsletter and read more at coloradosun.com.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Republican Party hopes to court voters ahead of 2020 elections<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":74655,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[394,14,15,233,3885,28,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-74654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-colorado-legislature","tag-colorado-state-house-of-representatives","tag-colorado-state-senate","tag-coloradosun-com","tag-gender-equality","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74654"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=74654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}