'Don't Run This Year': The Perils for Republican Women Facing a Flood of Resistance
SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, Calif. — Diane Harkey, the Republican candidate for California’s 49th Congressional District, recognizes that President Trump “doesn’t make women real comfortable.”
Men just have a different style, she said: “They’re more warrior-oriented. We are a little more consensus-builders.”
But she laughs off the idea of campaigning as a woman. “I want all voters, I like men too,” she said. “I don’t think it helps to talk about gender.”
It may be the year of the woman in midterm campaigns across the country, but Ms. Harkey is not embracing it here in one of the nation’s most hotly contested congressional elections. The passion is far more evident 30 miles south of here, in the offices of a new group called Flip the 49th, whose weekly protests following Mr. Trump’s inauguration drove the Republican incumbent, Darrell Issa, from his seat. Now, it is working feverishly to elect the male Democrat running against Ms. Harkey.
“She’s anti-health care, anti-gun control, anti-family, anti-immigrant, anti-environment,” said Mary Schrader, a Flip volunteer who was a Republican until 2016. “She’s completely out of touch with the women in her district.”
This is the bind for Republican women running for office in the Trump era. The energy among women that started with the marches after the president’s inauguration is against them — surveys have shown that 70 percent of the membership of local resistance groups, and almost all the top leadership, are women. And having long resisted identity politics, Republican women are reluctant or unable to claim any advantage to being a woman among voters.
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