Top Female GOP Donor: "I was the only woman in the room... they'd assume I was RNC chair Secretary" [View all]

[Emit]

“There are a lot of women we would meet with who have the capacity to write really large checks who feel disenfranchised by the party,” Toretti said. “I’m not saying their perceptions are accurate, but they are their perceptions, and that makes them real.” ... Toretti recalled that as she traveled the country raising money with former RNC finance chairman Ron Weiser, “At a lot of dinners I would go to, I was the only woman in the room, and they would assume I was Ron’s secretary.”

EMILY’s List spokeswoman Marcy Stech responds: The Republican Party has a policy problem: The GOP is just “completely out of step with women.”

Top donor rallies GOP women

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Pennsylvania energy executive Christine Toretti, who served as the finance committee co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee in 2012, told POLITICO she will head up a super PAC dubbed Women Lead. The organization aims to drum up contributions from other deep-pocketed Republican women and use them to promote women running across the country in 2014 and beyond.

A longtime member of the RNC who has donated some $600,000 to Republican candidates and committees over the years, according to the Federal Election Commission, Toretti said she came away from the 2012 election convinced that female donors needed a stronger role in intraparty Republican politics.

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Toretti said at least part of the problem for the party is that women — as well as male donors who care about electing women to federal office — have little power to ensure that their donations are spent on behalf of other women. So for other prolific givers who were dissatisfied with the results of 2012, Toretti has created a more narrowly focused political entity to address her concerns.

“There are a lot of women we would meet with who have the capacity to write really large checks who feel disenfranchised by the party,” Toretti said. “I’m not saying their perceptions are accurate, but they are their perceptions, and that makes them real.”

Toretti recalled that as she traveled the country raising money with former RNC finance chairman Ron Weiser, “At a lot of dinners I would go to, I was the only woman in the room, and they would assume I was Ron’s secretary.”

“I decided that if I was going to do this again, I was going to do it differently,” she continued. “Really, for me, it’s about getting more women at the table.”

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Democrats expressed skepticism about the viability of Toretti’s group as well as the full range of outreach efforts under way on the GOP side. With much of the electoral off-year gone, there’s only a limited window left to recruit female candidates — and in the bigger picture, 14 months is not much time to reverse the GOP’s weak position with women.

The bottom line, said EMILY’s List spokeswoman Marcy Stech, is that the Republican Party has a policy problem: The GOP is just “completely out of step with women.”

“It’s why they lost big in 2012 and why they are struggling to find women candidates to step up and run,” Stech said. “No amount of money will be able to drown out their anti-family policies that continue to plague a Republican Party that continues to oppose equal pay and would rather play politics with women’s health rather than focus on creating good-paying jobs for Americans.”

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http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/gop-women-super-pac-95872.html