Recent elections have seen notable advancements for women in Congress, but for the first time since 2016, those advances have stagnated and are now below the current record levels.
Democratic Representative Mary Peltola is the most recent woman to lose her race; NBC News predicts that she will lose to Republican Nick Begich in Alaska. Another female member, Republican Representative Michelle Steel, is now trailing Democrat Derek Tran by a slim margin in a close and uncalled election in Southern California.
In addition, if Steel loses, there will be 150 women in the next Congress, including the Senate and the House (including the winner of the recount between Democrat Christina Bohannon and Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks in Iowa’s 1st District). Data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics indicates that the next Congress may start with one fewer woman than the 151 who were in Congress on Election Day. This is only the second decline since 1978 and the first since 2010.
The first halt in progress since President-elect Donald Trump won his first term in 2016, Steel’s victory would bring the total number of women sitting in Congress to 151, the same amount on Election Day.
Trump overcame opponents vying to become the first female president in both the primary and general elections. According to Kelly Dittmar, director of research and a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics, women made great strides in Congress following his first victory in 2018 and 2020, but that growth stalled in 2022, partly because redistricting upended House races.
After Texas Democratic Representative Erica Lee Carter won a special election this month, all scenarios indicate that the number of women in the upcoming Congress will likewise be below the current record of 152.
According to Dittmar, advancement for women in politics is not a given. Although they make up half of the population, women still make only 28% of lawmakers in Congress, despite the improvements of 2018 and 2020.
Since women are already underrepresented, any slowdown in the rate of change will make it take longer to achieve even parity, which is the minimal level of representation that would fulfill the purported promise of a representative democracy, Dittmar stated.
According to her, any decrease is a setback on the road to parity.
The number of Democratic women in the House is on pace to equal their current high of 94. In addition to matching the existing record, the Senate will have 16 Democratic women, including two Black women sitting together for the first time: Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, both of whom won races for open seats. There will be nine Senate Republican women, matching their existing record.
Due to some retirements and losses, the number of Republican women in the House will drop from 34 in the current Congress to 31 or 32, depending on the outcome of the Steel and Miller-Meeks elections. Julie Fedorchak, a Republican from North Dakota, and Sheri Biggs, a Republican from South Carolina, have won two deep-red vacant seats in the House, giving Republican women two additional members.
Notwithstanding that minor drop, Republican women have advanced significantly in the House since the 2018 midterm elections, when there were just 13 female Republicans in the chamber. In an interview in September, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who has spearheaded the push to increase their numbers through her organization E-PAC, called the endeavor a tremendous success. If confirmed, Stefanik, who has been nominated to be Trump’s ambassador to the UN, may depart Congress the following year.
Danielle Barrow, executive director of Winning For Women Action Fund, a super PAC dedicated to electing GOP women, said, “We are thrilled with the progress Republican women have made since we got into this fight in 2018, but there is always more work to be done.” In addition to a general drop in the number of male and female candidates running, she pointed out that this year’s House races were less competitive.
She continued by saying that this emphasizes the significance of our efforts to find and assist deserving female candidates in primaries. As we move into the next year, WFW Action Fund is stepping up our efforts to help Republican women, and our entities are happy to have raised over $13 million this year.
Dittmar pointed out that Democratic women, who have benefited for decades from organizations like Emily’s List, which supports Democratic women who favor abortion rights, have had the same institutional backing as Republican women.
“As we look to the future, Emily’s List knows that now is not the time to rest, we’re going to roll up our sleeves and continue fighting for more representation up and down the ballot,” declared Sara Spain, the group’s spokesperson, in a statement released Thursday.
Additionally, Dittmar stated that additional assistance is required for groups like Winning for Women and View PAC, which are attempting to bridge the gap on the Republican side.
“It takes a reality check to say, No, there’s not enough being done if we want to see that continued gain,” she said, particularly at this time. I believe that these organizations are making significant progress, but they require more assistance. They require more money. To see increases across the board, they require more capacity as well as the support of the party and its leaders for the kind of work they are undertaking.
The fact that men won the majority of the pickups in both parties is another factor contributing to the stagnation of advancement for women in Congress.
Only two of the Democrats’ seven House flips occurred in districts featuring female candidates: Laura Gillen of New York and Janelle Bynum of Oregon, who defeated a Republican woman. There were no female candidates in any of the seven flips by House Republicans.
Male candidates also secured the Republican majority in the Senate with the GOP’s three Senate picks in West Virginia, Ohio, and Montana.
Democrats did saw a spike in female congressional candidates in 2018 following Trump’s first election in 2016, and two years later, in 2020, a flood of Republican women entered the race. It’s too soon to tell if women of both parties would increase similarly in the 2026 midterm elections.
Women have demonstrated in the past, at the very least, that they were inspired to take charge when they sensed danger and the idea that things had to happen right away because they couldn’t wait, Dittmar said.
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