Kevin McCarthy and NRCC Publicly Tout Women Recruits While Quietly Discouraging Others From Running
Washington Republicans, who claim to stay away from primaries, have decided to make at least one exception in New Jersey this cycle.
According to the Huffington Post, Republican leadership has explicitly told at least one woman NOT to run for Congress in an attempt to clear the field for Trenton politician, Tom Kean, Jr.
Wow!
This signals the GOP could face an increasingly uphill battle in closing the party’s gender gap in the House. A goal they claim to hold.
“It comes as no surprise that a party whose leadership continually marginalizes women’s voices has told a female candidate to sit this one out,” said DCCC Spokesperson Christine Bennett. “It’s hard to increase the number of women in your conference when you are actively discouraging women from running for Congress.”
Republicans Want To Elect More Women — Just Not Fewer Men
The old boys club picks its winner faster than you can say “she’s running.”
By Molly Redden |The Huffington Post
Rosemary Becchi is exactly who the Republican Party says it’s looking for.
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But when Becchi met with a party official at National Republican Congressional Committee headquarters in Washington, he asked her not to run.
NRCC officials already preferred another Republican in her New Jersey district, he said: Tom Kean Jr., the son of that state’s popular former governor from the ’80s.
“One of the first things they said to me was, ‘Why don’t you run in a different district?’” Becchi fumed in a recent interview. “Well, guess what? I don’t live in another district.”
This is a time when the GOP supposedly wants more Becchis. In 2018, the forces that made the midterms the Year of the Woman for the Democrats spelled total catastrophe for Republicans. White, suburban women with college degrees fled the party in droves. The bloodletting left only 13 Republican women in the House, a number so low that Mitch McConnell (R), the Senate majority leader and no one’s idea of an equality champion, promised to do “a better job of recruiting women candidates and getting them elected.”
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Becchi’s clash with the party, though, cuts to a more elemental problem: If Republicans want to elect more women, they’ll have to elect fewer men.
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The Chosen One
But Kean Jr.’s ties to those circles run deeper. He’s the state Senate minority leader. He ran his first race for Congress 20 years ago (he lost), and his personal driver on his 2006 U.S. Senate campaign is now the NRCC’s political director. (He lost that race, too.)
She’s a great candidate [but] her father wasn’t the former governor of New Jersey. GOP strategist Julie Conway, speaking about Rosemary Becchi
The party’s steamrolling of Becchi has not been subtle. Local Republicans convinced Becchi to delay her announcement by telling her she would distract from this summer’s legislative primaries. She later spotted local officials attending Kean Jr.’s much earlier campaign kickoff. Before she could follow him into the race, the NRCC took the unusual step of circulating poll results that showed Kean Jr. leading the sitting Democrat, freshman Rep. Tom Malinowski, in a general-election matchup. And soon after Becchi declared, U.S. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) gave Kean Jr. his endorsement.
“It’s a boys club,” Becchi said. “They say, ‘Tom is the person that’s supposed to run.’ He’s the chosen one.”
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In response to a request for comment, the NRCC claimed it does not play in primaries.
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All those supporters are part of a small group of Republican insiders trying seriously to elect more women. Reps. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) and Susan Brooks (Ind.), who is retiring from the House, have recruited scores of women between them to run for Congress. Conway has matched nearly every woman who’s running with a Republican woman in the House or a former member who can act as a kind of mentor.
But they can only do so much on their own. Without the help of the rest of the party — which has shown time and again that gender parity is not its priority — most of their recruits have foundered in the primaries.
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