State’s GOP Women Say It’s Lonely at the Top

It’s easy for Cathie Wright, the senior elected Republican woman in California, to organize a caucus of GOP women in the state Senate. All she has to do is walk into one of the Capitol’s meeting rooms, pull up a chair and have a nice long talk with herself.

“I agree all the time,” she said wryly. “The nicest part is I’m always right.”

Wright, who is from Simi Valley, is the sole Republican woman in the upper house, which as recently as three years ago boasted three. She has only three ideological sisters in the Assembly--less than half of the seven-member delegation five years ago--and none in the state’s Washington delegation.

The dearth of elected GOP women from California--four out of more than 180 positions in the Legislature, statewide office and Congress--is prompting broad anxiety among many in the Republican family. Worse even than the numbers is the reversal of strides that were years in the making.

California, progressive by reputation, now has fewer elected Republican female legislators than Kentucky, Oklahoma, Virginia or North Dakota. Fewer than Colorado or Connecticut. Only five states have a smaller percentage of Republican women.

As their ranks have fallen, those of Democratic women have jumped, doubling in the last five years to 36 in Sacramento and Washington. Included are both U.S. senators and 10 members of Congress.

Many Republicans--women as well as men--blame their party’s increasingly conservative underpinnings and often polarizing rhetoric for the lackluster fortunes of its female candidates.

The decline illustrates, they say, the hidden underbelly of the much-lamented gender gap: What has separated the party from female voters is also separating the party from female candidates, and feeding an image of being too male, too white and too extreme.

“Republicans have a consistent dilemma with the women’s niche,” said Victoria Herrington, until recently the spokeswoman for the state party.

“Historically, Republicans have allowed women [officeholders] in their ranks because these women had been the spouses of Republican men, and because their husbands did it, they did it. What they’re finding is an entirely new generation of women coming to the party for some answers, and the party is not addressing their concerns articulately.”

Party leaders deny any slights to female candidates and say they want to boost their numbers, in part because they need to hold onto female voters whose defections have hurt Republicans in recent years.

“I certainly wish that there were more women in elected office that are Republican,” said the state GOP chairman, Michael Schroeder. He blames the lack of successful female candidates on money.

“Primaries are determined by the state of your own personal network and the financial support that engenders,” Schroeder said. “And I think that it is still a lot easier for a man to establish that personal network than for a woman. That is changing.”

The next test, of course, will come in 1998. But the potential field for that election, at least at this stage, illustrates the problem. Among all the statewide races, only one Republican woman is in the mix--San Diego Mayor Susan Golding, who is exploring a bid for the U.S. Senate.

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For 20 years, Barbara Stone paid her dues the way Republican women always do. She stuffed envelopes, gave speeches, did the invisible work that separates winning campaigns from losers. She was named the National Republican Woman of the Year by the Federation of Republican Women.

So she felt she had every reason to expect that, when she ran for the Assembly in a 1995 recall election, she would win the backing of party leaders.

Wrong.

While some did support her--former Gov. George Deukmejian and state Treasurer Matt Fong among them--the bulk of Republican officials rallied around Gary Miller, a developer who loaned his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars. Miller eventually won.

Republican women still cite the race as an example of their routine dismissal.

“They promote people who are their friends,” said Stone, a Cal State Fullerton political science professor.

Some, like Wright, go further.

“There’s a whole group in the conservative movement of young men who I don’t believe have read that women are equals,” said Wright, who in part blames that attitude for her 1994 loss in the race for lieutenant governor. “The thinking process is not on board for the 20th century.”

Female Republicans have little leverage. They are outnumbered in the party hierarchy and among its financiers, and represent 46% of the Republican Party, according to polls. Democratic women make up 57% of their party.

Republican women tend to be better-represented on school boards and city councils and in mayor’s suites, in races where the financial demands tend to be less punishing. The challenge has been to move beyond that level.

Many Republican women believe their party leaders--including financial bigwigs whose support can be necessary for bigger races--often assume that female candidates for higher office are more liberal than men, a death knell in a state party that has grown increasingly conservative.

It is no accident, they say, that the women who have been successful are unquestionably conservative. Three of the four currently in the Legislature oppose abortion.

Sheila Carroll, past president of the California Federation of Republican Women, believes as do many others that the abortion issue has thwarted many female candidates. Either the women favor abortion rights, contrary to the party’s official position, or they are perceived as softer on the issue than men.

“The party is not funding Republican women, and I think personally that has to do with the issue dividing the party,” she said.

Schroeder, however, believes that the problem lies with a reluctance by women to run under the Republican banner.

“I think that the issue of the party being seen as white and male and possibly too extreme has hurt us more than abortion [among female candidates],” he said. “If we do a good job broadening our base and appear to be welcoming to minorities and reasonable on abortion, it will do more to address the gender gap.”

Many women see both elements at work--some conservatives, they say, find fault with female candidates. And, given the intensity with which Republicans have approached issues like abortion, affirmative action and immigration, many women don’t cotton to the GOP.

Susan Carroll of Rutgers University’s Center for the American Woman and Politics said there is sometimes simply a bad fit between Republican women and party backers in states like California where the hierarchy is conservative.

“Women who are fiscally conservative but socially moderate, which I find a lot, they are just not very comfortable with the socially very conservative views of the right,” she said.

“I think it works both ways, the extreme right is not comfortable with them, and they might not be comfortable with the right.”

Some Republican women, including those in the Assembly, say there is another explanation for their low numbers. Republican women, they say, have been slower to enter the work force and establish either the political or financial networks necessary for electoral success.

“We took a little longer before we decided to leave our homes,” said Barbara Alby, a Fair Oaks Republican elected to the Assembly in 1993. And, she added, “Republican voters are more oriented toward male leadership.”

Whatever the reasons, the numbers do not tell a pretty tale. Borne on the wings of the women’s movement, there were eight Republican women in the Legislature by 1989-90 and none in Congress or in statewide office. In the next session, 1991-92, the total grew to nine, compared to 17 Democratic women.

From that point on, it was all downhill for Republicans. There were seven senior Republicans in 1993-94, five the next election cycle. This year, the number hit four.

According to the National Conference of State Legislators, California has a higher percentage of elected female legislators--of all parties--than 24 states. But when it comes to Republican women, it is ahead only of Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas.

Nationally, about 60% of women elected to legislatures are Democrats and the rest Republican, according to Rutgers’ Carroll. In California, however, 85% of those elected are Democrats.

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The implications of having few Republican women in higher office are evident to Beverly Hansen, who served in the Assembly from 1986-92, at a time when there were twice as many GOP women as there are now.

“Cathie Wright, she can stand up and argue whatever point she wants and she has nobody standing behind her to back her up,” said Hansen, now a Sacramento lobbyist who blames Democratic-leaning women’s groups for failing to back Republican women.

“Many of the issues of today cut across gender lines; they aren’t necessarily directed to women but they are issues on which a woman has a perspective and life experience to offer.”

There are significant differences between Republican men and women that could theoretically affect policy, were more women elected. Women are far more pessimistic about the state’s economic recovery, for example; in November 73% of women said the state was on the wrong track, compared with 61% of men, according to a Los Angeles Times poll. A month earlier, a Times poll found that 25% of Republican women thought the state was still in a serious recession, three times the percentage of GOP men.

Even conservative women say the addition of more women would be a welcome moderating influence on the state’s political institutions, dampening the level of rhetoric if not always the reach of policy.

“I think our [Republican] policies are accepted by people but we have to watch our rhetoric,” said Alby, the Fair Oaks assemblywoman. “We have talked balance sheets not people and, if anything, we have to change that. Women are a moderating influence no matter what they believe.”

Many Republican women point with pride to the record of Gov. Pete Wilson. Of his 12-member Cabinet, five are women, as are 21% of his department directors. He also sponsors a highly popular annual women’s conference.

That sort of commitment, Republican women believe, is the key to improving the numbers of elected women.

“There does seem to be a much more pronounced wish existing today among women in general for more women to run for office,” said San Diego Mayor Golding. “There does seem to be a greater understanding of the value of having a woman in a position of influence and power.”

One force in the future may be the Seneca Network, a year-old grass-roots fund-raising operation that helps finance the campaigns of Republican women. Unlike other groups that have sprouted up recently, this one has no ideological litmus tests and seeks only one goal: more Republican women in office.

Members pay minimal annual dues and pledge to support at least two women in each election cycle. Named after the 1848 Seneca Falls, N.Y., women’s rights convention, the organization was co-founded by Herrington, the former party spokeswoman.

“The idea is to get the money flowing, north to south,” she said.

The organization is open to men as well. One who has signed up is Assemblyman Steven T. Kuykendall of Rancho Palos Verdes.

“Over a number of years, the Republican Party in my opinion has not been a very warm and open environment for women to succeed in, and I can’t put my finger on why. It just isn’t,” he said. “If all the visual stimulation you have shows four or five white guys standing up, it doesn’t give you the idea that you’re welcome.”

Party Chairman Schroeder said he supports Seneca’s goals and would like to boost the chances of women--though he acknowledged it could be touchy in a party that objects to affirmative action.

Many women, however, have little faith in words. Some were particularly alarmed when, at the party’s February convention, leaders broached the idea of establishing closed caucuses to avoid the open primary approved by voters last June. Under the open primary, voters from any party can vote for any candidate.

While Schroeder and others believe the closed system protects the purity of the Republican vote, many women see it as yet another way for a club of men to protect their own.

“We’ll see if these men will put their pocketbooks and support and endorsements behind Republican women from all points of view,” said Sheila Carroll.