Women have made significant gains in Congress in recent elections, but that progress has stalled for the first time since 2016 and lags behind current record levels.
The latest woman to lose her race is Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, with NBC News projecting her defeat by Republican Nick Begich in Alaska. Another female lawmaker, Republican Rep. Michelle Steel, is locked in a tight and uncalled race in Southern California, where she currently trails Democrat Derek Tran by a narrow margin.
If Steel also loses, the number of women in the next Congress, including both the House of Representatives and the Senate, will reach 150 (including the eventual winner of the Iowa 1st District recount between GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Democrat Christina Bohannon). That means the next Congress could start one fewer woman than the 151 who were in Congress on Election Day, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics — the first decline since 2010 and only the second since 1978.
If Steel wins, that number would be 151, the same number of women serving in Congress on Election Day, and the first stagnation since 2016, when President-elect Donald Trump won his first term.
In both elections, Trump defeated primary and general election opponents seeking to become the first female president. After his first election, women made significant gains in Congress in the 2018 and 2020 elections, but that progress slowed in 2022 partly as House races were shaken by redistricting, said Kelly Dittmar, research director and scholar at the Center for American. Women and politics.
Both scenarios mean that the number of women in the next Congress will also remain below the current record of 152 women, following Democratic Rep.’s special election victory. Erica Lee Carter in Texas this month.
“Progress for women in politics is not inevitable,” Dittmar said. Despite the gains of 2018 and 2020, women are still in the minority in Congress, representing 28% of lawmakers while making up half the population.
“We’re already at a point where women are underrepresented, and any decrease in the pace of change means it will take much longer to get to parity, right? to our supposed promise of a representative democracy,” Dittmar said.
“Every decline is a setback on the path to equality,” she added.
Democratic women are on track to match their current record of 94 women in the House of Representatives. The Senate will consist of 16 Democratic women, which also ties the current record, including two Black women serving together for the first time: Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, both of whom won races for open seats. Republican women in the Senate will also reach their current record, with nine in the House.
The number of Republican women in the House of Representatives will decrease due to some losses and retirements, from 34 in the current Congress to 31 or 32 depending on the races of Steel and Miller-Meeks. Republican women are adding two new members to their ranks in the House of Representatives, with Republican Julie Fedorchak of North Dakota and Republican Sheri Biggs of South Carolina winning two deep red open seats.
Despite that slight decline, Republican women have made significant gains in the House of Representatives since hitting a low after the 2018 midterm elections, when there were only 13 female Republicans in the House. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., through her group E-PAC, has helped lead efforts to strengthen their ranks, describing that work as a resounding success in a September interview. Stefanik has been nominated to be Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations and could leave Congress next year if she is confirmed.
“We’re thrilled with the progress Republican women have made since we started this fight in 2018, but there’s always more work to be done,” said Danielle Barrow, executive director of Winning For Women Action Fund, a super PAC running focuses on electing the Republican Party. women. She noted that there were fewer competitive House races this year and that there was an overall decrease in the number of male and female candidates running for office.
“That makes our work to recruit and support high-quality female candidates in primaries all the more important,” she added. “Our entities are proud to have raised more than $13 million to support Republican women this cycle, and the WFW Action Fund is redoubling our efforts as we head into next year.”
Dittmar noted that Republican women have not had the same institutional support as Democratic women, who for decades have received help from groups like Emily’s List, which supports Democratic women who support abortion rights.
“As we look to the future, Emily’s List knows this is not the time to rest, we are going to roll up our sleeves and continue to fight for more representation up and down the ballot,” said Sara Spain, a spokesperson for the organization. , said in a statement on Thursday.
And as organizations like Winning for Women and View PAC work to close the gap on the Republican side, Dittmar said they need more support.
“Especially at a time like this, it takes a reality check to say, ‘No, not enough is being done if we want to see those continued gains,’” she said. “And these organizations, I think, are doing important work, but they need additional help. They need extra money. They need additional capacity, and they need the party and the party leaders themselves to support the kind of work they do so that they can see gains across the board.”
The stagnant progress for women in Congress is also partly due to the fact that both parties’ victories have been largely won by men.
In the House of Representatives, only two of Democrats’ seven victories came in districts with female candidates: Janelle Bynum of Oregon (who defeated a Republican woman) and Laura Gillen of New York. None of Republicans’ seven flips in the House of Representatives were from female candidates.
In the Senate, the three Republican Senate elections in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana that sealed the Republican majority were also won by male candidates.
After Trump’s first election in 2016, Democrats saw a surge in the number of women running for Congress in 2018, and two years later in 2020, a wave of Republican women resigned. It’s too early to know if the 2026 midterm elections will see a similar increase among women from both parties.
“If anything, we’ve seen before that women were motivated to step up when they felt that sense of threat and the perception that this is how it has to be now because we can’t wait,” Dittmar said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
