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• Vote with your wallet? With less than a week of mid-term elections – go vote, everyone! – Politics has been one of our main concerns at Broadsheet headquarters. (If you have not read the oral history of the 1992 Year of the Woman we published yesterday, please do so.) So I was not surprised to find this New York Times interesting and alarming story about the state of funding of women candidates.
Like it or not, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to win an election for a position throughout the state or nationwide without having a large budget for finance your campaign. Take the House of Representatives, where FiveThirtyEight wins, in more than 90% of cases, the candidate who spends the most. (To learn more about the trends of this trend in recent congressional races, check out this fascinating Open Secrets data tool.)
The temperature History explains why, despite the huge increase in the number of women running for office, women candidates are still lagging behind in fundraising. The problem is particularly acute among Republican women, who struggle against the power in power or who run in places where they are unlikely to win – but which affect the vast majority of female candidates. The NYT reports that, among the Democratic primary candidates for the House vote, women raised an average of $ 1.4 million, $ 185,000 less than the average male.
The gap does not exist for a single reason. Women may not have the commercial relations of politicians or are less likely to sit on a fortune that they can use to finance their own campaign. Then there is the fact that the majority of donors are still men.
To be sure, there are some green-silver liners to this cloud. Women are becoming more and more campaign donors, sometimes with particular concern to help the women candidates. And women candidates are excellent at raising funds from small donors (ie ordinary people).
It should also be noted that, following the Trump election, women democrats have benefited from what is rightly called "rage", according to the Time.
Looking forward to the results of the last wave of candidates in next week's election, this is an important reminder: Making women appear is only part of the equation. Genuinely reducing the political representation gap will probably mean that we will do the same with the fundraising division.
New York Times
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