Yesterday, I posted about the white knight candidacies of 2016, one of which is that of Carly Fiorina. I noted that one of her attributes is that she is, obviously, female, a relevant detail for a party with a constituency and in particular a body of elected candidates that is overwhelmingly male. Now, I know that conservatives like to decry identity politics, but the fact remains that the ethnicities of people like Marco Rubio and Ben Carson are essential elements of their political rises. And it is no coincidence that the GOP names its first black RNC chairman shortly into the tenure of the first black President (of the other party), or that the GOP filled the only vacancy left on the Supreme Court by a departing black man with another black man. And what other explanation is there for the high profile of a small-town mayor in Utah running for Congress but that she – one Mia Love – is both female and black?
And all this fawning over Fiorina by conservatives and conservative publications proves that a large part of her appeal is her gender.
Carly Fiorina Runs for President as a Woman and Has Earned the Right To | National Review Online
Carly Fiorina, A Woman of Accomplishment - Cal Thomas - Page full
Carly Fiorina seeks to redefine feminism in 'state of women in America' address | Washington Examiner
The presidency, could it use a conservative woman’s touch? | TheBlaze.com
The Republican Party knows it has a demographics problem. That is part of the basis of Carly Fiorina’s support, as minimal as that is. Anyway, this got me thinking about the history of women running for the Republican nomination for President. I already knew that no Republican woman has ever won a single presidential primary or caucus. But I wanted to see which candidates had run and how well they had done. And so I looked.
There isn’t much to see.
I started with the 2012 campaign of Michelle Bachmann. She lasted exactly one contest before packing in her Presidential bid. In the Iowa caucuses, she finished a distant 6th with a mere 5% of the vote. This in the state where she was born and which is right next to the state of her political career, Minnesota.
It turns out that this feeble performance is the high-water mark for female Republican presidential candidates in the last half century.
What about Elizabeth Dole, you ask? Yes, she ran for President in 2000. Well, make that ‘in 1999’ – she dropped out in October of that year, well before the first contest. She did manage to get 231 write-in votes in the New Hampshire primary, good for 9th place behind the likes of Gary Bauer and Al Gore (yes, Al Gore got more write-in votes in the
Republican primary than did Elizabeth Dole).
And prior to that? Well, we have to go all the way back to 1964, where Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith came in second place in that year’s Illinois primary with 25%, albeit far behind winner Barry Goldwater’s 62%.
And so in the year 2015, the Republican Party is still looking for its first female winner of a single presidential primary or caucus, more than four decades after a female candidate for President first won a primary or caucus for the Democratic Party - that would be Shirley Chisholm, in 1972. As an aside, Chisholm was also the first African-American to win a major party primary or causcus - something that still has never happened for the GOP.
Too bad Fiorina is just window dressing for a party that is completely uninterested in her other than a prop on the debate stage, as evidenced by the polls – she couldn’t even come close to the top 10 requirement for making the Fox News debate to be held Thursday night. Maybe in 2020? The Republican Party does have a number of women in the United States Senate and serving as governors around the nation. Better late than never, I guess.
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