Capito, McSally, Martinez and Love are cited as candidates Women Lead could support. | AP Photos Top donor rallies GOP women

One of the Republican Party’s most prominent female donors is striking out on her own in an effort to steer more of the GOP’s ample financial resources to conservative women running for office.

Pennsylvania energy executive Christine Toretti, who served as the finance committee co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee in 2012, told POLITICO she will head up a super PAC dubbed Women Lead. The organization aims to drum up contributions from other deep-pocketed Republican women and use them to promote women running across the country in 2014 and beyond.


A longtime member of the RNC who has donated some $600,000 to Republican candidates and committees over the years, according to the Federal Election Commission, Toretti said she came away from the 2012 election convinced that female donors needed a stronger role in intraparty Republican politics.

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Republicans lost women voters by 11 percentage points in the last presidential election, according to national exit polls, and failed to win multiple Senate races in which male GOP candidates made comments about rape and abortion that were widely perceived as offensive.

Toretti said at least part of the problem for the party is that women — as well as male donors who care about electing women to federal office — have little power to ensure that their donations are spent on behalf of other women. So for other prolific givers who were dissatisfied with the results of 2012, Toretti has created a more narrowly focused political entity to address her concerns.

“There are a lot of women we would meet with who have the capacity to write really large checks who feel disenfranchised by the party,” Toretti said. “I’m not saying their perceptions are accurate, but they are their perceptions, and that makes them real.”

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Toretti recalled that as she traveled the country raising money with former RNC finance chairman Ron Weiser, “At a lot of dinners I would go to, I was the only woman in the room, and they would assume I was Ron’s secretary.”

“I decided that if I was going to do this again, I was going to do it differently,” she continued. “Really, for me, it’s about getting more women at the table.”

Toretti, 56, took over her family drilling company after her father’s death in 1990 and became a major Republican donor over the following decade. She likened her new effort to an earlier project she has overseen in the Keystone State: the Anne B. Anstine Excellence in Public Service Series, a training program for Republican women who want to run for office.

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“I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re going to be able to raise the money we need. I’m certainly not interested in funding the whole thing myself,” said Toretti, who was first named to the RNC by former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge in 1997.

The project is still in the early stages. Toretti will have only one adviser on staff at Women Lead at the outset: Courtney Johnson, a former Mitt Romney campaign aide.

The Pennsylvanian plans to put down seed money for the group and then raise an undetermined sum from other donors in the “big range” of $1 million to $10 million.

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If many of the specifics of the Women Lead initiative are still to be determined, the group starts out with the blessing of some influential Republicans in Washington — including the GOP’s highest-ranking public official, House Speaker John Boehner.

In a statement to POLITICO, Boehner endorsed both the goals of Toretti’s project and her leadership.

“No one is more capable of taking on this important project than Christine Toretti. She’s been in this fight a long time, empowering and growing the number of women in public office,” Boehner said.

Longtime Republican fundraiser Fred Malek, the finance chairman of the Republican Governors Association, called Toretti a “determined, disciplined, engaging and energetic leader who does a good job on anything she takes on.”

The launch of Women Lead comes as national Republicans seek, through a number of different avenues, to address the party’s weaknesses among women voters. The RNC, National Republican Congressional Committee and Republican State Leadership Committee have all announced initiatives to recruit women candidates for the 2014 election cycle. There are already four Republican women who serve as governors compared with just one female Democratic governor, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire.

A Pew survey conducted in late July and published Friday found that 52 percent of Republicans nationwide believe the party would benefit from nominating more women for office. There is a strong generational split in the response: 64 percent of Republicans under 40 said it would be beneficial to nominate more women versus just 46 percent of Republicans 40 and over who agreed.

Toretti cited four Republican women by name as examples of the kind of candidates she’d like to see her group support: West Virginia Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, who is the favorite to win the race for the state's open Senate seat; House challengers Martha McSally of Arizona and Mia Love of Utah; and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez.

The legal details of how and whether Women Lead can engage in state races are yet to be determined, but Toretti lauded Martinez enthusiastically. “I really, really like Susana Martinez a lot,” she said. “I’m hoping that we will be able to play in some of those gubernatorial races.”

Unlike other women-oriented political groups — such as EMILY’s List among Democrats or the Susan B. Anthony List on the right — Toretti said her startup wouldn’t have any litmus test for support on the issue of abortion. “For me, it’s about limited government. You don’t spend what you don’t have,” she said.

More important, she explained, will be finding places where other outside groups, such as American Crossroads, aren’t already “pouring money in. I’m not going to oversaturate that race.”

Democrats expressed skepticism about the viability of Toretti’s group as well as the full range of outreach efforts under way on the GOP side. With much of the electoral off-year gone, there’s only a limited window left to recruit female candidates — and in the bigger picture, 14 months is not much time to reverse the GOP’s weak position with women.

The bottom line, said EMILY’s List spokeswoman Marcy Stech, is that the Republican Party has a policy problem: The GOP is just “completely out of step with women.”

“It’s why they lost big in 2012 and why they are struggling to find women candidates to step up and run,” Stech said. “No amount of money will be able to drown out their anti-family policies that continue to plague a Republican Party that continues to oppose equal pay and would rather play politics with women’s health rather than focus on creating good-paying jobs for Americans.”

Toretti freely admits that her prospects for success are uncertain.

“We’re interested in women who can win and who need our support,” she said. “I might fall flat on my face, but I’ve got to see if we can make it work.”

CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of this story implied that Shelley Moore Capito was running for state Senate instead of U.S. Senate.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: David Cohen @ 08/25/2013 11:31 PM CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of this story implied that Shelley Moore Capito was running for state Senate instead of U.S. Senate.