David S. Bernstein is a contributing political analyst at WGBH News in Boston.

Candice Miller, a seven-term congresswoman from Michigan’s 10th Congressional District who endorsed Donald Trump for president, is the kind of woman the Republican Party needs to be part of its future. Instead, she’s about to become part of its past. She’s one of just 22 women in the Republican caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives. But she’s not seeking reelection this year. And when her eastern Michigan district held the primary to choose a successor last week, all five candidates in the GOP primary were men.

The same day, all three of the party’s candidates in the primary to replace Dan Benishek, a Republican representing the northernmost part of the state, were men. And on Thursday, in northwest Tennessee, a whopping 13 names appeared on the GOP primary ballot in the district where Stephen Lee Fincher is leaving his solid-red seat. All of them belong to men. All 13 of them.


These are not anomalies. So far this year, Republicans have nominated women in just 26 of the 308 congressional districts that have held primaries. That’s a mere 8 percent—and it’s in line with the current makeup of the House Republican Conference, which is 91 percent male and 9 percent female.

During the past decade, that disparity has actually grown wider, as wave elections swept out a number of established Republican members of Congress (in 2006, 2008 and 2012), and swept in a lot of new ones (in 2010 and 2014). Since 2006, the proportion of women in the House GOP caucus has dropped from 11 percent to just 9 percent today. Although there are now 247 Republicans in the House, up from 229 a decade ago, there are fewer women: 22, down from 25.

Over the same period, Democratic women took advantage of these electoral shifts, replacing men from their party’s old boys’ network with women backed by EMILY’s List and other advocacy groups seeking to increase women’s representation in office. From 2006 to today, women grew from 21 percent of the House Democratic Caucus to 33 percent. And the party isn’t about to let anyone forget it: Their new class was on display in full force when the House’s Democratic women gathered on stage behind Nancy Pelosi during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

And, thanks in part to Michigan’s Miller, the number of Republican women in the House may very well decline again. Of the 22 Republican women in Congress, two—Miller and Wyoming’s Cynthia Lummis—are not running for reelection this year. Another, Renee Ellmers of North Carolina, lost a primary in which redistricting pitted her against a fellow Republican incumbent. Still others—including Barbara Comstock of Virginia, Mia Love of Utah, Martha McSally of Arizona and Elise Stefanik of New York—face tough general election campaigns.

This growing disparity, with Democrats electing ever more women and Republicans ever fewer, repeats at every level of government: U.S. Senate, statewide offices, upper and lower state legislatures, and municipalities. (The Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University maintains useful records on this.) What that means is that there’s no sign the GOP’s current woman problem is going to get any better any time soon. Quite the opposite: The pipeline is dry and getting drier, all the way down.

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The decline of the Republican woman is a public relations disaster for the GOP.

It means that every time a male Republican officeholder or candidate puts his foot in his mouth about women—from former Congressman Todd “legitimate rape” Akin to Donald “blood coming out of her wherever” Trump—effectively the only Republicans who can rush to their defense are other men. Whenever Republican leaders gather to speak about welfare, abortion, the minimum wage or pay equity, they look like a bunch of men telling women what’s good for them. The GOP’s few female national officeholders the tend to tire of playing the role of token woman—especially when they think it’ll come at the expense of their reputation back home. You don’t see New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez or New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte on national television much anymore.

A bigger problem is that Republican women are struggling to get on the national stage at all—most can’t. Consider Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chair of the House Republican Conference, and the highest-ranking Republican woman in Congress. Twice, she’s tried to move to a higher-visibility position than Conference Chair, to no effect. Of the 21 House Committees in the Republican-controlled House, the only one chaired by a woman is the low-profile House Administration Committee. It’s headed by—you guessed it—the aforementioned, soon-to-be-ex-Congresswoman Candice Miller.

Which brings us back to where we started. Forget elected leaders for a minute—even during campaign season, the Republican Party that voters see is almost exclusively male.

That’s true at the highest levels of government, where all three women to run for the Republican presidential nomination in the past half-century—Elizabeth Dole, Michele Bachmann and Carly Fiorina—have dropped out either before the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary (Dole, Bachmann) or immediately afterwards (Fiorina). And it’s also true for statewide and state legislative races, in addition to federal offices. When voters encounter a Republican candidate asking for their vote, that request is coming from a man close to 90 percent of the time.

It’s impossible to quantify how much damage this will ultimately do to a party whose officials are so overwhelmingly—and increasingly—male. It’s fair to imagine, though, that a large corporation in a similar situation would be the subject of intense criticism and investigation, if its leaders were too foolish to address the problem themselves.

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This was not the vision that Sharon Day, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, had in mind two months after the November 2014 elections. That’s when I saw her speak on a panel discussion, pointedly held at the RNC’s Capitol Hill headquarters, as a group called Political Parity unveiled new research and a plan to elect more women to Congress.

Since becoming RNC co-chair in 2011, Day has taken it upon herself to champion the cause of getting more Republican women in office. Prior to that, she said, “the job of co-chair was to talk to the women’s clubs.”

Political Parity, Ambassador Swanee Hunt’s nonpartisan foundation advocating women in politics, had decided to look into the massive, partisan gender gap in elected officials. The foundation’s director, Marni Allen, summed up their findings succinctly: “The primary reason,” she said, “is the primary itself.”

As corporate managers who have faced gender advancement disparities will tell you, without a concerted effort to disrupt the old boys’ network, the network will keep working to the advantage of the boys. Women interested in political office will lack access to the experience, the influencers, the funding and the mentors that make a campaign viable.

At that January 2015 panel, Day stressed the need to get Republican women into substantive campaign positions and staff roles for elected officials—and to match them with mentors, starting at the state legislative level.

That, and other ideas I heard that day, sounded about as likely as the infamous 2013 RNC “autopsy” report that stressed the GOP’s need to win Hispanic voters. The problem isn’t that Republicans don’t know what needs to be done. It’s that they lack the willingness to do it.

Looking around the packed room in the RNC building that day, I saw only a few men—and most of the women, from what I could tell, were from women’s advocacy organization, and not Republican offices. Republicans in Washington, it seemed, weren’t interested. Let alone the far-off local party leaders who provide key backing for those candidates in western Michigan or eastern Tennessee.

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There’s another reason to be skeptical that the GOP can turn its women problem around. The old-boys’ entrenchment seems to be especially deep in the places where Republicans have the most opportunity to diversify quickly—open seats in heavily Republican districts.

Those are, after all, the easiest openings to elect new Republicans—and thus a great opportunity to elect Republican women. In a Congress where incumbents tend to stay in power for many years, missing a rare open seats dooms the party to many more years of lopsided gender imbalance.

But safe Republican districts tend to be the most entrenched: The political kingmaking positions are often filled by the long-serving male officeholders, party officials and financial kingmakers who tend to have held sway for a long time without disruption from the other party or from renegades within the GOP. Deliberately or not, they end up seeing men among their peers and in their circles as appropriate successors. Not women.

This year, by my count, there are 25 Republican-held districts where the incumbent is not running for reelection. (That count depends on your definition, as there are places where redistricting has jumbled things around.) In the Republican primaries to decide their replacements, more than 100 men put their names on the ballot; just a dozen women did the same.

Part of that nearly 10-to-1 imbalance may come from other factors—such as oft-cited research suggesting that women needing more encouragement to run for office than men. But in these Republican races, it’s not just the numbers, it’s the support. In district after district, men received the early endorsements and funding that matter most in the Republican primary contests. So maybe it’s that women need more encouragement. But maybe Republican women don’t step up because, for the most part, their party is telling them they can’t win.

In the 25 open Republican districts that have held primaries this year, only one woman has won the Republican nomination: Claudia Tenney, a conservative New York assemblywoman who took 41 percent of the vote against better-funded male opponents. In the general election, she’ll be running against another woman: the Democrats have put up Kim Myers, whose father founded the Dick’s Sporting Goods empire. The race is considered a toss-up by national prognosticators Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato and Stu Rothenberg.

There are a few more possibilities. This week, businesswoman Darlene Miller hopes to defeat party-endorsed candidate Jeff Lewis in another November battleground district, this one in Minnesota. Later this month, Mary Thomas, an attorney who has worked in the administration of Governor Rick Scott, is in a close battle for an open, solid-red seat in the Florida Panhandle.

But Republicans’ best chance to nominate and elect a new congresswoman looks like it will be Wyoming’s at-large district, where an August 16 primary will effectively decide who succeeds retiring Wyoming Rep. Cynthia Lummis. There’s just one female candidate in the race, and it won’t be an easy primary for her: Seven men are running, some well-funded and with more experience in political office. Still, if there’s any woman who can take advantage of the Republican Party’s old boys’ club, it should be Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president and Wyoming congressman. At this point, maybe that’s what it takes for a woman to make it in today’s GOP.