In midterm elections, women’s votes will decide our future
May 2, 2018
The midterms are about to turn out and the election in Wisconsin will determine whether or not we have a Trump administration. It’s clear that many Democrats, as well as Republicans, need to re-think their election strategies, but a key question is the role of women’s votes in helping decide the outcomes.
Although Hillary Clinton won the vote in Wisconsin in 2016, she lost the election, despite Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote. The reason has everything to do with the disparity between the turnout in women and men and the lack of enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate and her campaign. Women, in particular, are heavily engaged in the 2020 elections. The next presidential election will have more women than men running as candidates. There are more women than men in the House of Representatives, and if we get over this hump, we will elect women for the first time. In the last midterm election, women’s votes alone led to the Democrats picking up six seats, which would have brought them over the electoral threshold.
In the last midterm elections, where women’s votes helped determine the outcome, the balance of power has shifted dramatically. Democrats picked up six seats that they were almost certain would not have won, and with the help of an unexpectedly strong showing by some Republican women, they could have put the House in play for the first time in the past 20 years. The Democrats have lost a lot of ground since November 2016. In the House of Representatives, the Democrats are now behind in the popular vote only by 1.9 million votes, even though they were behind in the aggregate in the presidential preference vote by 7.8 million votes.
The election of 2018 is not only about the balance of power in the House. The election is also about whether or not the Republican Party remains in power in the Senate or whether the Democrat Party controls that body. For the Republicans to regain control over the Senate they would need to pick up or maintain six seats in the Midwest, which would force them to negotiate with the Democrats to see if they can