Welcome to At the Races! Each week we bring you news and analysis from the Roll Call campaign team. Know someone who’d like to get this newsletter? They can subscribe here . By Mary Ellen McIntire, Daniela Altimari and Niels Lesniewski Tuesday’s rout by Democrats has led one group dedicated to electing more Republican women to Congress to warn of a “crisis-level decline” of female GOP members on Capitol Hill. Danielle Barrow, the president of Women for Women Action Fund, drew parallels between this week’s results and the 2018 blue wave. “After 2018, when Republicans lost 40 seats and elected only one new Republican woman, the party made a real commitment to recruiting and investing in women – and it worked,” Barrow said in a statement Wednesday, adding that women accounted for 11 of the 15 House seats the GOP picked up in the 2020 election. But she cautioned that the party needs to sustain that focus across election cycles. “Republicans cannot only make this investment after a wipeout election and abandon it when things improve,” she said. “It is time for party leaders to treat this as a permanent strategy, not a crisis response.” The ranks of House Republican women won’t plummet to as low as after the 2018 elections, when the caucus had just 13 female members. At least 18 Republican women have won House races so far, according to The Associated Press, and two others are leading as of Thursday afternoon. The conference is likely to see two new female members: Florida’s Sydney Gruters, the wife of RNC Chairman Joe Gruters, and Washington state’s Amanda McKinney, who holds a comfortable lead as votes continue to be counted. Still, those figures are worlds apart from House Democrats, whose caucus will have more than 100 women next year. “We have always known that when women run, women win,” Florida Rep. Lois Frankel, chair of the member-led Elect Democratic Women PAC, said in a statement Wednesday. Those incoming new members span the ideological range of the party, including progressives from New York and California who scored big primary wins this summer, to more moderate Democrats who flipped seats in Virginia and Pennsylvania. House Democrats had set a public goal this cycle to push their female membership past 100. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is retiring at the end of the year, said electing Democratic women had been her “passion” since she joined the House in 1987. “We made a decision to make more room for women at the tables of power – and generations of candidates, organizers and supporters have carried that work forward,” she said. Blue breakthrough: Democrats flipped the House and Senate this week, giving the party one of its biggest nights in decades. On the Senate side, they wrested seats from Republicans in Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio, while finally flipping Maine. Meanwhile, on the House side, Democrats were on track to not just win every race rated a Toss-up by Inside Elections but also pick up seats in deep-red territory that weren’t considered competitive until late in the cycle. Mary Ellen and Daniela summed up their initial election night takeaways , including how Democratic moderates and progressives both cheered the results and why many of Trump’s picks flopped at the ballot box. Not going anywhere: The top Senate Democrat, Charles E. Schumer of New York, is confident he will be elected majority leader by his caucus, especially after the party’s resounding midterm wins. Several of his incoming members have promised to support others, our colleague Savannah Behrmann reports, but the reality is there’s no real plausible alternative. Schumer’s own seat is up in 2028. Redistricting rout: Republicans’ redistricting gambit hasn’t paid off as they’d hoped, the latest election results show, with the GOP appearing poised to flip only a handful of redrawn seats. Democratic incumbents who sought reelection from their reconfigured seats appeared pois
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