Women Ascend in American Politics

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Women Ascend in American Politics

In Democratic primaries, record numbers of women are running and winning.

As America prepares for midterm elections in November, women are scoring unprecedented political victories. In Democratic Party primaries for the House of Representatives, a record 309 women are running. And a stunning number of them are winning.

This year, 65 Democratic Party primaries have included at least one man and one woman, and no incumbent. Women have defeated men in 45 of these races, nearly 70 percent. Men have defeated women in only 18 of them.

The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman tweeted, “In ’18, Dem House primaries are coming to be defined by women trouncing men.”

A similar trend is playing out in Senate races, where a record 42 women from the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are vying for 19 Senate seats.

On the voting level, women have been more active than men in politics for decades. According to the Center for American Women and Politics, more women than men have voted in every presidential election since 1964, and the voting gap between the sexes is growing. In 1980, eligible female voters outnumbered men by 0.4 percent. In 2000, the difference had increased to 2.7 percent. By 2016, it had widened to 4 percent.

Unlike this long-term voting trend, however, these elections represent a much more sudden and much more noticeable swell in women seeking political positions.

A major factor fueling the trend is the #MeToo movement, the recent flood of accusations and revelations of sexual misconduct by prominent men. (The Trumpet has written a lot about the effects of this movement, such as “The Antidote to ‘Toxic Masculinity,’” “Are You Sure That ‘Character Doesn’t Matter’?” and “Modesty: The Solution No One Will Talk About.”) The #MeToo phenomenon has brought down prominent politicians like Minnesota Senator Al Franken, Colorado Representative Paul Rosenthal, and Missouri Governor Eric Greitens. Not only has this opened up political vacancies, but it also may have soured some voters on male political candidates.

The same catalyst motivating women to step forward and accuse their harassers is inspiring greater political activity. Dana Nessel, a candidate for attorney general in Michigan, says #MeToo is the singular driving force for female political candidates this year. In a rather crass campaign ad, she said the lesson of #MeToo is that “We need more women in positions of power, not less,” and argued that her being a woman made her more qualified for office than a man because she would not sexually harass her co-workers.

Sol Flores, a Democratic congressional candidate in Illinois, made a political ad that treated her story of past sexual abuse as a political asset.

Such a strategy is not foolproof. Flores lost her bid for election. As Democratic political analyst Alan Clayton said, “The #MeToo movement will help women candidates, but it won’t overcome a lack of key endorsements, lack of money, or lack of a strong résumé.”

Nevertheless, the #MeToo movement and the overall social shift against traditional male leadership are clear driving factors in American politics, and many observers believe the trend is just warming up.

The idea that America’s problems will be solved by replacing men in power with women has no basis in logic. Women are no less prone to bad decisions, no less susceptible to corruption, than men. They possess no inherent wisdom that men lack. They have no less human nature than men have.

But this trend is not being driven by logic. (It is interesting that it is happening at the same time as an utterly contradictory, society-wide movement to assert that biological sex is meaningless and can be changed at will.)

If sexual misconduct in an elected official is truly the concern, we should be closely examining the character of potential candidates. We should be closely examining the morals of potential candidates. We should be supporting actions like those taken by Vice President Mike Pence, for example, to avoid even the appearance of sexual misconduct. But none of these logical solutions is being emphasized. In fact, Vice President Pence’s stance was lampooned for being “absurd” and “evil.”

If #MeToo is simply an honest attempt to expose powerful men who commit sexual harassment, then the dichotomy here is absolutely illogical. But the trend starts to make a lot more sense when you realize that the honest part of #MeToo is being weaponized by people with a much larger agenda. People are co-opting it and bolting it onto their own deliberate ongoing campaign to destroy male leadership in our society.

This 21st-century political trend matches a prophecy made more than 2,500 years ago. The Bible forecasts this about ancient Israel’s modern descendants, which include the United States: “As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths” (Isaiah 3:12).

The trend in women candidates for the 2018 midterm elections is only one part of a massive trend to feminize society and to reject biblical social structure. Where will this lead? The Bible has a forecast for that, too. Read “What Happened to Manhood?”, the preface to our free book Biblical Manhood.