The Lonely Life of a Republican Woman

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/opinion/the-lonely-life-of-a-republican-woman.html

Version 0 of 1.

As has become typical in an election marked by its often unpleasant surprises, I awoke to a storm of outrage on Twitter on Wednesday morning. Newt Gingrich had told Fox’s Megyn Kelly that she was “fascinated with sex” and didn’t “care about public policy.”

Mr. Gingrich unleashed this boorish attack after Ms. Kelly tried to pin him down on whether the many accusations of sexual assault against Donald J. Trump, and his own words on the matter, should disqualify him from the presidency.

That Mr. Gingrich (with whom I once hosted a television show) thought the best way to deflect attention from Mr. Trump’s awful behavior with women was to attack another woman tells you so much about the depths to which Mr. Trump has dragged the Republican Party.

It’s also a sobering harbinger of how hard it’s going to be for the party to win back Republican women, let alone appeal to new female voters in the future.

As a conservative woman who wanted very much to support the Republican nominee, it’s been a deeply disappointing year and a half. After helping the Republican National Committee address some of the troubling deficiencies the party faced after 2012, as outlined in its so-called autopsy report, and witnessing some real progress in our outreach to women in the ensuing years, I did not expect an egomaniacal arsonist to come along and set all that ablaze.

Mr. Trump has sent the party back to the Dark Ages — or at least the 1950s — with his provincial notions of masculinity and misogynist notions of femininity, his cartoonish bombast, his vulgar jocularity and his open hostility to women who question him. In short, he’s reaffirmed the worst stereotypes about Republicans that Democrats have pushed for decades.

It would be nice to be able to argue that Mr. Trump is an aberration, but clearly he has found a great deal of support. Who will believe us when we say that he does not speak for us?

In 2012, an unknown, inconsequential congressman from Missouri’s Second District, Todd Akin, sent the Republican presidential race into a tailspin when he argued that rape victims should not be allowed to get abortions, saying, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

The stench of Mr. Akin hung around the party for months, if not years. Mr. Trump is neither unknown nor inconsequential. His will be the stink of a hydrogen sulfide explosion. Containment will be impossible.

What’s surprising is just how many Republicans — men and women — have been all too happy to smell like him. Political operatives feigned ignorance about whether grabbing a woman’s genitalia is sexual assault (it is), while female supporters claimed these weren’t important issues to women (they are). Voters will punish the party for this collective shrug.

Alienating women — who vote in higher numbers than men, and who have voted Democratic in every presidential election after 1988 — would seem a flawed business model for the “Art of the Deal” mogul.

Women are not unwinnable for Republicans. Ronald Reagan won a majority of them in both of his elections, and by 10 points in 1984. The largest spread in recent history was in 1972, when Richard Nixon, even with that mug, won women by a whopping 24 points.

Still, more than 20 years is a long time to go without women. I’d argue conservative policies were badly explained and liberals benefited from more emotional messaging. But it’s going to be much harder to make that case now.

When women flee the Republican Party in the coming years, no autopsy will be necessary. The explanation is all too clear.

And yet we have to try to repair the relationship between the Republican Party and women. Not just so that Republicans can be competitive in national elections, but because I believe our policies are genuinely better for women.

Democrats’ lofty language about empowering women sounds great (and way better than Mr. Trump’s), but President Obama’s economy has done just the opposite. By many metrics, women (and men) are worse off. The poverty rate is higher than it was in 2007. Real median household income is down. More Americans are dependent on the government for assistance. Homeownership is down. Student debt has skyrocketed, along with the national debt. We now know that Obamacare is becoming unaffordable.

None of this is empowering, not for working women, mothers, small-business owners or students. Whether you’re a veteran or a millennial, it’s hard to argue that big government has solved your problems efficiently, if at all.

But before we can make that case to women, Republicans will have to earn the right to be heard at all. That will require emptying the party of Mr. Trump’s enablers. Who knows how long that will take, but in the meantime, women would frankly have to have been lobotomized to believe anything the Republican Party tells them.

We will also need better communicators. There are plenty of good, rational, compassionate and talented conservatives who deserve a microphone and a platform. It’s time to pass the baton to a new generation of leaders who don’t speak — or think — like Archie Bunker.

I was first drawn to the Republican Party as an 18-year-old at a liberal university. The party’s appeal wasn’t about barring Muslims, arming our enemies with nuclear weapons or joking about sexual assault. I didn’t become a conservative because someone told me to hate liberals, or to blame people who didn’t look like me for my problems.

I became a conservative because of words like “self-reliance” and “individualism,” because it actually seemed the more optimistic philosophy. Conservatism measured compassion by how much you gave, not by how much you told other people to give. Conservatism believed that individuals, not bureaucracies, produced the best solutions. And conservatism saw American democracy as a beacon of hope to share with the world’s oppressed, not something to apologize for.

Now that I’m a mother, those ideals matter more to me than ever. In the era of Donald Trump, it’s hard to argue to the women of America that the Republican Party deserves their vote this year. But we must return to our aspirational roots if we’re going to have a party left at all.