Will the Women's March Become a Sustained Movement?

I'm seeing a lot of folks asking "will the Women's March" be more like the Tea Party and have a sustained impact or be like Occupy Wall Street and quickly fade. There is of course no way to tell. Certainly Trump will exist as a catalyst for a sustained movement, but Trump being Trump wasn't enough to keep the Obama coalition together for Clinton. The numbers yesterday, in DC and in other cities around the world, were incredibly impressive. Amazing. To dispute that would be folly. But one of my first thoughts was not of Tea Party v Occupy Wall Street. It was of the February 2003 anti-war protests that took place in over 600 cities and involved roughly 30 million participants. The invasion of Iraq came 5 weeks later and President Bush was re-elected in 2004 and Tony Blair in 2005. The protest never became an influential political movement. When I looked at the posters at the protest I certainly saw indications of the challenges it may well face when trying to influence politics. Much like the Democratic party, the protest was clearly an alliance of different groups with different agendas - unified by opposition to Trump. Yes there were folks there for equal pay and for reproductive rights. But there were also folks there for Black Lives Matter, immigration reform, refugee relief, and in support of Muslims. Can such a coalition remain unified? Trump won because many of the white working class voters who had been part of the Democratic coalition decided that they no longer fit in. The challenge for Democrats has always been the agenda diversity of their coalition. It's true that opposition to Obama helped to unify factions within the GOP, but the GOP has a much less diverse coalition. And the political geography of 2018 suggests that even a sustained movement may not be enough to change the balance of power. So would the movement survive an electoral defeat? So much remains to be seen.

As Women March on Washington, It's Also a Great Time for them to Run for Office

Of the many explanations offered to explain Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump, few are as ubiquitous as the belief that she lost due to the electorate's unwillingness to elect women. Yesterday, millions of people participated in the Women's March so I think today is good day to explore the question of gender's impact on electoral success in American Politics. The answer to the question is likely to surprise a lot of people, but it should inspire them as well.  A landmark study by the National Women's Political Caucus issued in 1994 determined, based decades of evidence from state assembly races and a decade of Congressional races, that gender had no impact on electoral success in US elections.

In state Assembly races, incumbent women won 95% of the time, while incumbent men won 94% of the races. Women challengers won 10% of the time and men challengers won 9% of the time. Women and men running for open seats each won little more than half the time.

In state Senate races, incumbent women won 91% and incumbent men 92% of the time. Women running for open seats won 58% of the races; men won 55%. Female challengers won 16% of the time; men 11%.

The findings were essentially the same for U.S. House races as well as U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races. A 2003 study by Fox and Oxley, published in the prestigious Journal of Politics, confirmed that women likelihood of victory does not vary based on the office sought.