President Trump was delighted to learn that Republican efforts to increase the number of women in Congress paid off on Tuesday. He tweeted: “This was also the year of the Republican woman. More Republican women were elected to Congress than ever before. That’s a great achievement.”
At present, Republican women have won at least 13 seats in Congress, a record-breaking number in a freshman class. At least six of them took seats held by Democrats.
The Republican effort was headed up by Representative Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who founded E-PAC (Elevate Political Action Committee). Said Stefanik, “The story of the night is the success of Republican women at the ballot box. For all these naysayers, we have proven that strong, Republican women are the best candidates to put on the ballot.”
Those “recruits” who were successful on Tuesday included Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, a former broadcast journalist for Telemundo; and Michelle Fischbach of Minnesota, a former lieutenant governor and the first female president of the Minnesota Senate.
One group celebrating the success of Republican women is the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List. Its spokeswoman, Prudence Robertson, rejoiced: “Several of our endorsed candidates have won. There are 13 new pro-life women who have been elected to the House.… There are still eight races still to be called, and a lot of them are looking really good.”
She added:
It’s a stunning blow to Nancy Pelosi and her pro-abortion agenda. The message to Democrats is that we are not going to continue to let their extremism go unnoticed in the House, and we want them to work with us to pass common-sense limits on abortion that we in the pro-life movement have been working so hard to promote for so long.
Joe Pojman, founder of the Texas Alliance for Life, has an agenda that he hopes will get traction in the new Congress:
Number one is a complete ban on abortion, The Human Life Protection Act. It would protect unborn babies beginning at fertilization, and it would go into effect when and to the extent that the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.
After the counting is completed, as many as 33 Republican women could win seats in the House, many of whom have what John Gizzi, the White House correspondent for Newsmax, calls the “take-no-prisoners” style of President Trump:
The untold story of the new class of women in the House is that, almost to a person, they are usually conservative on cultural and economic issues and, in many cases, share the “take-no-prisoners” style of President Donald Trump.
Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, who unseated Rep. Scott Tipton in the Republican primary, is best-known as the owner of a pub in which waitresses openly wear firearms….
In New York, state Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis and former Rep. Claudia Tenney took out Democrat incumbents. Both were strong “law and order” advocates who fought Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s liberal abortion legislation while serving together in the New York State Assembly.
Other notable female winners on the right include Maria Salazar, a Cuban-American TV newscaster who unseated Rep. Donna Shalala, D-Fla.; Mary Miller, a businesswoman and farmer, who won the seat of Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill. (that was once held by President Abraham Lincoln), by running as an anti-establishment Trump-style Republican; state Sen. Victoria Spartz, a Ukraine-born businesswoman and unabashed free marketeer, who won the Indiana-5 district of retiring moderate Rep. Susan Brooks; and Diana Harshbarger, a millionaire pharmacist and “Trump conservative,” who defeated nine primary opponents to win Tennessee’s heavily Republican 1st District.
In the Senate, Wyoming voters elected pro-life Republican Cynthia Lummis, who joined incumbent Senators Joni Ernst of Iowa, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi. If Georgia’s Senator Kelly Loeffler wins her run-off election in January, she would make seven pro-life women in the upper chamber.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, said:
We expect when all votes are counted and the races are called, we will have a record number of pro-life women serving in the next Congress. These gains are a repudiation of abortion extremism and further evidence that life is a winning issue in politics.
The pro-life issue will likely be part of the road map to taking back the House in 2022, as noted by Stefanik: “Republican women are majority makers, and we have a model that’s worked.”
