The Tea Party movement has been widely touted as the biggest grassroots uprising of recent years, and a large number of Tea Party candidates have been female. Some of the notables include Meg Whitman (CA – gov.), Carly Fiorina (CA – sen.), Sharron Angle (NV – sen.) and Christine O’Donnell (DE – sen.), all of whom have lost decisively. So far, the only Tea Party senate challengers who have won or appear to be winning are men, such as Rand Paul of Tennessee and Marco Rubio of Florida.
The only male Tea Party senate candidate who has definitely lost is John Raese of West Virgina, who was running for the late Robert Byrd’s senate seat.
Mainstream Republican candidate Dino Rossi is giving feminist WA senator Patty Murray a run for her money, but the race remains uncertain, and Washington State Democrats are very good at finding ballots in unlikely places when races are close.
In addition to the general failure of female challengers to unseat incumbents, several female incumbents have lost their jobs — the 2010 elections will likely represent the first time women have lost seats in Congress since 1960.
The candidacy of so many women adds another element to the traditional Republican/Democrat divide, one in which it seems that many voters were given a referendum on feminism of one sort or the other (left or right feminism). From all indications, voters have rejected feminism, which strikes me as more significant than the typical swing between Republicans and Democrats.
When the dust settles we’ll have a better idea of what happened along those lines, but in the meanwhile we should take some solace in the fact that rumors of “The End of Men” have been greatly exaggerated.
