Female Candidates Break Barriers, Except When It Comes to Money

The headline for this limited article felt like clickbait, once I read the article. I wanted more details. Eg, your last comment implied female donors are giving more. Some type of financial analysis of the giving trend for female candidates over the past several elections would be helpful.

This article is all over the place. Incumbents often have an easier time raising money than newcomers. Once an incumbent, a politician can advance the interests of the business community in their district, who will then support her/him in the next race. Anyone who has run before and has name recognition has an easier time raising money. Anyone who already has networked and has ties to the business community will have an easier time raising money. I have no trouble believing that there is sexism in donations, but this article is comparing apples to oranges to mangoes. Breaking it down by incumbency and number of years in the political arena (even if the candidate lost) is needed to understand what this all means.

You’re peddling an argument with distorted facts. Tlaib doesn’t receive much money because she is an extremist and won a heavily contested primary in a safe seat that ordinarily elects a Black Democrat from Detroit. People who look at her statements, positions, and record don’t want to give to such an unlikable candidate. And she doesn’t need the money running as a Democrat in a safe district. Sherrill and McGrath are far more appealing candidates, veterans who’ve staked out moderate to center left positions in districts currently held by Republicans. Donors know money spent there will be well used to flip the House. And Andrew Janz is running against Devin Nunes, who is despised by Democrats for using his House Committee to protect Trump. It’s also a heavily Hispanic immigrant district, where there is at least an outside chance. Though it will likely remain Republican. If a woman ran against Nunes, the money would also be rolling in to them.

Much ado about nothing.....let's not make too much of the "women wave "until we see if they actually win.

Women are the majority and could change this if they cared to. But the majority of White women voted for Trump. I don't believe most women care enough to advance a pro-woman agenda, or about their rights, for improvements in gender inequities to occur. That may change someday, but I'll believe it when I see it.

In elections, the meaningful distinction should be the content of the candidate’s message & abilities to represent the best interest of the voters. The preoccupations with the candidates’ sexes, races, religions, etc carry a strong tinge of Political Correctness and serve as completely unnecessary distractions. Indeed, if a right candidate appeared honest, sensitive & knowledgeable about the important issues, unifying rather than divisive, eloquent, AND if that candidate was a common frog living in the local pond, than I would vote for that frog to represent me regardless of its sex. Wouldn’t you?

I can't speak for everyone, but I am not swayed by commercials, and only consider policy, or platform of the individual. Pro-choice, pro-environment, antiwar, healthcare for all, and desire for sensible regulations needed to protect people. If you are the best candidate in these regards, you get my vote, and I always vote. It doesn't take much money to tell me that. Usually you just need to not be in the GOP.

I don’t doubt that women draw less donations then men but I don’t believe the problem is gender. Republicans tend to draw more money than Democrats. And Republican seldom run female candidates

Why does the media always make a big fuss over every tiny issue where women are worse off, while conveniently ignoring issues where men are worse off. Also using nominal numbers to describe this "gap" would be considered as useless or disingenuous by most economists. You should have used a percent, which can be calculated from information in this article, but is never laid out. Furthermore, the article fails to address how party differences or message differences can account for PA contribution differences etc. Honestly, this isn't even freshman level analysis. Understanding logic and statistic will make you a much more informative, albeit less lucrative, journalist.

The factors that go into campaign contributes are many. It's not just gender bias.

This article sounds like it’s advocating for donors to give more equal amounts to women as they do men. It’s kind of...shameful really. Many of these women are new and will face issues from incumbent men due to them being new, not female. Truthfully, I don’t think anyone truly cares if the runner is male or female, just that they seem to be able to get the job done. If the new person is female, has less connections, less experience, etc. then it makes more sense to give more money to the male incumbent. As we also saw in the article, once a female candidate won, or had a chance in winning, they were given similar amounts as men. This piece is just riding feminist sentiments on a non-story. TLDR Women are mostly new to politics and so get less donations than incumbent men. This is not really newsworthy as it makes sense. Do you invest more in a company with a history of good returns, or more in a new one run by 20-somethings who have no actual experience in business?

Women have always had to work twice as hard to get a head in life and in politics, such a shame when the smartest, hardest working, and most caring people I know are women. Give them a chance and many of our country and the worlds issues may start to mend. Give to them and make sure to vote.

And down the rabbit hole we go.... Is there anything that the left won't divide and measure by gender? Even winning Democratic female candidates can claim to be victims of the male patriarchy that is holding them back. Give me a break!

I didn't see that they adjusted for incumbency. More men are incumbents and more women challengers, so women would raise less simply because challengers on average raise less. There's also the phenomenon of women running for the novelty of it. An incumbent in a safe seat can still draw a female opponent even though there's little chance of winning, and therefore limited fundraising potential. A woman nominee challenging a strong incumbent can find fundraising extremely difficult, and her numbers will be added in to the total when computing the average for all women candidates. There are dynamics other than sex that might explain why women raise less than men. But there's no denying that women are running competitively and winning competitively more than ever before.

Somehow this does not come as a surprise. Reminds me of that famous quote about Ginger Rogers: "Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels." Sure does make it harder to get elected.

Women will raise more money as candidates when they focus on economic justice, not identity. The message that "We need more women in Washington" alienates men and women alike, as voters, and as contributors. The U.S. has all kinds of obstacles to being a true meritocracy, but Americans don't like to be told to support someone based on anything other than merit. As a result, while we do, indeed, need more diversity in government, that will need to be gained through platforms based on ideas and demands for fairness, not an insistence on diversity for diversity's sake. Adopt platforms that address social inequalities other than one's own, and the money and votes will follow.

So what else is new? We're not paid equally either. yet, we do succeed. We well know how to work around this kind of absurdity. Could it also be that those who are donating to support these women - many candidates who are breaking all sorts of ethnic barriers as well as gender barriers - both which should have fallen long ago - simply don't have as much to give? To those who are hedging their bets in the event of a power shift - please give equally.

90 percent of the pieces in the NYT seem to fall into these four categories 1. Women are being discriminated against 2. LGBT 3. Illegal Immigrants are good people and opposition to them can only be attributed to racism 4. Trump is bad Seriously — scroll through the Times at any time of day and I guarantee you will be able to place 9/10 articles into one of those subject boxes It’s almost as if they hired McKinsey to put together a four quadrant news plan to cater to their readership and maximise clicks

Think about your main storyline. This guy gave max money to a candidate with no opposition. Why would one do that? That's much more interesting to me than the rest of this identity-politics non-story.

You may be confusing correlation with causation, a common intellectual failing for those who live in a bubble.

This article really could have used more disciplined editing. I came away with... I don't know what. It's clear that women are receiving less campaign contributions overall than men, but what the main factors underlying are, I'm not sure. The article begins with a vignette comparing a single donation to Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic candidate in a multi-way race, to a contribution from the same donor to prominent Democratic representative Keith Ellison. Who wouldn't assume Ellison would receive a larger donation from donors seek to curry favor. After reading the entire article, it's unclear to me how the numbers stack up when one attempts to control for the many potentially pertinent factors other than gender. My guess is that there is a significant gender bias, but unfortunately this article hasn't provided material support for that assumption. Please add some meat to articles of this sort.

Quote from the campaign trail " we need more women in government" this from a normally R. retired male police officer I canvassed a few days ago. Our D candidate Jessica Morse out raised the R incumbent 1.3m to 300k last quarter in this formerly safe, recently lean,now tossup? R district.

Good to hear that women are more politically active. What we don't need is a bunch of Democratic women fighting among themselves in the same districts, cities, or states. It divides the Democratic Party and Trump will capitalize on that. We need women to go against their Republican counterparts. Republicans are the threat and not other Democratic women. Please run against Republicans!

I have been a long term supporter of Democratic candidates since I bripoke with the Republican Party in wake of the Iraq invasion. I also gave over the years to Emily’s list, and was contacted frequently by female candidates using that mailing list. But this year I was appalled as my high school acquaintance, Senator Al Franken, was frog marched out of the Senate in the #MeToo hysteria. The chief motivators of his ignominious and unjustified expulsion were 22 female Democratic Senators. I have cut support for Emily’s list, cut the DSCC, cut Heitkamp and McCaskill. I choose my own candidates, including centrist female Congressional candidates such as Spanberger. I hope the Democratic females win, but the basis for my hopes is their party affiliation, not their gender- which has proved as capable of political machination as the make.

We desperately need to de-fang this presidency and the party that is tearing our institutions to pieces and packing our courts. Rah Rah the women at the expense of all else all you like, but at the end of the day if they can't win the elections they're in, the nation will be in peril. So they had better win, because celebrating that they're candidates is not how this country or this government works. It's how high school for millennials works but we are within our rights to expect that they have grown up by now.

Great news! Socially Conscious Women are stepping up to take one-half the power and they know the key to getting elected is to go out and meet voters - not spend gobs of money. Small donations and volunteer helpers are all they need and Socially Conscious Americans are sending small donations to candidates across the land who represent their values. The media makes unbelievable money from political advertising and they will do everything in their power to keep those dollars rolling in. Money can only buy votes. Mine is not for sale.