ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Whether voters and candidates sport high heels and rouge lips or wear boxers and briefs, gender didn’t play a huge role in the midterm congressional elections.
In fact, when the 114th Congress adjourns in January, men will still comprise four-fifths of both chambers, with women gaining four seats in the Senate. Of course, Sen. Mary Landrieu will still have to prove her dynastic mettle in a Louisiana runoff — and she can do it if she galvanizes her surefire base, which, Democratic strategists say, is the black vote.
“PBS NewsHour” published an interesting online gender-based synopsis Thursday, “How the battle of the sexes shifted power in DC,” which also broke out a telltale voter demographic on the “marriage gap”: “More important to Democratic hopes than women overall are unmarried women. They generally vote 2-to-1 for Democrats, while married women have trended more Republican. In this election, unmarried women were 21 percent of the electorate, mirroring their 2010 and 2006 midterm turnout and down from 23 percent in 2008 and 2012. And their margin for Democrats was down 14 points from the 2012 presidential election.”
No marriage gap in D.C.
In the District’s mayoral race, all who care know that Democrat Muriel Bowser is now mayor-elect.
What’s interesting here regarding the marriage gap is that none of the leading candidates is currently married: Carol Schwartz, the former Republican who ran as an independent, is a widow. David Catania, also an independent, is single, and said on the campaign trail that he hopes to marry his partner. And the unmarried Ms. Bowser can, well, technically, wear the honorific of “miss.”
D.C. voters might have cared about race, but they did not seem to care about marital status, as Ms. Bowser handily won nearly 54 percent of the vote Tuesday.
Democratic challenges
Former Mayor Sharon Pratt told me Thursday that one of the first things the women who won office Tuesday should do is “own your power.”
Regarding Mrs. Landrieu, in “each instance it was the African-American vote that saved her,” said Ms. Pratt, who held office with the Democratic National Committee before she became D.C. mayor.
Regarding Ms. Bowser, Ms. Pratt said there’s a possibility she will play a role on the D.C. mayor-elect’s transition team.
The two Democrats certainly have a lot in common other than being women, even though Ms. Bowser was barely old enough to vote when Ms. Pratt won the mayor’s race in 1990.
Bowser’s challenges
That it has been a generation since Ms. Pratt shattered the glass ceiling, becoming the first female mayor of a major U.S. city, is lost on neither Ms. Bowser nor Ms. Pratt.
But don’t anticipate Muriel Bowser becoming a Sharon Pratt-Lite. That’s not going to happen.
D.C. is no longer a “sleepy, Southern, government town,” Ms. Pratt told me in the interview, in which I co-queried her on WPFW-FM with co-host Eugene Dewitt Kinlow. “Muriel has to help define the city beyond a government town.”
Ms. Bowser also has to engage “a fuller, fairer” swath of D.C. residents and other stakeholders in policymaking and, accordingly, “re-engineer the District’s economy.”
Ms. Pratt also used some impressive political DNA to explain Ms. Bowser’s CV: “decisive personality,” “political pragmatist,” among others.
Both should bode well for Ms. Bowser, who, with a sense of urgency, has to push beyond the groundwork that was laid in the 1990s.
In a sense, Ms. Bowser’s should be a back-to-the-future outlook.
A native Washingtonian and former advisory neighborhood commissioner, she certainly has mayoral examples of what not to do, and as a lawmaker and chairman of the D.C. Council’s Committee on Economic Development, she should already know what needs to be done and who the key players are.
Ms. Pratt says all that’s left to be successful is for Ms. Bowser to engage “a fuller, fairer” swath of D.C. residents and other stakeholders in policymaking and, accordingly, “re-engineer the District’s economy.”
As I said, that shouldn’t be too difficult for Ms. Bowser — unless she wasn’t paying attention as a lawmaker.
• Deborah Simmons can be reached at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.
• Deborah Simmons can be reached at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.
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