(NewsNation) — As Vice President Kamala Harris makes a play to become the country’s first woman president, the number of women running for public office is declining nationwide.
Voters elected women to Congress in record-breaking numbers over the past three election cycles, but the number of women candidates is now down in nearly every category, according to a Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics analysis.
Fifty women candidates filed to run for Senate nationwide in 2024, down from 70 in 2022. Nine of the candidates have won their primaries in the 18 states that have held them so far and over 30 women have filed in states that haven’t had their primaries yet, the research found.
In the House, 466 women have filed to run and 171 of them have won their primaries, according to the analysis. This is down from the 583 women who filed to run in 2020 and the 298 women who won their party’s nomination.
The number of Republican women candidates in the House saw the largest drop between 2020 to 2024, with a 36% decrease. In the Senate, that number was nearly 45%. Democratic women candidates are down about 7% in the House and nearly 10% in the Senate.
If Harris wins the election in November, she would not only be the first woman president of the U.S., but also the first Black woman and first Asian-American person elected to that office.
“Should she go on to win in November, she will shatter what Hillary Clinton coined the highest, hardest glass ceiling in American politics. Our research and programming has long been oriented towards changing the perception of power, and this transformative moment would forever alter how Americans view leadership in politics,” Debbie Walsh, the center’s director, told the New Jersey Monitor.
