Actually, partly, because the Dems are running so

Quote:

---

As Wasserman points out, the media and political pundits are building up a lot of narratives around 2018 — whether it will be the year of the insurgent progressive candidate toppling more establishment candidates backed by Democratic party insiders.

There haven’t been enough wins one way or another to know that for sure. But Wasserman argues that one clear theme emerging is that after Trump’s 2016 election, women are fired up and ready to run for office in greater numbers than ever before.

Trump’s approval rating is underwater with college-educated women; an April poll conducted by NBC and the Wall Street Journal found just 27 percent of college-educated women approved of the president, while 72 percent disapproved.

But it’s not just about Trump — women candidates around the country say they are fed up with men in Congress and in statehouses around the country passing laws on women’s issues and other key policy areas, and decided they needed to get politically involved themselves.

“That was a big thing for me last spring, watching men talking about defunding Planned Parenthood,” said Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, the Democratic nominee for Texas’s Seventh Congressional District, during a recent interview with Vox. “If women were having that conversation, I think the outcomes would be different.”

But as Wasserman wrote, “there may be something much simpler and more powerful than ideology at work here: Democratic primary voters’ intense desire to nominate women in 2018. If House Democrats are ultimately successful in November, 2018 might be remembered as the ‘Year of the Angry College-Educated Female’ — a reversal of the 1994 GOP revolution’s ‘Year of the Angry White Male.’”

What’s more, voters want to elect these women. Some recent wins included Amy McGrath in Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District, Kara Eastman in Nebraska’s Second District, and Lauren Underwood in Illinois’s 14th.

Republicans are also stepping up their recruitment drive of female candidates. There are currently 103 Republican women running for House seats in 2018, compared to 48 in the previous election cycle. Republican strategists say that’s the result of a strong, disciplined recruitment effort.

But as the Cook graphic suggests, Democrats are blowing Republicans out of the water both in the number of recruits this year and the number of women candidates who are actually winning so far in 2018.

---