Are the Wisconsin recalls about women?

12:21 PM ET, 08/08/2011 By Rachel Weiner

Liberal and conservative pro and anti-abortion rights groups are descending on the Wisconsin recall elections to champion their candidates, arguing that women’s issues have become a dominant theme of those campaigns. Six Republican state senators, two of them women, will be on the ballot Tuesday in the ongoing recall fight, while the remaining two targeted Democratic incumbents will face voters on Aug. 16th. Although the war on public employees has played the starring role in the recall conflict, women’s groups in both parties are lobbying for and against abortion rights and other issues they say are important to female voters.

On the left, the pro-abortion rights fundraising powerhouse EMILY’s List is involved in the recall fight to an unprecedented degree, and Planned Parenthood has also gotten in the ring. On the right, Wisconsin Right to Life, Wisconsin Family Action and Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition are active in ad campaigns supporting the Republican state senators. “It’s a war on women, and that’s a war we intend to win,” said EMILY’s List President Stephanie Schriock.

Conservative anti-abortion groups agree that women’s issues are central. As a Wisconsin Right to Life press release put it: “No matter what you hear about the nine State Senate recall elections that will take place on August 9 and August 16, it’s really about the rights of the unborn.” Six Republicans and two Democrats face recall elections in the next eight days; Democrats are hoping to recapture the state Senate they lost in last year’s GOP wave.

Five of the six Democratic candidates running in the recall elections are women. Only 24 percent of state legislators in the country are women, a slight decrease from before the 2010 elections. Wisconsin’s breakdown almost exactly mirrors the national average. But two of the incumbents facing recalls are women themselves, so even if all five female Democratic candidates won, it would not change the gender breakdown of the state Senate dramatically. And one of the two Republican challengers is a woman running against a male Democratic state senator. Some Republicans argue that Democrats are making the race about women’s issues because they can’t win on the economy. “They’re pushing pro-choice Democratic women. That’s their objective, that’s their right,” said Nathan Duerkop, campaign spokesman for Republican state Sen. Sheila Harsdorf. “But it’s interesting that they’re getting involved in a Wisconsin state Senate race that’s really about economic issues.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/are-the-wisconsin-recalls-about-women/2011/08/04/gIQA0sUc2I_blog.html

as "pro-abortion"?


These recalls are still about the unions and overreach of power. That includes all areas of over reach - even their trying to lower women's health care standards.

You can sense the desire for some divisive culture-war type issue with traction.

to recruit and train excellent women candidates.