U.S. Democrats Have Their Sights Set on 100 Women in the House

In four weeks, U.S. midterm elections will help determine the balance of power in Congress for the final two years of Donald Trump's presidency.

All 435 seats in the House — the lower chamber of Congress — are up for election on Nov. 3. The representatives elected will serve two-year terms.

Democrats are currently favored to wrest control of the House from Republicans, but according to The New York Times, some Democrats are eyeing another goal as well: They’re hoping to elect at least 100 Democratic women to the House. That would be a record for the party in a legislative body still overwhelmingly dominated by men.

“I’m incredibly confident that we will pass that 100 mark,” Representative Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico, chairwoman of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, told The Times in an interview. “The real issue is how far above it do we go.”

Currently, there are 95 Democratic women serving as voting members of the House, in addition to two non-voting delegates who represent Washington, D.C. and the Virgin Islands. 

Women hoping to secure a spot in the House have already cleared one important hurdle. Earlier this year, candidates competed in primary elections — contests that political parties use to choose who will represent them in November. 

A record 590 women ran for the House this year, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Among the candidates who won those primaries, 198 Democratic nominees are women, compared with 73 Republican nominees.

That partisan divide is striking. Women make up almost half, or 45.5%, of Democratic House nominees, but fewer than one in five Republican nominees. And Democratic women did particularly well in the primaries: almost half of those who ran won their party’s nomination, a considerably higher success rate than Democratic men, according to the researchers at Rutgers.

The prospect of Democrats crossing the 100-woman mark is therefore part of a broader pattern: women are much more heavily represented among the party’s nominees than they are among Republican nominees. (Pew research from 2024 also found that when it comes to voters, women are more likely to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while men are more likely to lean Republican.)