2010 Sets Record for Republican Women Filing to Run for Office

According to the Washington Post, 270 women have filed for candidacies in House and Senate races for the 2010 election— and over 100 of them are Republicans:

Nearly two years after Sarah Palin became the Republican Party’s first female vice presidential nominee, record numbers of Republican women are running for House seats, driving the overall count of women running for both the House and the Senate to a new high.

The surge in female candidates has taken place largely under the radar. The previous high came in 1992, the Year of the Woman, when the percentage of women in Congress reached double digits for the first time. That year, 222 women filed to run for the House and 29 for the Senate.

So far this year, 239 women are candidates for the House and 31 for the Senate, according to data from the Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. Among them, a record 107 Republican women have filed to run for a House seat, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee — surpassing a previous GOP high of 91 in 1994 and a sharp increase from the 65 who ran in 2008.

Hotair.com calls 2010 "The Year of the Republican Woman" for fueling this surge, and points out that part of what is fueling this surge is the strong conservative focus for the GOP in the 2010 elections:

Republican women have two significant role models for this new surge in activism. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann have toured the country, headlining Tea Party events and becoming spokespeople for the grassroots opposition to the radical Democratic agenda. In my experience at Tea Party events, we seem to get a bigger turnout of women — and women tend to dominate the organizer ranks as well.

In my experience as well, the Tea Party ranks are filled with Republican women, and to be perfectly honest, there have been some pretty fine looking conservative women at these events. It is about time that the GOP has encouraged more women to take on leadership roles in the party- they've always been there and have been an important part of the GOP, but for some reason haven't stepped forward to take on leadership roles in the party. It just goes to show how important Sarah Palin is to the GOP- she has proved that you don't have to be some sort of pseudo-intellectual unattractive boring politician (Democratic women) to be a leader in politics. I just hope more women follow her example and step forward to challenge Democrats and Republicans for the future of the party.