In June, Leah Vukmir, Wisconsin’s Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, aired the first TV ad of her campaign. It features men threatening to take her life. “I know where you live, and I’m going to come for you,” one voice says, over an answering-machine recording. “You’re going to die,” another says, “and I’m going to be the one who does it.” The camera pans from a landline, across a sideboard decorated with family photos, to Vukmir, sitting at the end of a long dining-room table. She’s dressed in “Handmaid’s Tale” red, with a gold cross worn like a medal around her neck. A holstered handgun sits on the table, inches from her clasped hands. “Ever have someone threaten your life for what you believe in?” she says. “I have.”
The ad is referring to Vukmir’s support, as a state senator, of Act 10, which eviscerated collective-bargaining rights for Wisconsin’s public-sector unions in 2011. While the voice mails in the ad are dramatized, Vukmir did receive death threats from some angry citizens—though the vast majority of Wisconsinites opposed to the legislation, myself included, expressed our discontent more prosaically, by trudging around the capitol with bullhorns during the bitterest months of winter. The spot is meant to assure voters that Vukmir has the unswerving resolve to take unpopular conservative policies to Washington, and so far, it’s done its job: Vukmir won the primary in August, and now faces the incumbent Democrat, Tammy Baldwin. But the ad has a strange resonance in a year when the #MeToo movement has called so much attention to violent acts against women. And then there’s the handgun—presumably a nod, at least in part, to Second Amendment rights, though it is never acknowledged as such. It is likely meant to suggest that Vukmir is fine taking care of herself, that she is not, to borrow a phrase she likes, playing “the female card.”
2018 has been proclaimed by many as the Year of the Woman, as though American political history followed its own version of the Chinese zodiac. (1992 was also famously dubbed the Year of the Woman. So were 1966, 1968, and 1984.) Press coverage of the midterms has focussed mostly on Democratic women, who are running in unprecedented numbers and whose rage—so the prevailing narrative goes—could lead to a historic reckoning in November. Republican women are often rendered as the fine print appended to the triumphant headlines, dwindling holdouts on the wrong side of history. As LA Kauffman wrote in the Guardian last month, “Of course there are women, mainly white women, who retain their allegiance to the Republican party; their ranks, though, are very unlikely to expand.”
But the eagerness to dismiss female conservatives may owe less to their irrelevance than to the fact that they complicate the premises of these elated narratives. Vukmir is one of fifty-nine female Republican nominees for Congress, and one of six in a Senate race against another woman. She is a mother who advocates for gun rights and school choice, a daughter of immigrants who supports Trump’s border wall, a former nurse who has made repealing the Affordable Care Act a central plank of her campaign. She entered politics in the mid-nineties, after a prolonged fight with the Milwaukee public-school board about her daughter’s kindergarten curriculum. (The class was encouraged to use “creative spelling.”) This baptism of civic engagement eventually led her to run for State Assembly, and then the State Senate, where her unwillingness to brook compromises garnered her the nickname Nurse Ratched, a misogynistic epithet that Vukmir sees as evidence of her strength. “I’ve already been called vile,” she said, during a primary debate, when a voter asked whether she had the “fortitude” to stand up to the D.C. establishment and the media. “I’m not afraid,” she added. “They can call me any name in the book they want.”
Wisconsin Republicans believed that Vukmir could neutralize the issue of gender in the race against Baldwin. “If this is the year of the woman,” Margaret Farrow, the state’s former lieutenant governor, told the Wisconsin State Journal, “well, we match them, and it’s woman to woman.” But this strategy has been confusing in practice, partly because Vukmir keeps insisting that gender is not a factor in her campaign. “I don’t play that female card that the left usually plays,” she told a gathering of women last March, in Wauwatosa, an affluent suburb of Milwaukee that has been her longtime home. (Wauwatosa, once purple, swung decisively blue for Hillary Clinton in 2016.) But then she launched into a several-minute riff on the theme of double standards, which she said she had learned about from the writings of Margaret Thatcher. When a man gets excited on the Senate floor, she explained, he is regarded as passionate; a woman is dismissed as shrill. “Anyway, I am not playing the victim,” she concluded. “You all know that I am not a victim. Tammy Baldwin is going to play the victim, I’m not going to let her play victim, and only a woman against her is going to prevent that from happening.”
Vukmir has persisted in this odd, gender-based doublespeak throughout the campaign. In September, when Baldwin held a Women for Tammy event, Vukmir’s campaign responded by pointing out that Baldwin’s female full-time staffers earned only seventy-four per cent of the salaries of their male counterparts. One could easily demonstrate that Vukmir herself is no friend of equal pay—in the State Senate, she voted multiple times against provisions that would have guaranteed it—but doing so would be beside the point. Vukmir and her allies regard gender as an empty signifier that bears no relation to policy. It’s a rhetorical weapon that functions much like the gun in her campaign ad: it may be a threat, or it might simply be part of the scenery. Like all instruments of self-defense, it works just as well as a bluff.
When Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, Baldwin opposed him immediately, citing the threat he posed to abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act. Baldwin was among the women drawn into politics after watching Anita Hill’s treatment by the Senate Judiciary Committee, in 1991. In 2012, she became Wisconsin’s first woman U.S. senator and the first openly gay politician to be elected to that body, after defeating the former governor, Tommy Thompson. She has described herself as a progressive in the lineage of Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and she maintains one of the most liberal voting records in Congress, which has made her popular in cities like Madison. But over the past several years, as the once-progressive state has undergone a rightward shift—Trump was the first Republican Presidential candidate to carry Wisconsin since 1984—Republicans have insisted that she is a member of the “radical left,” out of touch with the state. She is now the most prominent progressive remaining in Wisconsin; unseating her would signal that the state is truly red.
After Christine Blasey Ford and other women came forward with sexual-assault and misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh, the debate moved away, somewhat, from matters of policy, centering instead on female credibility and female outrage—qualities that are, in theory, nonpartisan. Baldwin expressed her continuing opposition by standing with the women who were angered by the process. “To the women reading this,” she tweeted on the day Dr. Ford testified, “you are strong. I believe you, and I’m with you.” Vukmir herself is most credible when she is angry; she channelled her outrage at Democrats, who, she believed, were unjustly obstructing Kavanaugh’s confirmation. She seemed to regard her gender as a license to lodge far more strident attacks than those ventured by her male counterparts. In the days before the hearings, when most Wisconsin Republicans, including Governor Scott Walker and Senator Ron Johnson, offered tepid criticism about the delay, insisting they wanted to hear from Dr. Ford, Vukmir went on a tour of talk radio, calling the allegations a “witch hunt” and a “circus.” In a press release, she condemned the “uncorroborated attacks on Judge Kavanaugh being irresponsibly published by the Fake News media.”
While anger like Vukmir’s is less publicized these days than that of the liberal variety, it surfaces frequently on the airwaves of Wisconsin talk radio, where the conservative personality Vicki McKenna (who often hosts Vukmir on her program) has called Dr. Ford’s supporters “the vagina-shouting sister mob.” It’s palpable, too, among conservative college students who feel oppressed by progressive campus politics. “Many people believe that the left has a monopoly on women in politics. However, that’s not true,” Alesha Guenther, a twenty-year-old student at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the communications director for the College Republicans, told me. She had come to a campus lecture hall filled with students on a Tuesday evening to hear Vukmir speak. Despite the university’s liberal reputation, the room was packed to capacity and buzzing with a concentrated energy that made it feel less like a college club than a campaign headquarters. The executive board of the College Republicans at U.W. is predominantly female. Young women rushed up and down the aisles with clipboards; pizza boxes sat largely untouched, for now, at the front of the room.
Guenther said that many conservative women on campus were still upset that they had been excluded from events like the Women’s March because they were pro-life. “A lot of people felt like such organizations and such marches were taking advantage of the name ‘Women’s March’ without including all women,” she said. What impressed her most about Vukmir was her voting record in the state legislature, particularly on pro-life measures and tax reform. “For me, personally, I tend to vote for people based on what they believe in and their record, regardless of their gender,” she said.
Vukmir’s talk that night was a variation of her stump speech. She recalled her “mom with a cause” days in the early nineties, and she encouraged regional solidarity by knocking Tammy Baldwin for “hobnobbing in the Hamptons.” The most telling moment, though, came during the Q. & A., when a young woman in the audience raised her hand and said, “I’m a Republican, but I’m also pro-choice. Is there room in the Party for someone like me?”
“It’s hard for me to be anything but pro-life,” Vukmir replied. “I’m a nurse. And I’ve spent my entire career saving lives.” She spoke expansively of her work in pediatrics, of holding a child as small as twenty-four weeks in her hands, and concluded with the assurance that of course the young woman could join the Party if she embraced its other principles. But, she added, “I hope your heart will change. We’ll work on you. We’ll get you there.”
Vukmir’s response initially struck me as hostile and vaguely coercive—a master class in Midwestern passive-aggression. But perhaps it shouldn’t have. In some ways, it was a mirror of the resistance on the part of organizers of the Women’s March to embrace pro-life activists. And it seems indisputable that these days the left has more illusions about the potential unity of women than the right does. Like many Republicans, Vukmir is willing to pay lip service to women to the extent that doing so advances the objectives of her party, but she harbors no dreams about a future in which all women walk in lockstep toward a single-minded future. (Guenther later speculated that the student who asked the abortion question was a member of the College Democrats, and was trying to get a response from Vukmir that they could use against her. A spokesperson for the College Democrats said that whoever asked the question did not do so on their behalf.)
Vukmir is about ten points behind Baldwin in recent polling, which is not necessarily consoling to Wisconsin Democrats: in the 2016 Senate race, the Republican Ron Johnson lagged behind his opponent for months by double digits, then won after a flood of last-minute spending by out-of-state interests. Many of those same PACs have now allied behind Vukmir, along with mega-donors like Richard Uihlein and Diane Hendricks, the wealthiest self-made woman in the United States. It’s possible that Wisconsin is not yet conservative enough to unseat an incumbent Democrat during the first midterm election of the Trump Presidency. But Vukmir’s presence, and her solid base of support, should serve as a reminder of the uncomfortable truths that were highlighted two years ago—among them, that women negotiate their political conviction in complex ways that don’t always flatter the dominant political narratives, and that politicians can creatively manipulate those sympathies to their advantage. Vukmir, like many of the other Republican women running for Congress, understands that women’s anger can be a weapon for other ends.
