WASHINGTON – Although the election didn't turn out the way Trump supporters hoped, Republicans overall performed strongly, led by successful conservative women candidates, and now the GOP is positioned to take back the House from Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Of the 14 seats Republicans flipped in the House, ten were won by women – mostly in urban and suburban parts of the country.
Newly retired Rep. Susan Brooks (R-IN) set out to encourage more conservative women to run and help them win and her success will be her lasting legacy.
"More and more conservative women wanted to raise their hand and say 'groups like AOC and the Squad do not represent my views. I need to step up and put my conservative views and how I have contributed to my community forward. I need to make sure that the electorate has another choice,'" Brooks told CBN News.
After the 2018 midterms led to huge Republican losses, party leaders vowed to stop the gravitation of women to the Democratic Party.
Leaders like Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) directed more money to conservative women candidates and made electing them a priority.
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A record 228 women ran as Republicans with 94 winning their primaries.
"The women, I think, just had messages that resonated and they knew their districts," Brooks says.
Republican strategists say this will help change the reputation of the GOP being the party of old white men.
"The Republican Party is diverse, and I think that you're starting to see that reflected in the candidate recruitment," Garrett Bess with Heritage Action for America tells CBN News.
So what can we expect in the 2022 midterms?
"I would much rather it be Leader McCarthy than Speaker Pelosi," says Bess.
That's because after the 2010 census, Republican majorities in statehouses across the country dominated the drawing of congressional districts and there are still districts Trump won in 2016 that haven't yet flipped.
There's also the great migration from liberal strongholds. As more and more Americans leave places like New York and California those states will continue to lose congressional seats that could go to Republican strongholds.
For now, Democrats have seen their House majority diminished, and once again, Bess says, the political elites got it wrong.
"I think the conventional wisdom in Washington DC and New York City was that Trump was so unpopular he was going to lose by a wide margin, and he was going to take Republicans in the process and that simply didn't occur."
Meanwhile, Congresswoman Brooks has retired, but fittingly she's been replaced by a Republican woman who beat another woman running as a Democrat.
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