Sex and the Socialist Girl

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

Maybe the two recent Democratic primaries everybody has been talking about are a sex story and not an ideology story.

 

Indulge me—it’s August.

 

In Michigan, far-left candidate Abdul El-Sayed saw off relatively moderate Haley Stevens to secure the Democratic nomination for the Senate election. El-Sayed has a record of ideological extremism and has lost the only election he ever contested; Stevens has successfully sought election to the House four times. El-Sayed is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America—the main characters in the 2026 Democratic primary season—and he disavows socialism per se, but he is closely aligned with a basket of DSA deplorables, Hamas apologists, and the like.

 

In Wisconsin, the DSA candidate, Thanksgiving-hating weirdo Francesca Hong, saw her commanding lead in the polls disintegrate as David Crowley, the relatively moderate chief executive of Milwaukee County, rose from the political grave to exile his socialist comrade to political Siberia.

 

There is a difference between reporting and storytelling, and the story many observers wanted to tell this summer—that this primary season is a referendum on the ideological future of the Democratic Party—is at least in part at odds with the reported facts. Sometimes the DSA wackadoodle pulls it out, sometimes the relatively sober municipal-government guy takes the win. That’s the thing about elections: Whatever you may hear on the internet, they really are not fixed—on Election Day, things can go either way.

 

There are many variables at play in our elections beyond issues and ideology. Some of you will be familiar with the bit of trivia that while Democrats and Republicans are about equally likely to win a presidential election, the taller candidate usually wins—the taller guy (and it was always a guy) won every single presidential election from 1900 to 1968. Women have been heads of government in the United Kingdom and France, in India and Pakistan, but no woman has ever managed to get herself elected president of these United States, and only two women have ever managed to secure a major-party nomination. (One might be tempted to put an asterisk next to Kamala Harris, who enjoyed a shortcut to the nomination.) But that is a pretty small data set.

 

And there is not much to be learned from the small dataset of two Democratic primary elections in the Midwest in Anno Domini 2026. So let us consider some larger datasets.

 

The general consensus among psephologists is that female major-party candidates do about as well as male major-party candidates for federal office, ceteris paribus. But the picture gets a little more complicated when you start asking the right questions. It is interesting to know the answers to questions. It also is interesting to think about which questions are not asked, or not often asked.

 

In the Michigan and Wisconsin primary races, the male candidate beat the female candidate in both cases. I had a vague impression that female candidates run at some disadvantage vs. male candidates and went looking to see whether there was anything to back up my hunch. The easiest answer to get was the answer to a question that I was not asking—which is to say, I was informed that female candidates for the House and Senate succeed at about the same rate as male candidates when one controls for the very lively variable of incumbency. Male and female incumbents tended to win at similarly high rates, male and female challengers tended to win at similarly low rates.

 

Open seats, in which the variable of incumbency is eliminated, reveal a little bit more. In a study of open-seat House elections from 1994 to 2004, scholars publishing in the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy found that “quality female candidates running in open seat elections are less likely to win than are quality male candidates.” (Some readers will zero in on the word quality and wonder how this variable is treated; the methods include accounting for factors such as having been elected to another office. The technique is limited, but the standard is evenly applied.) But that still did not quite answer my question: I did not want to know how women did overall—I wanted to know how women did when running against men.

 

Women facing men in U.S. Senate elections have a relatively poor record even when incumbency is not a factor. (The Dispatch has a policy of disclosing AI use. In this case, I had Claude compile a spreadsheet of Senate races in which major-party candidates of opposite sexes faced off and then checked the results against Wikipedia election results and English-major math. The results are consistent with the publicly accessible data.) Women defeated men in only 38 percent of all male-female Senate contests from 1972 to 2024. That’s in part the incumbency issue: As you would guess, female incumbents defeated challengers about 82 percent of the time, a high rate but slightly below the success rate of male incumbents, of which there have been many more. But in male-female open-seat Senate elections, women remain just under 40 percent—which is to say, women facing men in open-seat Senate elections are only very slightly more likely to win elections in that set than elections in the larger set of all male-female Senate elections, about half of which consist of female challengers facing male incumbents, a tough situation in which only 9 percent of women win.

 

What gives?

 

“A substantial body of research shows that voters display a number of biases toward female candidates,” the scholars in the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy report. “These biases range from associations between gender and ideological extremity, issue competence, leadership traits, and even a generalized preference for a male-dominated government.” I do not think that anyone who has spent much time talking to American voters—of any ideological persuasion—will find much to argue with in that.

 

To repeat: The dataset here is extremely limited, and I do not propose to argue that the results in Michigan and Wisconsin suggest that sex plays a dispositive role in Democratic primary elections.

 

But it does seem clear that ideology does not play a dispositive role, either.