Democratic women are excited about Amy McGrath. Will it be enough on Election Day?

U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, R-Lexington, won this county by 49 percentage points.

It’s the type of county he’s won in his past four campaigns. It’s the type of county he’s expected to win. But there’s a movement going on.

Since about 2008, as U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell and Republicans took their bright red paintbrush to the state, the Anderson County Democratic Woman’s Club was dormant.

Then Amy McGrath came to town. Now the club’s going again. Shortly after their second meeting rolled around, the club had 52 paying members.

“I met Amy McGrath and I had an opportunity to talk to her and I just found her to be… she generates excitement,” said Bobbi Jo Lewis, president of the women’s club. “She made me excited to be a Democratic woman again.”

McGrath will need to capitalize on that excitement to unseat Barr in November. In a toss-up race in Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District, the difference on Election Day will hinge on the enthusiasm of each candidate’s core supporters.

For McGrath, that means Democratic women.

From health care to education to the president’s comments on sexual assault, there’s a growing feeling among Democratic women that the issues important to them don’t matter.

They’ve marched, protested and written letters to Congress. They’ve joined private Facebook groups like Pantsuit Nation and Moms For McGrath.

But as recently as October 1, a poll found that Democratic women and Republican women were about equally likely to say the election in November is important.

Women have long been an important voting bloc — more women than men have voted in every presidential election since 1964, according to the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. But they don’t all vote alike.

Political scientists have found party identity is a stronger indication than gender on how a woman will vote and a recent study by Tiffany Barnes at the University of Kentucky and Erin Cassese at West Virginia University found that Republican women hold policy attitudes more similar to Republican men than Democrats of either gender.

Women are also divided by race. Trump may have only won 42 percent of women in the 2016 campaign, but he won 52 percent of white women, according to CNN’s exit polls. The Sixth Congressional District was 85.4 percent white in 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The anecdotal evidence certainly appears in McGrath’s favor. She said she’s noticed many of her volunteers are women.

“I’m subjective here, but I would probably say 75 percent to 80 percent of my volunteers who are really giving their time and effort are women,” McGrath said. “And it’s of all ages. It’s as old as 85, 87-year-old women working on the campaign, down to 15-year-olds.”

In the only independent poll in the race so far, conducted by the New York Times and Siena College in early September, McGrath had the support of 51 percent of likely female voters to Barr’s 43 percent.

When asked about the energy among Democratic women, Phyllis Vincent, the chairwoman of the Franklin County Republican Party, was dismissive.

“People want to say the abortion movement, the me too issue,” Vincent said. “Those issues have been around all of our lives.”

Kentucky is one of only 11 states in the country that does not have a woman representative in Congress. This year, two Kentucky women are running for Congress, McGrath and Louisville Republican Vickie Yates Brown-Glisson, in a state that has had two congresswomen in its history — both Republicans.

This is, after all, a conservative state. President Donald Trump won Kentucky by almost 30 percentage points and he won Central Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District by more than 15 percentage points. A study by the Pew Research Center found that 74 percent of women who voted for Trump still had a “warm feeling” for him in March of 2018.

Barr is doing his best to keep the support of those Trump voters. In August, he held a “Women for Barr” rally where more than 200 attendees had the opportunity to hear a speech from White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

“As the spouse of a hardworking mother of two precocious and busy daughters, who daily juggles the responsibilities of parenting and her profession, I have tremendous respect for what women do at home and in the workplace,” Barr said “That’s why I have fought for solutions and policies that will give the women of the Sixth District and this country more time, more security and more financial peace of mind.”

Barr then listed off legislation he voted for that relates to women, including a bill that would allow workers in the private sector to use overtime as paid time off (it failed in the Senate), his amendment that led to a federal study on Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (it became law), the authorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013 (it became law and is due for renewal this year) and a bill that would provide funding to put more law enforcement officers in school (it was rolled into an appropriations bill).

The divide between Democratic and Republican women was only galvanized by the recent confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

As the left mobilized around Professor Christine Blasey Ford and cited Kavanaugh’s confirmation as another example of Republicans ignoring women’s issues, the right rallied around Kavanaugh and what they perceived as Democrats dragging a man through the mud.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican political action committee supporting Barr, recently used a radio ad to bring Kavanaugh into the race in an effort to boost Republican enthusiasm. But Kavanaugh is also keeping the left energized.

Lori Shook, a neonatal physician at UK Healthcare, has gone from making donations and putting up yard signs to actively volunteering for McGrath’s campaign.

“The tipping point for me has just kind of been building,” Shook said. “Basically with the rampant misogyny.”

A study from the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and National University Singapore that examined how sexism affects women recently found that Kentucky was one of the most sexist states in the country based on a survey that asks about women’s capacities, roles and place in society.

As she’s campaigned, McGrath has noticed a few slights here and there, mostly about how she would manage being in congress when she’s the mother of young kids.

“I’m like, ‘I don’t know, maybe I’ll ask Andy Barr because his kids are the same age as mine,’” McGrath said. “And that kind of shuts people up pretty quick.”

This story was originally published October 25, 2018 at 9:46 AM.