Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) on Wednesday said that discussing policies that women care about did not hurt Democrats in the midterm elections.
“I resent the notion that women shouldn’t be talked to directly about issues we care about,” she said during a Center for American Progress Action Fund event, according to the Huffington Post. “It’s a shame that the range of issues that affect women have been successfully rebranded into this one tight phrase to dust off the shoulder.”
Gillibrand outlined the wide array of Democratic policies that impact women, like access to birth control and equal pay, and said she’d rather call them “family issues.”
After the election, conservatives asserted that Democrats lost the “war on women,” but Gillibrand said Democrats still need to differentiate themselves on these issues.
“Republicans don’t have a branding problem with women, they have policy problem with women,” she said. “Let me be clear: There’s a real difference between the parties on the full range of issues that affect women and their families, so the answer is not to stop talking about these issues.”
According to a Planned Parenthood poll released on Wednesday, talking about women’s issues is helpful to Democrats. Democratic candidates in the Senate battleground states had a significant advantage over Republicans when it came to women’s access to abortion and health care.
Planned Parenthood also found that Republican women favored Democrats by 25 points on access to abortion, but sided with Republican candidates on all other issues.
