AS: Could the Republican Party ever become the party of women?

Sen. Cotton: Well, if you look at the exit polls from Virginia, it suggests that we already have. It’s very curious to see that so many self-styled feminists in politics and the media have taken steps that are objectively harmful to women.

I mean, Title IX was a long-sought and hard-fought battle to try to achieve equality between women’s sports and men’s sports. Some of the very same people that fought those battles—or their philosophical and political inheritors—are willing to sacrifice those gains, all in service of this radical abstraction of Gender Ideology. And to simply stand up and say, ‘No, we’re going to protect the rights of girls and women to play sports—to compete in sports on an equal basis—we’re going to protect the rights of women who are in shelters for those who face domestic abuse, or we’re going to recognize that there are natural and biological differences between the sexes, and that justifies a difference in how we treat new mothers and new fathers. That’s not some kind of radical ideology; that is just common sense. That is pushing back against a radical ideology, and most Americans are not ideologues.

And when you add that to the concerns that so many mothers have just going to the grocery store today and not be able to find the fixings for Thanksgiving dinner, being worried about getting gifts for Christmas, both because the shelves may be bare or they may cost too much because of inflation. Whether their kids are going to be indoctrinated in school to hate America, and whether they’re gonna be safe on their streets walking back home from school. I’m not surprised that we saw significant gains among female voters in Virginia and New Jersey, closing what is often called the [Republican] ‘gender gap’ in the vote between men and women.