A group that champions electing conservative women to public office issued a blunt warning to Republicans on Wednesday after the Democratic sweep of Congress, calling the defeats of a large number of G.O.P. women an emergency that must be addressed.
“We are once again facing a crisis-level decline in Republican women in Congress,” Danielle Barrow, the president of Winning For Women Action Fund, an outside group dedicated to electing Republican women, said in a statement.
Ms. Barrow sounded the alarm as Democrats were celebrating their own milestone of electing more than 100 women to the House for the first time in history.
Republicans already have far less gender diversity in their ranks in the House, where there are currently 32 G.O.P. women (including two nonvoting delegates) — around 15 percent of their members.
With the landslide Democratic victories that are projected to win them the largest House majority in decades, that number could potentially dip to below 20 next year, after all races are called.
In 2018, when Republicans lost 40 seats and elected just one new G.O.P. woman to Congress, the party made a commitment to recruit and invest in female candidates, Ms. Barrow said. It worked: Two years later, 11 of the 15 seats Republicans flipped were by women.
“But that commitment to recruiting women faded when the urgency did,” she said. “Republicans cannot only make this investment after a wipeout election and abandon it when things improve. It is time for party leaders to treat this as a permanent strategy, not a crisis response.”
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