A winning day for women

Primary elections in 12 states this week launched several female candidates on the volatile path to November. In California, Republicans nominated two former businesswomen—Meg Whitman for governor and Carly Fiorina for Senate—both of whom spent heavily to defeat men running to their right. Whitman will face former Gov. Jerry Brown in November, while Fiorina opposes incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer. Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas survived against a labor-backed challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. In Nevada, Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle won the GOP nod to face Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, while South Carolina state Rep. Nikki Haley overcame murky adultery allegations and took the most votes in the GOP gubernatorial primary. She’ll face U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett in a June 22 GOP runoff.

In California, voters also approved a landmark ballot initiative to replace party primary elections with open primaries in which all candidates compete, with the top two vote-getters moving on to the general election, regardless of party. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called it a “historic change.”

While the Tea Party had mixed results Tuesday, it certainly made Harry Reid’s day, said Jay Newton-Small in Time.com. Angle, Reid’s GOP opponent, is an “ultra-conservative who supports phasing out Social Security and Medicare” and who wants to abolish the Energy and Education departments and the EPA. This “Tea Party darling” has breathed new life into the unpopular incumbent.

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The biggest winners were the “Palinistas,” said Robert Costa in National Review Online. Sarah Palin has encouraged what she calls the “emerging, conservative, feminist identity” in the GOP, and Palin’s “mama grizzlies” delivered. Palin endorsed both Fiorina in California and Haley in South Carolina—two “smart, pro-life conservative women who succeed with style.”

If someone had told me “the next governor of South Carolina was almost certainly going to be an Indian-American woman accused of cheating on her husband, I’d have said they were high,” said Jonathan Alter in Newsweek.com. But Nikki Haley, who was born Nimrata Randhawa, is the clear front-runner. With voters “desperately searching for change, this may yet turn out to be another Year of the Woman.”