Top donor rallies GOP women – Alexander Burns – POLITICO.com

One of the Republican Party’s most prominent female donors is striking out on her own in an effort to steer more of the GOP’s ample financial resources to conservative women running for office.

Pennsylvania energy executive Christine Toretti, who served as the finance committee co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee in 2012, told POLITICO she will head up a super PAC dubbed Women Lead. The organization aims to drum up contributions from other deep-pocketed Republican women and use them to promote women running across the country in 2014 and beyond.

A longtime member of the RNC who has donated some $600,000 to Republican candidates and committees over the years, according to the Federal Election Commission, Toretti said she came away from the 2012 election convinced that female donors needed a stronger role in intraparty Republican politics.

Republicans lost women voters by 11 percentage points in the last presidential election, according to national exit polls, and failed to win multiple Senate races in which male GOP candidates made comments about rape and abortion that were widely perceived as offensive.

Toretti said at least part of the problem for the party is that women — as well as male donors who care about electing women to federal office — have little power to ensure that their donations are spent on behalf of other women. So for other prolific givers who were dissatisfied with the results of 2012, Toretti has created a more narrowly focused political entity to address her concerns.

“There are a lot of women we would meet with who have the capacity to write really large checks who feel disenfranchised by the party,” Toretti said. “I’m not saying their perceptions are accurate, but they are their perceptions, and that makes them real.”

Toretti recalled that as she traveled the country raising money with former RNC finance chairman Ron Weiser, “At a lot of dinners I would go to, I was the only woman in the room, and they would assume I was Ron’s secretary.”

via Top donor rallies GOP women – Alexander Burns – POLITICO.com.