The moderate Republican woman was speaking last week at the Texas Disposal Systems Exotic Game Ranch, just south of Austin. The first order of business was to confront that one nasty little rumor going around about herself.

This was Jenifer Sarver, a 40-year-old former staffer for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), and she was facing off in a forum with 12 other GOP candidates vying for U.S. Rep. Lamar Smiths (R-Texas) seat in Congress.

Sarver was here to talk about policy and pragmatism. Surrounded by Trump supporters and taxidermied animals, she was not in her element, and she leaned into it with her confession. Its true, she admitted. She voted for Hillary Clinton.

I couldnt support candidate Trump, she said. As a woman, I couldnt do it.

Just then, wrote one Austin-American Statesman columnist who was in the room , some of the dead animal heads on the walls turned toward Sarver with looks of shocked disbelief.

Sarver didnt stop there. She took aim at the aging, white GOP and said Republicans need to learn how to work with the other side.

We have a tone that is shutting people out, she said. Young people are not interested in joining our party. Women are leaving our party in droves. And if you look out over this audience, its a very white crowd here tonight. And its a pretty white group of people that are running as well.

The room fell silent and then right-wing candidate Matt McCall chimed in. We shouldnt be getting along with the side that wants to kill babies, he said. Married women vote Republican.

As Democratic women storm the 2018 midterm elections , running in higher numbers than ever before and inching closer toward equal representation in government, Republican women are becoming something of an endangered species in Congress. More than a quarter of GOP women in the House arent seeking re-election this year, leaving a gaping void in a caucus in which women already make up less than 10 percent of elected members.

Republican women are struggling to find a foothold in a party that rejects identity politics and therefore puts little effort into recruiting, training and financially supporting female candidates. Moderate GOP women, in particular, are increasingly marginalized in the bellowing, hypermasculine Republican Party of Donald Trump , President Grab Em By The Pussy. Look no further than the wagon-circling around Rob Porter, the former White House staff secretary who resigned last week over allegations of spousal abuse. Trumps first instinct was to praise Porter and his second was to muse on Twitter about false accusations .

Maxine Waters has coined the term reclaiming our time. We want to reclaim our party, said Meghan Milloy, co-founder of the nascent nonprofit group Republican Women for Progress, which aims to train moderate GOP women to run for office. Many of us are for limited government and free markets, but were not these cuckoo Lets put the gays in a camp Republicans.

Milloy and her co-founder, Jennifer Pierotti Lim, who spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in support of Clinton, would love to fill Congress with more women like the broadly popular Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), who are moderate at least in their rhetoric if not always their votes. The chupacabras, Milloy and Lim call them.

But Republicans arent seeing the same surge in female candidates as Democrats are this year in response to Donald Trumps presidency. The number of Democratic female House candidates has risen by 146 percent since the 2016 election, while the number of Republican women candidates has increased by 35 percent, according to an analysis by the Center for American Women in Politics (CAWP). In total, 99 GOP women are looking to run for Congress this year, compared with 351 Democratic women.