Trump-Backed House Candidate Once Said Women Don’t Belong in the Voting Booths or the Office

John Gibbs, a GOP candidate running for the U.S. House in Michigan’s 3rd District, once argued that American politics has “suffered” since women were allowed to vote.

Gibbs created a website called Society for the Critique of Feminism while attending Stanford University in the early 2000s, as first reported by CNN yesterday. “Increasing the size and scope of government is unequivocally bad,” he wrote at the time. “And since women's suffrage has caused this to occur on a larger scale than any other cause in history, we conclude that the United States has suffered as a result of women's suffrage.”

Per CNN, Gibbs also repeatedly praised another anti-feminist group on his website, Father’s Manifesto, which once circulated a petition to repeal the 19th Amendment.

Gibbs also posted on his website that women in the workplace put a “strain” on their male colleagues. “Numerous sexual harassment laws are introduced, which spawn a barrage of sexual harassment cases of frivolous proportions, wasting the time and energy of the courts and legal system, and taxpayer dollars,” he wrote.

A spokesperson for Gibbs’ campaign told CNN the website was created to “provoke the left on campus.” They went on to say, “It was nothing more than a college kid being over the top … Of course, John does not believe that women shouldn't vote or shouldn't work.”

Gibbs ran against and defeated incumbent Rep. Peter Meijer in the Republican primary for MI-3 earlier this year. Meijer, one of the House’s most moderate Republicans, was one of the 10 in his party who voted to impeach President Donald Trump over his role in the January 6 Capitol riot. Out of the 10, 4 retired and 4 lost their primary, which leaves just 2 candidates advancing to the general election in November.

The population of Michigan’s 3rd District is one of the most evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats in the state, making it a key toss-up seat for which party ultimately wins control of the House in November. Currently, most political experts classify the race as “Leans D” and consider Gibbs a slight underdog vs. his Democratic challenger Hillary Scholten, a former Obama DOJ employee and immigration lawyer.