A Massachusetts Democrat has accused her party of starting a "war on women" because it left her out of a recent poll.
Marisa DeFranco, who wants to take Democratic incumbent John Tierney's 6th Congressional District seat in the November midterm election, says she was omitted from a poll commissioned by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. She vented her growing frustrations with the party in a
press release.
"Our campaign is not asking for special treatment, only equal access," DeFranco says in the release. "We need to show the Democratic Party machine, the DCCC, and everyone else that they cannot ignore, dismiss, and erase out of the picture women who dare to challenge the status quo."
The release questions why the Democratic Party doesn't have more female members. "Whose fault is that?" reads the release.
The poll referred to two candidates — Tierney and challenger Seth Moulton. DeFranco, who has a history of being left on the sidelines within the Democratic Party, cried foul.
"This sexist double standard is unacceptable," DeFranco's press release reads. "Who needs Mitt Romney's etch-a-sketch when the Democratic machine can just as easily write a woman off with an eraser?"
DeFranco campaigned for the U.S. Senate in 2012. She failed to win enough support at the Democratic Party state convention to have a Senate primary vote.
Elizabeth Warren won the nomination that year and went on to win the seat, defeating
Republican incumbent Sen. Scott Brown.
DeFranco, an immigration lawyer, has said she would not have voted for the Affordable Care Act, an unpopular opinion within the Democratic Party.
When asked why DeFranco was kept off the recent poll, Democratic party spokesman Marc Brumer said "the poll speaks for itself," according to
the Lowell Sun.
"If the Republican Party did something so disrespectful to a woman candidate and her supporters who have been working their hearts out, we would be hearing about the 'War on Women' in every media outlet across the land," DeFranco's press release says. "But the DCCC runs a poll with only the two men in the race and disregards the woman effectively writing her out of the picture and no one in the establishment blinks an eye. Why is John Tierney standing by, allowing a woman to be discriminated against?"