What is it with Republican women that makes them put the dumbest examples of their gender forward as candidates? Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Christine "I am not a witch" O'Donnell are embarrassments to the XX chromosome. I swear, the only reason any of them opens her mouth is to change feet. 🙄
If Bachmann is the Repugnican candidate, she'll guarantee even Democrats who are thoroughly dissatisfied and disappointed with Obama will campaign aggressively and vote for him.
Women are completely underrepresented among Republicans at the federal level compared to Democrats. In the Senate, 5 our of 47 Republicans are women, while women represent 12 out of 53 Democrats. In the House, 24 out of 242 Republicans are women, compared to 53 out of 193 Democrats. In the Senate, women are about twice as represented among Democrats as Republicans, and in the House it's closer to three times the relative representation. Adding in the Governors evens things out a bit, as 4 out of 29 Republicans are women, compared to only 2 out of 20 Democrats...but it doesn't make up for the Congressional makeup. All in all, 33 out of 318 nationally notable Republicans are women, while 67 out of 266 nationally notable Democrats are.
This has two effects. One is that not only is the pool of potential female Democratic candidates twice as large in real terms, women make up 2.5 times the percentage of the Democratic pool as they do of the Republican one. This means Democratic candidates are more likely to be women (all else being equal), and female candidates are more likely to be Democrats (again, assuming candidates are more or less randomly selected).
The other effect is more of a cause of this gender disparity...the Republican party is not really the party of women. The female vote almost always leans Democratic, and most "women's issues" fall squarely on the left side of the aisle. What's interesting is that women VOTE Republican far more often than female politicians ARE Republican, at least at the national level, which suggests that support for female candidates is more about party affiliation than gender.
All this to say...picking a good female Republican candidate is hard, since there is a smaller pool to work with. And to be honest, it's not clear to me that women can be as successful in the Republican party in general. Both of which might explain something about the candidates you mentioned.