Contemporary U.S. elections tend to be candidate centered, but political parties and other political organizations also help candidates gain public office, particularly at the national level. They are especially significant for newcomers to the campaign process, and they played key roles in the campaigns of women in the 2008 election.

Democratic women candidates in particular have benefited from party organizational and women's groups activities in recent electoral cycles. A substantial national growth in party resources in the 2006 and 2008 elections favored Democrats, and thus female Democratic candidates. Republican women, particularly those who are pro-choice (a minority position within the activist base of the Republican Party) have access to training and some recruitment activities on the part of their national party organizations and women's groups, but in general they have been much less advantaged. Few Republican women have entered primaries for national elective office, whether through strategic decisions of their own (realizing that the political atmosphere was not conducive to ultimate Republican victories) or from anemic recruitment efforts by party leaders in districts or states leaning favorably toward their party.

At the end of the 2008 election, the gap at the national level between the numbers of Democratic and Republican women officeholders was wider than ever. The defeat of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Dole by Democrat Kay Hagan in North Carolina meant that only four Republican women senators would serve in the 111th Congress (2009–10), compared to thirteen Democratic women.