Women candidates are vanishing in Trump's GOP -- and thriving on the Democratic side

Republican women are a vanishing species -- even as their numbers are growing by leaps and bounds on the Democratic side.

The past decade has seen a female-led Democratic wave in Congress -- where 88 Democratic women serve in the House and 17 Democratic women serve in the Senate -- but GOP women are nearly extinct at both the state and national level, reported the New York Times.

On the other side of the aisle, there are just 13 women in the House of Representatives, the lowest number since 1993, and eight women in the Senate.

At the start of the 2010s, many political observers believed Sarah Palin would usher in a "stampede of pink elephants" on the GOP side -- but instead Donald Trump carried the former half-term Alaska governor's right-wing populism across the electoral goal line.

Palin didn't help out other Republican women, and often endorsed GOP men running against candidates such as Kay Bailey Hutchison, who left her Senate seat to run unsuccessfully for Texas governor, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who won.

The 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee did help boost Republican women in the 2010 election cycle -- when GOP women in the House increased from 24 to 17 -- but women voters flocked to President Barack Obama in his re-election campaign.

Republican women lost 21 percent of their congressional seats in that election, while Democratic women boosted theirs by 26 percent.

Palin played a smaller role in 2014, when more moderate Republican women made gains, but Trump's rise took the party back toward the hard right -- and prompted widespread protest by women across the country.

Women voters have turned against Trump's Republican Party, and every GOP congresswoman from the 2014 class lost in last year's midterms except one, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY).

Republican women will end the 2010s with governors and senators outnumbered two to one by their Democratic counterparts, despite winning three gubernatorial races and one open Senate seat last year.