[Mb-civic] WORTH A LOOK: The politics of female voters - The Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

  The politics of female voters

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist  |  March 12, 2006

ONE OF the myths that Kate O'Beirne skewers in ''Women Who Make the 
World Worse," her shrewd and refreshing new book on the modern women's 
movement, is the myth of the gender gap -- the potent edge that 
Democrats are supposed to have over Republicans when it comes to 
attracting women's votes.

For decades, writes O'Beirne, feminists have been brandishing the gender 
gap. Eleanor Smeal, a former president of the National Organization for 
Women, published a triumphant book about it in 1984: ''Why and How Women 
Will Elect the Next President." But on Election Day that November, 
Democrat Walter Mondale was flattened by Ronald Reagan's 49-state 
landslide, despite Mondale's historic choice of a female running mate, 
New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro. Reagan won 62 percent of the 
male vote and 56 percent of the female vote -- a six-point gender gap, 
but probably not what Smeal had in mind.

Of the last seven presidential elections, Republicans have won five -- 
three times with more women's votes than the Democrats. For all the 
rhetoric about the mighty gender gap -- Democratic strategist Ann Lewis 
once called it ''the Grand Canyon of American politics" -- Republicans 
seem to bridge it without difficulty.

That's because women aren't monolithic voters, as O'Beirne emphasizes, 
and they don't march in lockstep to the beat of liberal drums. The best 
evidence of that is the electoral gap that really does matter in 
American politics -- the gap separating married women from those who are 
single.

Unlike the gender gap, there is nothing illusory about the marriage gap. 
Married women are more likely to vote Republican; unmarried women are 
more likely to vote Democratic. In the most recent presidential 
election, unmarried women voted for John Kerry by a 25-point margin, 
while President Bush won the votes of married women by an 11-point 
margin -- a marriage gap of 36 points.

''Want to know which candidate a woman is likely to support for 
president?" asked USA Today in 2004, as the Kerry-Bush race was heading 
into the home stretch. ''Look at her ring finger."

Why? What is it about wedlock that makes women more Republican -- or 
about the absence of wedlock that makes them more Democratic? Here are 
three hypotheses:

Financial protection. Single women, especially if they have children, 
are more likely to be dependent on the government for welfare, Social 
Security, and other economic benefits. A majority of unmarried women, 54 
percent, have household incomes below $30,000, double the percentage of 
married women with incomes that low. With greater reason to be anxious 
about economic security, single women tend to support a more active and 
paternalistic role for government -- the traditional Democratic view. 
Married women, by contrast, are much less likely to depend on government 
support. Instead, many come to see the welfare state and its tax burden 
as a threat to the well-being of their family, making them more likely 
to vote Republican.

Children and cultural values. Married parents with children are less 
likely to support the party whose policies make it harder to shield 
their children from corrosive cultural influences. ''Kerry did not have 
a single message that resonated with married parents," the scholar 
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote after the 2004 election. ''He opposed the 
right to parental notification for minors' abortions, condoned 
partial-birth abortion, and said not a single word about television's 
graphic depictions of sex, violence, [and] murder." Democratic leaders, 
too, often seem bemused by the kind of Americans who ''put religious 
bumper-stickers on their cars and struggle to 'work on their marriage' 
while keeping their kids away from sex, drugs, and alcohol, as well as 
the lesser lures of body piercings, tattoos, gangsta clothes, and other 
pop fashion."

Male influence. Women are significantly less likely than men to follow 
national and international affairs, a knowledge gap that researchers 
have documented for decades. In a new survey conducted for Women's 
Voices, Women Vote by the Democratic polling firm of GQR Research, a 
large majority of nonvoting single women -- 70 percent -- said they 
''find politics and elections so complicated that it is hard to 
understand what is really going on." That helps explain why single women 
are much less likely to vote. It also explains why married women more 
often adopt their husband's political outlook -- which tends to be more 
conservative -- than the other way around.

Of course there are many voters who don't fit these patterns. But this 
much seems clear: Democrats gain when women stay single, Republicans 
benefit when they marry. Marriage may be good for society as a whole. 
But only the GOP has a political incentive to say so.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/12/the_politics_of_female_voters/
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