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The Gender Gap
THE GENDER GAP....Ruth Rosen writes today that women "sealed the deal" for Obama:
For the last two years, I've been writing and telling anyone who would listen that American women could elect the next president, if only they voted.
Well, this time they did, and there is no doubt that women were a decisive factor in the election of Barack Obama.
....Just take a serious look at the numbers. As the data in the Week in Review in the New York Times reveals, women constituted 53% of the electorate, while only 47% of men voted. Among those who voted for Obama, 56% were women and 43% were men. Among unmarried women, a whopping 70% voted for Obama.
Is this true? Remember, Obama's overall national swing was 9 percentage points compared to John Kerry in 2004. So women only made an outsize difference if they swung by substantially more than 9 points.
But they didn't. The swing among women was 10 points. That's actually smaller than the swing among men, who switched to Obama by 12 points. There's some slop in these numbers thanks to sampling error and so forth, but it's unlikely that women played an unusually large role in this election. The gender gap this year was pretty much the same as it was four years ago.
On the other hand, it is true that unmarried women swung hard for Obama. Kerry carried this group by 25 points in 2004, while Obama carried them by 41 points this year. That's a swing of 16 points, nearly double the national trend. I don't know exactly what it was about his character or his policies that did it, but there's certainly a story of some kind there.
He was raised by a single mom, was that enough to swing the unmarried woman vote?
"Among those who voted for Obama, 56% were women and 43% were men."
And what were the other one percent?
I sincerely hope there aren't hundreds of thousands of Monica wannabes out there.
Without looking at the numbers, I would guess that Obama gained support among unmarried women because more young people voted this year, and this group is more likely to include women who are not yet married.
Maybe unmarried women more easily saw the silliness behind the Palin pick.
Or, more likely, issues like jobs and healthcare resonate more with unmarried women because they lack the added economic security that marriage can provide.
Clearly it's the big ears. Oh, and the nice smile. What woman could resist that combination?
How could women swing by 10, men by 12, and the overall swing be 9? Some of these stats just seem goofy.
And what were the other one percent?
According to one website I saw, it may have been batboy and the aliens.
Uh, yeah, I second emmarose. Its surely age, and silly to armchair reasons why Obama was sexier or something. And even if that is actually mattering to women (because we know that's all they think about... that's intended as sarcasm) it's still probably an age effect. Kerry probably is probably more appealing to older women.
Emmarose is probably right, and I also wonder how much this had to do with abortion. Even though the candidates and the media didn't talk about it a lot, many people realize that there are four votes to overturn Roe.
Some of the "stats" in the post definitely ARE goofy. For example, to say;
...women constituted 53% of the electorate, while only 47% of men voted
at best incorporates a number of incorrect assumptions about the electorate, and at worst is a misstatement or a misunderstanding.
Statistics, contrary to popular view, is very exacting and not at all malleable, and gross sloppiness with its results doesn't help clarify the situation.
Since women were 53% of the electorate, it doesn't take as large a "swing" in their voting to have an impact. Obama won men voters 49 - 48; women by 13%]. Almost the entirety of his margin was women voters. Looking at the "swing" would be useful if you were trying to see where the Dems made strides compared to '04, but that's not what Marcus is doing. Just looking at gender, the Democrats owe their success this year -- and in 2006, for that matter, when they won females 55 - 43%, men 50 - 47 -- to women voters. If I were the Democrats, that's something I'd keep in mind.
I'd guess that unmarried women are younger on average than married women. Given the relationship between age and vote for Obama, this is surely part of the story.
If Obama motivated women to come out in greater numbers than Kerry did, then they could have made a decisive difference even if there wasn't a particularly large swing within that group. Just looking at percentage difference isn't sufficient.
Well Kevin is totally wrong on this one. Not only did women go for Obama by 56% in 2008 (compared to men's 49%) -- but women also went for Kerry by 51% in 2004 (compared to men's 44%).
Women went for the Democratic candidate by significantly higher proportions both in 2004 and 2008.
And lots more women than men voted in both elections (54% to 46% in 2004, 53% to 47% in 2008).
Looking at swings from 2004 to 2008 is the wrong way to do this.
JS, it's true that there's no reason to fetishize the 2004 vote as though it represented some kind of natural baseline of Democrat X. But you need some evidence to claim that one particular demographic swung especially hard for Obama, as opposed to just shifting the same way everybody else did. If you looked at, say, people who can curl their tongues sideways (a random genetic trait), you'd probably find that their vote shifted about +9 for Obama from 2004 to 2008, just like everybody else on average.
What you're saying is that women in general vote for Democrats. That's true, and important, and worth writing explanatory pieces on. But you can't claim women won the election for Obama, since their vote shifted just the same as everyone else's; it's just as accurate to say that men won the election for Obama, by voting less strongly for McCain than they had for Bush. And if you're saying women won the election for Obama and men won the election for Obama, you're not saying much at all.
It is simple. They expect the government to take care of them. Hundreds of thousands of demmocratic candidates over the years promise a safety net.
Brooksfoe, if the question is framed as "Which group swung the most" then you will come up with one answer. If the question is "Which group contributed the most votes to Obama", you will come up with another. And if the question is "which group voted for Obama by the largest proportion", you will come up with a third.
My assumption is that Ruth Rosen was addressing question #2. The last paragraph of Kevin's quote from what she wrote makes that clear, I think.
It's true that she started by saying "American women could elect the next president, if only they voted... Well, this time they did" -- and this is misleading, because more of them voted in 2004 as well. But even more women voted in 2008, percentage-wise. And less than 50% of men voted for Obama in BOTH elections -- so they can hardly be credited with his election, unless you are answering strictly question #1. (But then you wouldn't summarize it by saying "men elected Obama" -- more like "fewer men voted Republican").
There seems to be some numerical illiteracy involved here. "women constituted 53% of the electorate, while only 47% of men voted"... It seems she means 47% of the voters were men; I assume more than 47% of men voted. The share of women in the electorate actually nominally decreased from 2004 (it was 54-46 according to CNN), but by saying 47% of men voted, she makes it sound like women swamped men in terms of turnout. "Among those who voted for Obama, 56% were women and 43% were men." I think she means Obama won women 56-43... exit polls don't usually tell you how much a single candidate's vote was comprised by a different demographic groups, and the NYT numbers she cites say Obama won women 56-43. (If you work the numbers from the exit poll, 56.3% of Obama's voters were women and 43.7% were men, but I don't think that's what she meant.)
Perhaps she knows what the numbers actually mean, but her carelessness in presenting them raises doubts about the rest of her analysis. Consider the opening sentence: "For the last two years, I've been writing and telling anyone who would listen that American women could elect the next president, if only they voted." But proportionately fewer women voted in 2008 than in 2004! They voted in 2004, but apparently it was men who elected the president that time. It sounds like she analyzed the numbers based on a preconceived hypothesis. You could make the argument that women elected Obama because men were split, but this isn't the result of them voting, it's the result of how they voted in relation to men.
And goodness, we wouldn't want THAT now, would we? Government offering a "safety net"? Institutionalized compassion for our fellow citizens? Quelle horreur!
Of course, it's perfectly okay for the government to bail out banks and auto-makers. Or maybe you're against that too? Randian purist, war of the all against the all, that sort of idiotic schoolboy fantasy?
I don't know what's worse, stupid Republicans or naive Libertarians...
JS: The thing is, your question #2 doesn't make much sense. If you don't restrict yourself to a predefined collection of groups, the answer is always going to be "the group consisting of everybody". If you do, it'll probably be "white people" for any president if that's a valid group, or "women" for any Democrat if it isn't. None of this says anything interesting about Obama's campaign in particular.
What % of single moms are black?
micah, it's not "my" question #2. It's what I understood to be Ruth Rosen's question.
Neither she nor Kevin identified a specific set of groups for comparison. You can of course define an infinite number of groups an infinite number of ways.
But when someone says "women did it" it's rather obvious that the discussion at hand is about women vs. men.
During the third debate, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. came up.
McCain sided with the Court, saying women had missed the statute of limitations for equal pay, and called Obama's position, "a trial lawyer's dream."
Six out of six women with whom I have discussed this were seriously pissed off about it.
On average, the entire American and National leagues played .500 ball last season.
I don't understand this 9% rule Kevin seems to have come up with and many here are buying into. The "swing" to Obama compared to Kerry is not a national standard to which each subgroup should be compared. There is a degree of dificulty that is higher for some groups and lower for others. And what difference does it make anyway. What counts is the guy put together a fantastic campaign and matched it with a stunning GOTV effort. That's what counts.
Give women some appreciation. They carry the water every four years and every four years some other artificial group gets all the press. Soccer moms, nascar dads, hockey moms, hip black friends, joe the plumber, rick the guy on face book . . .
I think I've seen a representative of literally every group imaginable on the TV in the past few days saying "their" group sealed the deal for Obama except old white dudes. So as far as I'm concerned, old white dudes sealed the deal because they're not trying to claim credit for something EVERYBODY did.
No, no
It was me, it was me, I did it !
*sheesh*
"...If everybody voted, the Republicans would lose every time..." - Jim McDermott
JS: The fact that women gave Obama more votes says absolutely nothing about him as a candidate: *any* Democrat is going to get more votes from women than from men.
As emmarose pointed out early in the thread, this swing in the "unmarried female vote" is very likely just a secondary effect of the shift in the "youth vote". Nothing else to see here.
micah, I don't believe the conversation was about what the voting patterns said about Obama as a candidate.