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.
