I usually resist saddling up with political pollsters and going for a ride so early in a presidential election cycle. The horse race is long, after all, and the numbers don’t mean much.Still, it was hard to ignore recent headlines blaring that Hillary Clinton is losing support among women. According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 42 percent of females who lean Democratic said they expected to vote for her. That’s down from 71 percent in July.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has increased his lead among Republican women, up from 20 percent to 33 percent, according to CNN.
To be sure, these are different women, but it raises an age-old question: What do women want? Do they want a lifelong advocate for women, children and families who famously said women’s rights are human rights; or a rogue contender who says he “cherishes” women while insulting them?
Whatever the case, women are not a monolithic bloc, even within their respective parties. Barack Obama reminded voters of that fact almost eight years ago as he competed against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. By the time the primaries were over, Obama had captured younger women’s votes, while Clinton had won over older women and a bare majority of women overall.
Nor are women a sisterhood who invariably stick together to support female candidates. They often say they’d prefer to vote for a woman given the chance, and many yearn to see the first woman in the White House — though far more Democrats express this hope than Republicans. Even so, research reveals that women often betray their sex once inside the voting booth.
What’s more, women are less interested in so-called “women’s issues” than you might suppose. They care about health care, employment, gas prices and the deficit more than access to contraception, an issue that seems to have more to do with party affiliation than gender, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey in 2012. At that time, less than 1 percent of respondents mentioned women’s health or birth control as top election-year issues.
At any rate, gender-identity politics is more complex than gender alone. Education, race, class and party affiliation affect how and for whom people vote. In fact, two political scientists at American University’s Women and Politics Institute assert that partisanship has reached such a pitch that gender may be moot. Keep that in mind as pollsters scramble to track the opinions of women in this presidential campaign. The results might be interesting, but they won’t necessarily inform or enlighten.
