Janet Hook writes in the Wall Street Journal that the gender gap is shrinking, and declining female support for Democrats is hurting them in the Iowa, Colorado, and Arkansas Senate races. The Democrats are indeed in trouble, but there’s little evidence that it’s because the gender gap is shrinking.
As I noted yesterday, though, the gap between Arkansas men and women is about the same as usual, with the men more Republican than the women. The Democrats’ problem is that their base level of support is too low. (Hook looks at the same poll I did but does not compare it to any historical examples.)
Colorado provides some evidence for the shrinking-gender-gap theory: A Suffolk/USA Today poll has Representative Cory Gardner, the Republican, pulling equal support from men and women. If true, it would break from the nearly universal pattern of modern elections. I’d want to see some confirmation before believing it. Quinnipiac has a poll out today showing Gardner doing ten points better among men than women (and winning overall).
In Iowa, it’s the same old story. Hook cites a Marist poll from early October in which men were 12 points more likely to back the Republican than women were.
And she also throws in the Texas governor’s race, where the Republican candidate is narrowly winning among women — who are 13 points less likely to back him than men are. The gender gap isn’t “closing” there.
There’s a terminological problem here: Sometimes people use the phrase “gender gap” just to mean the margin by which women support Democrats. In some races that gap disappears or even inverts. But you can easily trip yourself up when you analyze the gap this way. Here’s Hook:
There has long been a gender divide in U.S. politics, with women more inclined to support Democrats and men more inclined to support Republicans. One rare exception came in 2010, when the GOP gained 63 House seats and six in the Senate as women backed Republicans, 49% to 48%, exit polls showed. Four years earlier, Democrats held a 55%-43% advantage.
The 2010 election wasn’t a “rare exception”: Women remained “more inclined to support Democrats” than men, by six points. That was a larger gender gap than in the 2006 elections, when it was four points.
Overall it looks like the Democrats’ problem this year is weak support among men and women alike. The gender gap is staying in place.