• Light/Dark
  • Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
  • We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.

The Gender Gap Among Midterm Voters Looks Huge — Maybe Even Record-Breaking

Rvaan

Rvaan

Member
Oct 25, 2017
13,734
Look at what the GOP is doing to healthcare, title IX, and abortion. I'm not surprised the gap is widening.
 
Khanimus

Khanimus

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
40,212
Greater Vancouver
Men seeking to shut down women vs. Women fighting for their reproductive rights (also, y'know, the president being a fucking serial sex offender)
 
Steeped in a Sea of Games

Steeped in a Sea of Games

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
6,948
So, when they said that white men were the most marginalized group (haha), I think they really meant white male democrats.

I feel so ostracized.
 
Dyle

Dyle

One Winged Slayer
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
29,942
Please save us ladies, I don't know why the rest of us dudes keep refusing to listen to reason
 
sersteven

sersteven

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,206
Philadelphia
I hope white women show up in droves and vote D to make up for the fact that they voted majority for Trump in 2016.

We need more women, especially of color, in representation.
 
Sulik2

Sulik2

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
8,168
If women can save this country in 2018 I hope the presidency goes to a woman in 2020, they deserve it.
 
Stoof

Stoof

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,787
As a white man I really hate other white men. I just want us to not be major fuckups anymore but that won't be anytime soon.
 
ShyMel

ShyMel

Moderator
Oct 31, 2017
3,483
I am guessing most of the gap is being caused by minority, primarily black, women. Millions of white women are either not voting or will happily vote their rights away.
 

Deleted member 4274

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
3,435
Something, something 53%... Y'all know what I'm talking about. The gap was wide in 2016 and we all know who came around eventually. Let's see what happens this time and in 2020...

AKA: This article means little to me. Put up or shut up.
 
Last edited:
Steeped in a Sea of Games

Steeped in a Sea of Games

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
6,948
CaptainBojanglesIII said:
There are dozens of us!

Please vote. Unless you're an asshole, then please stay at home. Thanks
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

No joke, I honestly don't trust any other white men when I first meet them because I know like 65% of them are self serving pieces of shit. I have a legit fear that most people automatically assume the same of me when they meet me, especially because I'm a pretty big dude and I think most people just usually assume that big people are assholes. Sigh.
 
Kirblar

Kirblar

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
30,744
More stuff on this. Its one of the crucial stories of this midterms along with the Obama->Trump backlash.



Ac30 said:
Angry white men, yeah.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Women are more reliable voters than men. There's a reason the "BOTH SIDES ARE THE SAME" crowd tends to be male regardless of their political orientation.
 
PeskyToaster

PeskyToaster

Member
Oct 27, 2017
15,314
Kirblar said:
More stuff on this. Its one of the crucial stories of this midterms along with the Obama->Trump backlash.




Women are more reliable voters than men. There's a reason the "BOTH SIDES ARE THE SAME" crowd tends to be male regardless of their political orientation.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...


The difference an education makes
 
CaptainBojangles

CaptainBojangles

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,689
Vivian-Pogo said:
Mom and I vote D.

Brother and dad vote R.

The math checks out.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Think my mother and grandmother voted R, my grandfather also R I think.

I voted D and I don't know if my father actually voted at all

So math doesn't check out here at all

But my family is so dysfunctional it's only right that we'd be the exception to the rule and overall still be shit lmao
 
Magilla

Magilla

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
738
Of about 12 males in my family and extended family, I'm the only one that votes Democrat. It's sad.
 
BDS

BDS

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
13,845
3f4ca0b172baa71099271df46f88a9a9.gif
 
Aaronrules380

Aaronrules380

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
22,470
Steeped in a Sea of Games said:
No joke, I honestly don't trust any other white men when I first meet them because I know like 65% of them are self serving pieces of shit. I have a legit fear that most people automatically assume the same of me when they meet me, especially because I'm a pretty big dude and I think most people just usually assume that big people are assholes. Sigh.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Also a white guy, can relate. I always feel bad about it to because I don't like to assume the worst about people without actual evidence and I know this is also a form of prejudice (though obviously nowhere near as extreme as what minorities face on a daily basis)
 
Autodidact

Autodidact

Member
Oct 25, 2017
18,729
The Democratic Party's base comprises women and minorities. A lot of "white working class" men hate those aforementioned groups and resent a party that supports them. Republicans have been playing to that resentment for decades, and Trump merely escalated the rhetoric and made more blatant appeals to the bigots. Consequently, those bigots now embrace the Republican Party in increasingly larger numbers.

Shocker.
 

Avinash117

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,602
It happened in an Austrian election in 2016 a lot of women supported the party that wasn't extremely nationalistic. Women in general tend to support the Democratic Party for a long time, but now the gap is increasing. Wonder what is causing this. The reason pointed out in a tweet says that women are threatening men's status, it is a reason but I don't think that tells the whole story.
 
HotHamBoy

HotHamBoy

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
16,423
The GOP is pretty good about getting people to vote against their own interests but for women it's a pretty cut and dry platform of misogyny. Makes sense the majority of women would vote against the party that's trying to drag them back to the 50s.
 
Kirblar

Kirblar

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
30,744
SapientWolf said:
Anger is good motivation to vote. And there are a lot of angry people out there right now.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This is absolutely correct and why the "anti-Trump won't work" line conservatives disingenuously push is.... completely incorrect. This is a great piece on how the wax/wane behavior we've seen with Presidential control killing a party downballot appears to be escalating in the modern era.

http://wasoncenter.cnu.edu/signs-si...-democrats-will-win-big-in-the-2018-midterms/

I'll come back to this shortly but first I want to explain a very important, but largely ignored, fact about the American electorate. In many elections, even competitive ones, Independents are not always the decisive factor determining who wins and who loses an election. You are likely scoffing at this claim because it contradicts the way we understand elections but consider the evidence. Although Barack Obama won the majority of Independents in his 2008 presidential race (primarily because the economy was quite literally collapsing on Election Day) he did not win the majority of Independents in his 2012 reelection bid. Given the conventional wisdom of elections, such a thing should not be possible. And it's not just that he failed to carry Independents nationally, he failed to carry Independents in critical swing states such as Ohio that he still won. In fact, Obama lost Independents in that decisive swing state by a staggering 10 points, but he still won the state because the impressive turnout operation established by the Obama campaign managed to produce an electorate that was 38% Democrat. And as I show in my unfortunately titled book The Unprecedented 2016 Presidential Election, Democrats lose Independents quite often, and in elections they win and they lose because they have a population advantage in many places and when their partisans turn out in high numbers, it trumps the combined loss of Republicans and Independents, assuming they don't lose the latter group by wide margins.

The fortunes of the Republican and Democratic parties seems to rock back and forth every few cycles, creating the appearance of neurotic electorate that can't quite figure out what it wants. But what we are really seeing, especially in the first midterm under a new president, is backlash from negative partisanship from voters of the party that lost the presidency looking for electoral revenge coupled with complacency from voters of the ruling party. Out of power partisans vote because fear is an excellent motivator. Especially the kind of fear that comes from seeing the opposition party enacting policies you don't support and stacking the federal courts with judges with the "wrong" ideology.

Think about it. When we look at the impressive gains made by Republicans in the 2010 and 2014 congressional midterms, as well as the 1000+ state legislative seats they gained over the course of the Obama presidency, partisan gerrymandering only accounts for part of their electoral success. And in the case of the 2010 midterms, the current district lines that strongly advantage Republicans in many states are the product of the big gains Republicans made in state and federal elections, not the cause of it. So the electoral success of Republicans is more than a story of partisan gerrymandering, which didn't take effect until the 2012 election. Instead, much of their electoral prowess over the past 8 years was largely driven by backlash to Obama and Republican strategists' success at tapping into this "fear factor" by nationalizing elections. For Republicans, elections in the Obama era, both big and small, were framed as a referendum on Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. This brilliant messaging, combined with a complacent Democratic electorate, allowed Republicans to over perform their share of the electorate by 5 points in the 2010 midterms and 10 points in 2014 in midterms. It is negative partisanship among opposition party voters that drives the midterm effect, not movement of independent voters back and forth between the parties.

This updated theory of electoral behavior led to my successful prediction of the Blue Wave in the 2017 elections in Virginia (at the 20 minute and 32 minute marks). All told, we ran 5 surveys on the gubernatorial race between Democrat Ralph Northam and Republican Ed Gillespie over the course of the general election and they were remarkably stable, predicting that Northam would win the election handily. This worried my colleague, who had spent the past decade making a close study of the Virginia electorate because the elections in 2013 and 2014 had turned out to be far more competitive than expected. Indeed, this was a reason the national punditry herded around a close and competitive election the final week heading into Election Day. But by applying my theory of negative partisanship's electoral effects in the polarized era, I suspected that Ralph Northam's victory was cemented on November 9th, 2016 when Donald Trump won the presidency. Trump's victory created a different Virginia electorate from the electorates of 2010, 2013, and 2014. Because Democrats lost the 2016 presidential election, especially considering the way they lost it and to whom, I expected a turnout surge among the Democratic portion of the electorate and this is exactly what happened. Despite predictions of a close race by other pundits, Northam ended up winning by 9%. And he did it by a surge in Democratic Party participation, not by winning over Virginia's right-leaning Independents. In 2013, 37% of the electorate were Democrats and in 2017 that percent increased to 41%, which is enough to turn a average 2-3 point advantage for statewide Democrats into a 9 point route that also allowed Democrats to flip 15 House of Delegate seats when even the most ambitious predictions, including my own, predicted a gain of just 7 or 8 seats due to gerrymandering. The point I want to hammer home is that the determinate factor driving voter behavior in this election was negative partisanship because had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, Virginia may well be currently governed by the Gillespie Administration despite the growing demographic advantage Democrats hold among the overall population of the state and the increasing influence of Northern Virginia on statewide election outcomes.

So let me come back to Silver's concept of the signal and the noise. Because of negative partisanship Democrats will have a significant enthusiasm advantage in turnout in elections so long as Donald Trump sits in the White House. In places where there are large pools of untapped Democratic voters, the party is going to win marginal seats as well as some seats that have not been competitive since at least 2006. Case in point, the special election in Pennsylvania CD 18. Although the narrative of Connor Lamb's unexpected victory points to a well-run, highly funded campaign (it was) and Lamb's centrist platform attracting Independents (it did) Lamb's narrow 1 point victory would not have possible without massive Democratic turnout. In a largely rural district with an 11 point Republican Party advantage (PVI) that Trump carried by 19 points Democrats managed to make up a plurality of the the electorate, 46% compared to just 41% for Republicans. And that was driven by large turnout among Democratic voters in the Pittsburgh suburbs motivated to the polls by negative partisanship and backlash to Trump.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
 
Aaronrules380

Aaronrules380

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
22,470
Avinash117 said:
It happened in an Austrian election in 2016 a lot of women supported the party that wasn't extremely nationalistic. Women in general tend to support the Democratic Party for long time, but now it the gap is increasing. Wonder what is causing this. The reason pointed out in a tweet says that women are threatening men's status, it is a reason but I don't think that tells the whole story.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
What more needs to be there beyond women gravitating for a party that uses blatant mysogyny as one of its core tenants?
 

Avinash117

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,602
Aaronrules380 said:
What more needs to be there beyond women gravitating for a party that uses blatant mysogyny as one of its core tenants?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Because very little is that simple. Women in general supported Democrats more than the Republicans for years. However, majority of white women don't back the Democrats, but they do slightly more than white men. If it was that simple all majority women of every group will back the Democrats. Also what is different now is that the gap is increasing in all racial groups. I have some suspicions, so I am not really surprised, but I like to see more details to get a better understanding.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.