Even before Dobbs/Trump Democrats did much better with women compared to the GOP: Why? (user search)
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  Even before Dobbs/Trump Democrats did much better with women compared to the GOP: Why? (search mode)
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Author Topic: Even before Dobbs/Trump Democrats did much better with women compared to the GOP: Why?  (Read 1075 times)
Skill and Chance
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« on: September 23, 2022, 06:57:11 AM »
« edited: September 24, 2022, 12:41:15 PM by Skill and Chance »

What was the last election housewives were a demographic that was more Democratic than the nation as a whole?
Not in recent history I guess. Not sure if there has been one.

Hmmm... the answer is 2020 if WFH counts!

Beyond that, probably 1932-40 because of how much the business community feared FDR?  Those women who were active in business back then would have been more exposed to that.
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Skill and Chance
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« Reply #1 on: September 23, 2022, 07:11:42 AM »

Biological women are pre-wired to generally be more caring towards others since their job was to carry the baby and then in most societies they would be the most active caregiver towards the baby. Men on the other hand generally went out to hunt, and were far more exposed to competition with other men. They were also the protectors of their family or community. In the parties today, Ds are generally seen as the more compassionate party that wants to lift everyone up while the Republican Party encourages the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" ideology of individual people reaping the benefit of their hard work.

Women voted to the right of men for decades after the Nineteenth Amendment.

Proof?

Exit polls up to 1976 show women breaking more Republican than men.  Also consider the massive swing away from FDR from 1940 to 1944.  Military absentee voting basically didn't exist at the time, so the electorate may well have been pushing 60% female. 
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Skill and Chance
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« Reply #2 on: September 23, 2022, 10:27:45 AM »
« Edited: September 23, 2022, 01:14:38 PM by Skill and Chance »

Not sure why the biological explanation is getting so much hate here. Economic differences certainly play a role in the gender divide, but don't explain why the divide persists even for men and women with similar incomes, industries, and educations. Seems very likely that at least one reason for the gender divide is biological.

As for why women used to be more right wing than men, a potential explanations could be that
that women are more likely to value stability, but men are more sympathetic to conservative ideological appeals. Thus, female voters might like a candidate like Eisenhower more than male voters, but be less likely than male voters to like a candidate like Reagan. A good example of this would be Chile, where women were more right wing up until the 2021 election, where Kast, a more ideologically conservative nominee than past candidates, performed better among men than woman.

Biological explanations for voting choices are pretty extreme, though, especially when voting choices have fluctuated so much over just 4 or so generations of men and women voting on equal terms.  Also the women = risk averse stuff that's really common in social science fails to account for how incredibly dangerous childbirth used to be.
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Skill and Chance
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« Reply #3 on: September 24, 2022, 12:50:06 PM »

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/women-won-the-right-to-vote-100-years-ago-they-didnt-start-voting-differently-from-men-until-1980/

A really good article from FiveThirtyEight. It suggests that when (mostly white) women gained the right to vote, they tended to be wealthier. Many women continued to not vote, because they had grown up believing that their gender did not belong in politics, the article states. By the 1970's women started finally voting at the same rates as men, but did not start leaning Democratic until 1980, when the Republican Party railed against the ERA and shifted rightward.

That makes a lot of sense if you ask me.


This was true early on (though surely not as late as 1970), but the class impact went the other way.  It was generally upper class/upper-middle class women who were taught that they should be over there raising the children.  Working class women and particularly farm wives were more likely to be involved in most or all of the same activities as men and be treated as equals earlier on.  This was especially true in the West.  This also meant that the movement for equal rights for women started off with a rural base and urban opposition!

When California held an all-male referendum on whether to put women's suffrage in the state constitution, it lost dramatically in the San Francisco Bay Area (the oldest and most established city at the time) and only tied in L.A., but narrowly won statewide because of near unanimous support from the rural counties.

https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/celebrating-womens-suffrage/california-women-suffrage-centennial 

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Skill and Chance
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« Reply #4 on: September 24, 2022, 04:31:41 PM »
« Edited: September 24, 2022, 05:48:52 PM by Skill and Chance »

Biological women are pre-wired to generally be more caring towards others since their job was to carry the baby and then in most societies they would be the most active caregiver towards the baby. Men on the other hand generally went out to hunt, and were far more exposed to competition with other men. They were also the protectors of their family or community.

"Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus killed us all" exhibit #463728

I do think this is stupid, but there is something to women being more left-wing/liberal and less right-wing/conservative than men in voting patterns across the developed democratic world, from Sweden to Taiwan.

That's true on the issues that are being debated today and from the position that women occupy in society today.  We don't know how a 23rd century woman would vote on teleportation regulations. 

Part of the shift is probably attributed to the proportion of women who preferred to work as little as possible after having kids.  When deciding who to vote for, they would obviously have a huge incentive to keep their husband's income as high as possible.  In the 1920's, this would have been a clear majority of American women, but it has since fallen to perhaps 10-20% at most.

So you get class based voting where husbands and wives generally pick the same side with the goal of keeping the family income as high as possible.  Recently, with the decline in "housewives" and no equivalent rise in "househusbands" and with marriage after age 30 becoming increasingly common (meaning the average person will vote several times while still single), it's way more common for men and women to have diverging political interests now.
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