"I
feel like my voice doesn't matter. People who suck still are in
office,
so it
doesn't make a difference.
– Megan
Davis, 31-year-old massage therapist in Rhode Island who never votes,
and says she's proud of her record
This may surprise you. I
know it did me. Women dominate among America’s most politically
disengaged. According to a new Knight Foundation survey, the largest
ever study of why people don’t vote, 53 percent of chronic
nonvoters are female. Rishika Dugyala writes in Politico:
“Sixty-five percent
of ‘unaware’ nonvoters were women. This is a subgroup of
nonvoters least likely to mobilize and unable to answer questions
about the government or hot-button issues.”
The first of its kind, the
study, “The 100 Million Project: The Untold Story of American
Non-Voters,” examines 12,000 people who chronically do not vote –
those who are not registered to vote or voted only once in the last
six national elections.
The study examined
non-voters throughout the country and across the political spectrum,
at every level of education and income, and from every walk of life
in terms of age, race, gender and religious affiliation, with
separate samples in key battleground states. For comparative
purposes, 1,000 active voters and 1,000 18- to 24-year-old eligible
citizens were also surveyed.
As many know, there is
also a class element of nonvoters. Chronic nonvoters also are “more
likely to be lower income, less likely to be married, less educated,
and more likely to be a member of a racial minority group — though
they were still predominantly white — according to the Knight
study,” Dugyala writes.
Why the gender gap? The
study found that 76 percent of male voters actively sought out news
and information, compared with 69 percent of female voters. Among
nonvoters, the numbers were 60 percent men and 53 percent women.
“Politics
is like another language to me. I don’t care about it
and don’t
want to learn more about it.”
– a
female nonvoter from Las Vegas polled in the study
Why, Oh Why?
The study suggests men
might be more “fixated on politics” than women. Non-voters are
less engaged with news and information. It is thought that men are
also “more free to speak out” on politics – on Twitter, on
Facebook. Women, being more hesitant to express political thoughts,
have a tendency to say, “I don't know.”
“Those were the
nonvoters that are a bit more female, a lot of them weren’t in the
workforce, they were a full time parent or underemployed. Social
networks and workforce networks tend to put things like politics more
on one’s radar.”
– Evette
Alexander, Director of Learning and Impact at the Knight Foundation
The study also suggests
women are just too “busy.” Page Gardner, founder and president of
the Center for Voter Information, told Dugyala that women become
politically disengaged because they’re overwhelmed. Gardner
explained …
“Unmarried parents
with young kids have an especially difficult time participating in
civic life, she added. The ‘second shift’ – taking care of kids
after work – cuts into time spent following the news and,
eventually, voting. Low-income nonvoters face housing and food
insecurities too, exacerbated for women because of the gender pay
gap.”
Although many activist
groups are dominated by women, it's not likely they’re dominated by
women who work two jobs, or 60 hours a week, and have four kids at
home.
And, sadly, many women
feel they just aren't educated enough to take part in politics and
even in voting. They actually feel their vote might harm the country.
Evette Alexander says …
“I was surprised to
see many nonvoters express a sentiment that they would be doing a
disservice to the country by voting because they didn’t feel
educated enough and that an uneducated vote would be worse than not
voting at all.”
What has worked to
increase female voter turnout? A successful GOTV effort in Florida
and North Carolina targeting moms of color in 2018 tried everything
from providing games and art projects at polling places, so moms
could take their kids with them to vote, to a program in which women
volunteered to hand-write postcards to other moms with low voting
frequencies, reminding them to turn out.
The group also launched
mom-to-mom direct texts. The whole idea, says Rowe-Finkbeiner, was to
build a “support structure around moms and around voting that
celebrates voting and bringing your kids with you voting.”
Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner,
executive director and co-founder of MomsRising, a mother’s
advocacy group, launched this “Be a Voter, Raise a Voter”
program, and it turned out at rates 13 percentage points higher than
the average for moms of color in Florida and 11 percent better in
North Carolina.
2020 and the Future
What is at stake in 2020?
The Knight Foundation study found that if non-voters all turned out
in 2020, non-voter candidate preferences show they would add nearly
equal share to Democratic and Republican candidates (33 percent
versus 30 percent, respectively), while 18 percent said they would
vote for a third party.
In other words, the
largest bloc of citizens in the presidential elections are not those
who vote for one candidate or another, but those who do not
participate in the election at all.
People are more evenly
divided on current political issues and President Trump than
previously thought. The study shows fifty-one percent have a negative
opinion of Trump, versus 40 percent positive. While non-voters skew
center-left on some key issues like health care, they are slightly
more conservative than active voters on immigration and abortion.
Sam Gill, senior vice
president and chief program officer at Knight Foundation, says …
“This study brings us
face to face – for the first time – with those who feel
disconnected from our political process. If we care about the future
of our democracy, we have an obligation to better understand our
friends, neighbors and family members who choose to sit out
elections.”
The #MeToo movement and
Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court hearings opened up a national
conversation about sexual assault. Panels of men have been in charge
of deciding women’s health care. And now, a record number of women
are running for office.
Still …
Consider women and their
stereotypical depiction in the world of politics. Susan Fiske, a
psychology professor at Princeton said that women “generally fall
into two alternatives: they are either seen as nice but stupid, or
smart but mean.” These behaviors, in fact, are considered an
embodiment of masculinity: many of the adjectives we might use to
describe the ideal leader are imbued and intermixed with powerful
manhood.
This same view has
certainly ham-stringed the women's vote. The 14th Amendment, ratified
in 1868, specifically identified “voters” as male. It was the
first time a federal document had done so. Why were women excluded,
both from many individual states’ laws and from the 14th Amendment?
The framers of the Constitution – and many who followed them for
more than the next 100 years – believed that women were childlike
and incapable of independent thought. They believed that women could
not be counted on to vote responsibly, so they left women out of
states’ voting laws and the Constitutional amendments that granted
voting rights to African American men.
As early as the 1840s,
some women began speaking out, arguing that women should have the
right to vote. However, it took until 1920 for that right to be added
to the United States Constitution.
And, in the years
immediately following suffrage, the conventional wisdom was that
women didn't really want to vote at all. Headlines declared women's
suffrage a "failure." In the words of one writer, "The
American woman ...won the suffrage in 1920. She seemed, it is true,
to be very little interested in it once she had it."
"(In the 1920
Presidential Election) just 36% of eligible women turned out to vote
(compared with 68% of men). The low turnout was partly due to other
barriers to voting, such as literacy tests, long residency
requirements and poll taxes. Inexperience with voting and persistent
beliefs that voting was inappropriate for women may also have kept
turnout low. The gap was lowest between men and women in states that
were swing states at the time, such as Missouri and Kentucky, and
where barriers to voting were lower."
(J. Kevin
Corder and Christina Wolbrecht. “For women's equality day,
here's the
key question: Was women's suffrage a failure?”
The
Washington Post. August 26, 2017.)
Now, in 2020, expectations
for women voters are often more grounded in assumptions and
stereotypes than in evidence, and predicting how women will vote
requires looking beyond gender alone. Women did and might still take
direction from their husbands.
Change occurs slowly. A
female writer proposed a different hypothesis in 1956: "If
married couples tend to vote the same way—and they do—it is
because their environment gives them the same orientation, rather
than because the woman rubber-stamps the man's choice."
Women have gained
considerable political independence in the last forty years.
Christina Wolbrecht, professor in the Department of Political Science
at Notre Dame, and J. Kevin Corder professor of Political Science at
Western Michigan University, speak of bigger changes of
identification in female voting related to issues …
“By 1980, women were
more likely to exercise their right to vote than were men, and more
likely to vote for Democratic candidates. Why? In that election year,
the Republican Party first took clear positions against – and the
Democratic Party clear positions for – the Equal Rights Amendment
and abortion rights. Observers at the time (and since) assumed that
women prioritized their own equality and rights, and 'women's issues'
were given the lion's share of blame, or credit, for this new
partisan divide.”
(Christina
Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder. “Predicting How Women Will Vote
Requires Looking Beyond Gender Alone. Newsweek. January 30,
2020.)
And yet today women and
men don't actually report very different positions on issues like
abortion. Even when they do disagree – arguing issues like sexual
harassment and equal pay – other issues usually have a bigger
impact on women's vote. And, as evidenced women can take all sides of
divides as they do with pro-choice and pro-life.
Expectations were very
high for a historic gender gap in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election
– Hillary Clinton was poised to be the first woman president. Yet
what was most surprising about 2016 was how normal the voting
patterns were. However, while the gender gap in 2016 was big –
women, like men, didn't vote based on their gender alone. Party
identity overwhelmingly ruled. Almost 90% of women who identified as
Republicans voted for Trump, the same rate as Republican men.
Wolbrecht and Corder explain …
“In 1964, men and
women were equally likely to identify with the Democratic Party.
Across the next two decades, both men and women became less likely to
identify as Democrats, but it was men who defected at a far greater
rate than women.
“Why did (some) men
abandon the Democratic Party? Why did (more) women stay? The answers
are complex, and require careful attention to race, geography and
education. A big part of the answer appears to be differences over
social welfare policies. Unlike attitudes on women's issues, women
and men consistently differ in their support for government programs
for children, the poor, infirm and elderly, with men more likely to
express conservative positions, which helped push them toward the
GOP.
“Furthermore, social
welfare preferences work in concert with other attitudes. Since the
1960s, press coverage and opinions about social welfare have been
intertwined with racial attitudes – conservatives on racial issues
tend to be conservatives on social welfare, and vice versa. Women are
more likely to express egalitarian values, and those views also help
explain why more women stuck with the Democratic Party.”
(Christina
Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder. “Predicting How Women Will Vote
Requires Looking Beyond Gender Alone. Newsweek. January 30,
2020.)
The gender gap affirms
that women today are more likely to vote Democratic than are men.
Yet, in most elections, a majority of white women vote Republican,
and a large majority of black women vote Democratic. In other words,
while more white women vote for Democrats than do white men, most
white women vote for Republicans in most elections. And while a large
majority of black men vote for Democrats, the percentage of black
women who vote Democratic is even greater.
While each group has
unique dynamics, similar patterns are observed among other racial and
ethnic groups. When we focus on the gender gap only, we tend to
mistakenly view women as a cohesive, Democratic-leaning group. When
we are attentive to race as well, our understanding of women voters
becomes more nuanced and much more accurate.
What does past evidence
say about the outcome of the 2020 election? Wolbrecht and Corder
expect that women will almost certainly vote more Democratic than
men, but probably not for the reasons people assume. They assume the
gender gap will be driven in part by the voting behavior of men, not
just women. And, differences between groups of women – especially
in terms of race and education – will likely be larger than
differences between women and men. Conjecture? Evidence based on
history.
There is every reason to
believe that the election of 2020 will be a close contest. What role
will that large group of politically disengaged women play in the
battle for the White House and in other hotly contested Congressional
seats? It could very well depend upon a candidate's understanding of
how and why women vote.
The group of previous
“non-voting” females can tip the scales for candidates who solve
the mystery of getting them to the polling places and having them
cast votes to enforce their most favorable policies. That will be a
monumental task for any candidate – work fraught with a multitude
both of excuses and of real challenges – but it is a highly
feasible outcome for anyone who pushes the right buttons on women's
issues and who exerts persuasive power to make women feel confident
in engaging in political matters.
“Non-voters are split
down the middle, adding nearly equal shares to both the Democrats and
Republicans. This sets up a scenario for 2020 in which the side
that’s more effective at getting out the vote – and crucially
turning out new voters – is likely to have the advantage in
November. There are constituencies on both sides waiting to be
activated.”
– Eitan
Hersh, Professor of Political Science at Tufts University
