Women Who Don't Vote -- Domination Over the Politically Disengaged

"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