Political Gender Gap Growing Most Men Republicans, Most Women Democrats
The gender gap that loomed so large in the last presidential election is widening into a canyon, according to a poll sponsored by a Democratic women’s group.
The survey conducted for Emily’s List, the 45,000-member group that raises funds for women Democratic candidates, also shows that women are far more likely than men to be enthusiastic about President Clinton when compared to the 1996 election when female voters were widely credited with putting Clinton over the top for a second term.
“You see a majority of women voting Democratic, a majority of men voting Republican, and those trends have grown in opposite directions in 1997,” said Celinda Lake a Democratic political consultant who conducted the survey of 1,325 voters with former Clinton White House pollster Stan Greenberg.
The survey asked 925 women and 395 men about party preferences and how each might affect the other in the 1998 election. It is the first in a series of “Women’s Monitor” polls that Emily’s List is commissioning for the 1998 campaign season.
A total of 51 percent of women said they were more likely to vote for a Democratic nominee for Congress, while 37 percent of women said they would prefer a Republican. That’s a gap of 14 percentage points.
For men, 36 percent said they want a Democrat for Congress and 50 percent want a Republican. That also was a gap of 14 points.
The sum of those two gaps - 28 percentage points - was 10 percentage points more than in a similar Emily’s List poll conducted just after the 1996 election.
In the 1996 poll, 54 percent of women voted Democratic, compared to 46 percent Republican. Men reported voting Republican 55 percent to 45 percent.
About Clinton, 61 percent of women say he is doing a good job, with 34 percent disapproving. That 27-point gap is significantly wider than the 16-point margin by which women voted for Clinton in 1996 when 54 percent of women voted for Clinton and 38 percent for GOP nominee Robert Dole.
For men, Clinton’s approval rating is 50 percent, compared to 46 percent who disapprove of the president. Clinton in 1996 won 44 percent of the vote, compared to 45 percent for Dole.
At a press conference, Lake and Greenberg said the numbers represent only a preliminary exercise in political fortune-telling a year away from the 1998 mid-term election.
Other elements of the poll suggest Democrats may face an impossible task in taking either the Senate or the House of Representatives back from the GOP next year. A total of 67 percent of respondents approved of the way their individual representative is performing, with women at 70 percent and men at 63 percent.