16 Ways of Looking at a Female Voter #
In today’s New York Times Magazine, Linda Hirshman offers sixteen interesting ways that observers try to understand female voting patterns. In doing so, she shows that there is not easy way to do it.
RACE FACTORS into the gender gap in two important ways. In 2004, for example, the nonwhite female vote was 12 percent of the electorate; the nonwhite male vote was 10 percent. So when polled, women as a group were less “white” than men were — and nonwhite women are more likely to vote Democratic than white women are. Second, nonwhite women are more likely to vote Democratic than nonwhite men (75 percent to 67 percent in 2004). In other words, nonwhite women make “women” more Democratic than the nonwhite men make “men” Democratic. In 2004, 55 percent of white women actually favored George Bush.