In “every presidential election since 1950 — except Goldwater in ’64 — the Republican would have won if only the men had voted,” said pundit Ann Coulter in a 2003 Guardian interview. This pattern has continued since then. In the 2018 midterms, percentage-wise, men supported the GOP 51-47 while women broke for the Democrats 59-40. Men voted for President Trump in 2020 by a 53-45 margin; women swung toward Joe Biden 57-42. As for Tuesday’s 2022 election, despite all the talk of the #WalkAway movement and a “historical realignment,” the picture was similar:
Men supported Republican candidates 56-42.
Women voted for Democrats 53-45.
In other words, there was a male red wave — that ran up against a female seawall.
Writing Thursday about the women’s vote’s influence, The Hill’s Lauren Leader pointed out that females “are more likely to be registered to vote and more likely to turn out than men.”
Leader then asserted that prenatal infanticide, in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, was a significant factor. She wrote:
The Michigan governor’s race is highly instructive here. Exit polling shows that race was all about abortion; it was both on the ballot with a constitutional amendment and a contest between women candidates with starkly different commitments to upholding abortion rights…. The result: female Michiganders hugely came out for Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, 75 percent of them voting for her compared to 55 percent of men among the 18-29 demographic, and 62 percent versus 48 percent overall. And it was a multigenerational coalition: Majorities of women of all ages broke for Whitmer, while men over 30 mostly went for Republican Tudor Dixon. White women also broke for Whitmer by 52 percent, as did independent women.
“Michigan is an important story because it illustrates just how much the political divides in America today are really gender divides,” Leader continued. “Women across all generations, and women of color, are overwhelmingly left-leaning. This also tracks with the higher education level of Democrats — women have been the majority of college degree earners for years and are also more than 50 percent of the graduate degree holders. Republicans are increasingly white, male, less-educated and much more right-leaning.”
Speaking of “education,” Leader apparently misunderstands the term. But its true meaning is reflected in the apocryphal saying, “Never let your schooling interfere with your education.” And for insight into why this saying was birthed, just take a gander at the 2022 exit polling: In general, the more schooling people have, the more likely they were to support leftists. Perhaps college today is where you go, to echo Ronald Reagan, to learn so much that isn’t so.
What is so is that there’s some important nuance to the female vote. That is, there’s a strong correlation between women’s marital status and their voting patterns.
Sixty-eight percent of unmarried women voted Democratic in 2022, and only 31 percent supported Republicans. In contrast, 56 percent of married women cast ballots for the GOP, while 42 percent supported the Democrats. In fact, while married women weren’t quite as likely as married men to vote Republican, they were slightly more likely to do so than bachelors.
Partially explaining this is that the unmarried tend to be younger; not only do people generally become more conservative with age, but the later generations today are the most liberal in history (with the exception of, perhaps, young white men). Yet, at least insofar as women go, there’s another factor.
As I wrote in 2011, they are “The Security Sex.”
I then asked, “Did you ever wonder why women are so often attracted to strong, burly men?” It’s the same reason why they’re drawn to men boasting wealth and/or power and/or high intelligence (Einstein had many female fans) and are more careful investors. It’s the same reason why male animals show off and act dominant to attract females.
Women crave security.
“Ideally, they want to ‘marry up’ — up in terms of strength, finances, clout and intellectual capability,” I wrote. “And this is reflected in a not uncommon female reaction. When a woman falls for a man who she can look ‘up’ to, she may say to him something such as ‘You make me feel safe.’” This is logical from a survival standpoint, too, because a woman can only maximize her children’s survival chances if she secures a safe environment for them.
I then continued:
The cocoon of safety in which woman traditionally was most comfortable … is the family. And it is by necessity a little nanny state; it is, quite appropriately, a very socialist, top-down, command-control institution. Its closest thing to the “people,” the children, are controlled and afforded relatively few freedoms; the family is not democratic. And it is a communal place, where everything is shared and the “people” are cared for by the “government” (the parents). To a great extent, its operating principle is “From each according to his means; to each according to his needs.”
The problem occurs when this domestic-realm nanny-state mentality is applied to the wider society. And who is most likely to do this? Answer: Women who can’t find that craved-after security within a family — that is, unmarried women. Big government can become a surrogate husband.
This is, by the way, why both discouraging marriage and encouraging attendance at the propaganda mills masquerading as institutions of higher learning serve leftists’ ends. If all of American womanhood comprised unmarried, aging, female Ph.D.s, the whole country would look like San Francisco.
