By Jim Geraghty
Friday, November 01, 2024
You want to talk about the Julia
Roberts ad? Fine. Let’s talk about it. I presume Lyle Lovett will not be
giving the rebuttal.
Start with the fact that the gender gap is nothing new:
In every presidential election
since 1980, a gender gap has been apparent, with a greater proportion of women
than men preferring the Democrat in each case. The magnitude of the gender gap
has ranged in size from four to twelve points since 1980. . . .
In every presidential election
since 1996, a majority of women have preferred the Democratic candidate.
Moreover, women and men have favored different candidates in presidential
elections since 2000, with the exception of 2008 when men were almost equally
divided in their preferences for Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John
McCain.
The same divide that manifests in the presidential vote
appears in public surveys on a
wide range of issues: “Women tend to be more supportive of gun control,
reproductive rights, welfare, and equal rights policies than men. They tend to
be less supportive of the death penalty, defense spending, and military
intervention.”
It is not surprising that men and women see the world
differently, both in politics and other parts of life. (My go-to anecdote here
was going to be astrology, but fascinatingly, the numbers in this Harris survey indicated that men and women
were equally likely to believe in astrology, and men actually pay more for
astrological advice.)
Men and women are different. This doesn’t mean that one
is better or worse than the other; they are complementary. Some of us believe
that the reason people marry — or “pair-bond,” to use the term of the
evolutionary biologists — is because that yin-and-yang balance is what’s
needed, or perhaps optimal, to get through the world. One of my favorite books that I read long ago contended that when a
man facing a big decision says, “I need to sleep on it,” he is either
consciously or subconsciously saying, “I need to consult my wife.” This is not
because he’s under her thumb; it’s because he knows that she, with her
different perspective and life experience, will recognize things that he won’t
and have some useful advice about whatever decision he’s facing.
(None of this is meant to say that if you’re doing
something differently, I’m criticizing you. People get very touchy about this
subject. Cam and I laid out our advice to young men a little less than a
decade ago.)
Left-of-center analysts love to talk about the gender
gap, because it represents one of the major advantages for the Democratic Party. (“Women have
registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election
since 1980, with the turnout gap between women and men growing slightly larger
with each successive presidential election.”) I suspect this is one of the
reasons why one of the dominant narratives in our culture is “What’s wrong with men?” The subtext is often that men are a defective form of
women who require some kind of fixing, rather than their own thing. (As one essayist noted, the women in our cultural and social
elite love dissecting the topic of “What’s wrong with men,” but men seem to be
much less enthusiastic about hashing it out.)
But there’s a thorny complication in the Democrats’ happy
narrative, and it’s that married women vote Republican in much higher numbers
than single women do. Married men vote Republican more than single men do, too.
The Pew Research Center:
Married men and women are more
likely to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party than their
unmarried counterparts, with 59 percent of married men and half of married
women oriented toward the GOP. . . .
Women who have never been married
are three times as likely to associate with the Democratic Party as with the
Republican Party (72 percent vs. 24 percent).
By a narrower — though still
sizable — margin (61 percent to 37 percent), never-married men also favor the
Democrats.
Now, perhaps that reflects that people who lean
Republican are more likely to get married. But there’s also a compelling
argument that marriage is a “Republican-ification” process for both men and
women — it alters their worldview and values, and that has a downstream effect
on their political views.
Why does marriage often make individuals more
conservative? One big reason is kids, as parents suddenly A) have a big
interest in the long-term condition of their community, state, and country; B)
have a whole lot of new costs that make their taxes much more annoying; and C)
must care about if their local schools are teaching the kids nonsense.
(A statement like that is almost guaranteed to bring out
commentators who declare they were Democrats before having kids and remained
Democrats after having kids. Great, do you want a medal or a monument?)
People call for sweeping changes when they have nothing
to lose. When you have kids, you definitely have something to lose, and
thus care a great deal about conserving that which is good in society. You
aren’t quite as enthusiastic about being a vanguard of the revolution and
turning everything upside down. We laugh at those Progressive Insurance commercials
about people
turning into their parents because we recognize ourselves in the
not-so-young homeowners. All of a sudden, the minivan starts to look like a
reasonable option because of the space for groceries in the back and side
airbags.
Oh, and somewhere along the line, you probably saw an
ultrasound of your child and your sense of when human life begins may well have
been changed.
A good reflection of the Democratic Party’s vision of
“the good life” — at least for everyone else — can be found in the Obama
campaign’s interactive web ad, “Life of Julia.” If you’ve forgotten or weren’t paying
attention to politics in 2012, Julia was a strangely pupil-less woman whose
whole life was reliant upon the benevolent intervention of the Obama
administration. (I know it will shock you to learn that the Obama campaign played fast and loose with the facts in its apocryphal tale
of the woman with Little Orphan Annie eyes.) Julia had a child, but the father
never appeared in the story and Julia never got married. As Jessica Gavora
wrote at the time, “The decline of marriage and Democratic political opportunism
have combined to transform what used to be a situation to be avoided — single
motherhood — into a new and proud American demographic, citizens of Obama’s
Hubby State.”
I mentioned “everyone else” above because you notice the
Obamas, the Bidens, the Harris-Emhoffs, and the Walzes — as well as the
Pelosis, Schumers, the Jeffrieses, and most other Democratic Party leaders —
are married, and in most cases have been for a long time. This would be another
case of the largely progressive American elite refusing to preach what they
practice, as writers from David Brooks to Tim Carney to Charles Murray to Ed West have
observed. A lot of elite Democrats might find the life of Julia
unfulfilling without a spouse to come home to every night — particularly in
those later years once the kids are off to college or moved out.
(A statistic I wish was more widely known: “After taking into
account other factors that have been reported to contribute to suicide,
divorced men still experienced much increased [sic] risks of suicide
than divorced women. They were nearly 9.7 times more likely to kill themselves
than comparable divorced women.” A possibly related statistic: 69 percent of divorces in heterosexual marriages are initiated
by the wife.)
If you get married, have kids, and stay married, you’re
going to have a smoother ride in life. And no (long sigh), this isn’t an attack
on divorced people. Marriage is hard and we’re all rooting for you, but it’s
probably not a good idea for two people to stay together if they constantly
make each other miserable. If we can increase the marriage-satisfaction rate, we will likely lower the
divorce rate.
Just as many cultural elites perceive men as defective
women, the default setting of a lot of progressives is that a woman who doesn’t
vote for the Democratic Party must be defective in some way. She must be
uneducated or misled by “disinformation.” She must be succumbing to Republican
fearmongering on illegal immigration or crime.
She must be corrupted or brainwashed by toxic masculinity
if she can’t appreciate a true gentlemanly masculine role model like, you know, Doug Emhoff.
To many progressives, it is simply unthinkable that any
significant number of women might look at what the modern Democratic Party has
to offer — federal spending at such a runaway pace that it sets off the worst
inflation in 40 years, a de facto policy of open borders by giving the tidal
wave of asylum seekers court dates a decade from now, a revolving-door justice system where
you can attempt to stab a gubernatorial candidate on stage and get
released on your own recognizance later that day, lawmakers
who call for a “balanced” approach when it comes to mass rapes committed by
Hamas — and say “no thanks.” As mentioned earlier this week, a lot of Democrats walk around
believing that the Biden administration is doing a terrific job, the economy is
roaring, and the public has great faith in Kamala Harris’s abilities.
When they are confronted by the fact that married women actually favored Trump over Biden in the 2020
exit polls — 52 percent to 47 percent — the explanation that makes the most
sense to Democrats is that these women must be voting Republican out of fear of
their husbands.
Back in an interview with NPR in 2017, Hillary Clinton declared that her loss could be attributed in
part to the fact that, “I’m talking principally about white women — they
will be under tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and
male employers not to vote for ‘the girl.’” And then the following year, Clinton blamed white women for her defeat, declaring those in
that demographic feel “ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband,
your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”
(I know that when it comes to healthy, supportive, and
clearly communicating marriages, our first thought is always of the Clintons,
but do you see a lot of guys out there pressuring their moms to
vote for a particular candidate?)
Marriages where one spouse is a Republican and one spouse
is a Democrat are pretty rare — just 4 percent of all marriages, according to research by the Institute for Family Studies. It’s a little
more common to have marriages where one spouse is a member of either party and
the other is an independent. But in 79 percent of marriages, both spouses have
the same party identification.
That ad narrated by Julia Roberts is a Jenga tower of
inaccurate and faulty assumptions. But it’s not really meant to persuade
married women Republicans or independents to secretly vote for Harris and tell
their husbands they voted for Trump. It’s meant to make Democrats feel better
if the exit polls show that most married women voted for Trump again. Just as
the villain in a Scooby-Doo cartoon would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t
for those meddling kids, the Democratic candidate would have won if it wasn’t
for all those abusive husbands.
ADDENDUM: The gender gap runs in the other
direction, too. You may recall that on Election Day 2004, the early exit polls indicated that John Kerry was going to win in
a landslide. Long after the election, they determined: “Kerry supporters
were more likely to talk to exit pollsters than supporters of Mr. Bush, some of
whom were put off by very young interviewers.”
Very young women interviewers, perhaps?
How many men who voted for George W. Bush came out of the
polling place, encountered a young attractive woman exit-poll interviewer, and
said, “Why, of course I voted for John Kerry! Say, what are you doing after
your shift here? Do you want to grab a drink or something?”
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