White Women Dump the Dems - Democratic Underground

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Tue Sep-28-10 07:40 AM
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White Women Dump the Dems

White Women Dump the Dems
by Linda Hirshman

Democrats are losing white women support. According to Gallup polling data exclusive to The Daily Beast, white women are deserting the Democratic Party in droves. Linda Hirshman on where the PUMAs are heading.

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It’s the independent women (21 percent!) and the Democratic women (24 percent) who aren’t revved up about the coming midterms.

Exclusive data prepared at The Daily Beast’s request sheds some light. Gallup conducted its regular weekly survey of 1,750 adults (1,500 registered voters)—then, for the period between August 1 and September 22, ran the data controlling for race and gender. The result: A dismal 27 percent of white female registered voters expressed excitement about the contest, compared to 36 percent of black men and women and 40 percent of white men. It is fair to say that the white women’s numbers are not depressed by indifference among the almost entirely white Republican women. At least in June, Gallup was finding that the Republican women were the most enthusiastic of the registered female voters. It’s the independent women (21 percent!) and the Democratic women (24 percent) who aren’t revved up about the coming midterms.

Asked to interpret the data, Gallup’s Frank Newport said that “men are more likely to be Republican than women are, and Republicans in general are more enthused than Democrats this year.”

Remember the PUMAs, whose motto was Party Unity My Ass? They were the supposedly angry white women (the horror) so pissed off by Hillary Clinton’s defeat they were going elect John McCain? The PUMAs were sort of lost in the pixie dust storm of the Obama election. I wonder if we declared them an endangered species too soon? There were glimpses that all might not be well with white women in the exit polls even then. Turnout was up in 2008, but white women as a percentage of the electorate shrank a couple of points. The percentage of white men stayed the same, and nonwhites, both men and women, voted in larger percentages in 2008 than 2004. White women vote Republican, just like white men do, but they did give Obama the benefit of the traditional gender gap, supporting him more than the white men did. They didn’t like him nearly as well as they had liked Al Gore, though.

In her indispensable new book about women and the 2008 election, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Rebecca Traister outed me as having a WWHD (What Would Hillary Do) bracelet, which I take out when the White House agrees to exclude women’s abortions from the new high-risk health-care pools or when Michelle Obama takes her Givenchy outfits to the Costa Brava for a little mid-recession respite from gardening. So I cannot help thinking that there are a lot of other women who responsibly voted for the Democrat hoping for the best but who were not firmly attached to the whole undertaking.

Well, who needs white women anyway? They haven’t broken Democratic in years. A big piece of the “gender gap” for the Democrats is because the category “women voters” is more nonwhite than the men are, and nonwhites vote heavily Democratic. So the gender gap is partly a race/gender gap. The rest of the gender gap is due to white men’s robust fealty to the Republican Party. Although white women do not vote Republican in such large numbers as men do, in 2008 Barack Obama would have won the popular vote, even if the white women had voted exactly the same as their white male counterparts. He held his losses with the pale males to 41 percent, and the huge majorities among nonwhite voters did the rest.

Here’s why white women matter. Pundits like the authors of The Emerging Democratic Majority predict that a growing nonwhite population—combined with the clear-sighted fealty of the big-brained voters of the postindustrial economy (read, young white guys in chinos) and the conventional gender gap—means that Republicans would soon lose their electoral dominance. But the 2010 election seems to indicate their predictions were either wrong or way premature. Obama’s majorities were probably more anomalous than transformative: a fragile coalition of marginally less rabid white men, a few more dutiful white women, and overwhelming nonwhite support.

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More at:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-27/democrats-losing-support-of-white-women-gallup-poll-data/?om_rid=MMBIx0&om_mid=_BMod3IB8U8xxAe