Republicans Are Losing Women To The Democrats, But Why?
What is making most women become democrats? There are many reasons people have. For one they feel Trump has been too disrespectful to women. Many others believe that Democrats support of social justice and feminism is what is causing it. However there are studies showing that marriage is a big factor in whether women are democrat or republican. Divorced women tend to become democrat and women become republican upon getting married.
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We've had waves of accusations against Brett Kavanaugh, and some of them are absolutely...
Absurd.
I don't know how else to describe it.
Claiming that there are these gangs of men at parties drugging and raping women just sounds extraordinary.
And extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
But following this hearing, over nine hours of Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford answering questions, the lines were drawn in a rather obvious way.
The left obviously siding with Christine Blasey Ford, the right obviously siding with Brett Kavanaugh, and obviously there's overlap.
Nothing's absolute.
Following this, we saw an op-ed from Newsweek.
It says Republicans just lost women for good.
And it brought me back to something I've talked about in the past about how women, millennial women especially, are overwhelmingly voting Democrat.
And I wondered why that was.
There were people tweeting about a gender war coming.
Because men are supporting Kavanaugh and women are opposing him.
Again, it's not absolute.
And a lot of people were showing these photos of the old Republican white males.
And they said, the Republicans are all white males.
You can clearly see, you know, the division here.
And I made a video on my second channel yesterday about a Vox article where they talked about the white male backlash.
So I started to wonder about where this divide is coming from and if it really is being drawn on identity lines.
The first thing I want to do is just read the opening and closing statements from the Newsweek op-ed.
In the opening statement they say, When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, he reportedly told an aide, the Democratic Party had just lost the South for a generation.
On September 27, in a day-long nationally televised hearing on whether accused sexual abuser Brett Kavanaugh should be put on the Supreme Court of the United States, the Republicans lost the women.
But a generation will look like a short sentence and a region like the South a small setback in comparison to 52% of the voters in every congressional district who watched in horror.
And are now prepared to turn the Republicans out of office over it.
And I believe they're not entirely wrong.
I wouldn't say they lost every woman.
That's a bit too absolute.
They're obviously conservative women.
But especially when it comes to millennials, they are few and far between.
Now, I just want to highlight their closing statement in this op-ed.
I'm not going to read through the whole thing.
They say, The federal branch is not set up for populist movements like the recall.
But there are avenues.
Kavanaugh, like Persky, can be unbenched.
Women are simply not going to accept this monumentally unfit man remaining on the court regardless of what the Republicans manage to ram through this week.
Sooner or later, as Chicago newspaperman Finley Peter Dunn predicted, the Supreme Court follows, the election returns.
It's an opinion piece.
Is it true?
Well, as I mentioned, I've talked about this in the past, how there is a gender gap in voting.
First, I just want to show you some Pew data before looking at some opinion.
They say, as has been the case for more than two decades of Pew Research Center surveys, women are significantly more likely than men to associate with the Democratic Party.
While the gender gap has changed little in recent years, it is as wide as it has been at any point during this period.
Among registered voters, 56% of women affiliate with or lean toward the Democratic Party, compared with 44% of men.
Now I want to point out, when you look at all demographics, All ages.
Then it's fair to say that, for the most part, there's only a slight advantage the Democrats have in terms of women.
However, when it comes to the younger generation, the gap is much larger.
We'll get to that.
They say from 2010 through 2015, about half of women, 51 to 52%, identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party, but the share of women who identified with or leaned to the Democratic Party has risen in recent years to 54% in 2016, 56% in 2017.
The partisan breakdown of men is relatively unchanged over this period.
The Democratic gains among women have not come from increased affiliation with the party.
Overall, the proportion of women voters who identify with, rather than lean toward, the Democratic Party has remained relatively constant for the past 25 years.
In 1994, 37% of women said they identified with the Democratic Party, compared to 39% in 2017.
Again, looking at all age groups, there's not a big difference and there's not a huge advantage, but there is a shift among millennials.
And I believe this has to do with media, most notably with websites like Vox, which I'm now going to quote from.
But they show this chart, which is additionally from Pew.
And when we break down the difference between men and women, we can see that 68% of millennial women Lean towards Democratic candidates and only 24% of women lean toward Republicans.
And here's where it gets rather crazy.
I wanted to know why that was.
Was it the media manipulating people?
Are they targeting women specifically?
And it turns out it might actually be marriage for some reason or another.
I've got a couple studies I've pulled up and it looks like this is a widely accepted fact.
That married women are more likely to be Republican and unmarried women are more likely to lean Democrat.
I don't know if I'm phrasing it the right way.
I'll show you the data in a second.
But I want to talk about one of the reasons Vox believes this to be the case.
They say, As the chart shows, the trend accelerated right around the 2016 election.
Millennial women appear to have been pushed further toward the left by the election of Donald Trump.
In October 2016, the Washington Post published an Access Hollywood tape that caught Trump bragging about grabbing women by the pussy, comments he later brushed off as mere locker room talk.
Since then, more than 20 women have accused him of sexual misconduct, allegations he's responded to by denigrating several of the women.
Meanwhile, loyalty to the president is proving to be among the most important qualifications for conservative candidates seeking public office.
Women like Reps Martha Robbie and Barbara Comstock, who have spoken out against him, have seen these critiques come back to bite them at the polls.
At the same time, Democrats have sought to frame themselves as a party that promotes women candidates and female empowerment in the age of Me Too, with a record number of women vying for Democratic congressional spots this year, even as the party continues to be divided by the response to allegations against former Senator Al Franken.
Against that backdrop, young women, who have been a driving force in grassroots activism pushing for gender parity, seem to have made a clear choice.
Now, what I want to mention here is specifically this.
I think they do have a point when they talk about Trump's grab them by the pussy statement.
And before I get into the studies, I want to talk about at least my personal opinion
and why I think we're seeing this gap.
I believe there are data points that can prove it, but I do believe, speaking to my friends
and seeing things online, I think there is an overwhelming feeling of animosity or a
slight taken against women.
And perhaps the best way I can explain how women probably feel is how men probably feel when women say things like, kill all men, all men are rapists, and things of that nature.
There's an analogy that gets kicked around all the time.
They say, You have a bowl of M&Ms.
2% of them are poisoned.
Go ahead, take a handful.
And this has been used against every identity group.
It's used by people on the right against refugees because of the fear that some of them might be terrorists or criminals.
It's used by women when they talk about men being rapists, and it is a terrible analogy.
I believe it's an analogy.
It's terrible.
It's ridiculous.
Okay?
Yes.
With all things, there is risk.
In a liberal society, we recognize that sometimes bad people get away with doing things.
But what I want to point out is, first of all, over 90, I believe like 92% of my viewers on both of my channels are men.
Not women.
It's a very small percentage of women who actually watch the content I make.
And I don't know why.
And I don't think there's anything I can do about it.
To the men who are watching this, I know many people have commented about statements from feminists and people who oppose, you know, SJWs and things of that nature.
When people go on Twitter, these blue-checked, high-profile feminists, and they say things like, all men are bad, all men are criminals, all men are violent, when they say things like, hashtag kill all men, to a lot of guys, that's shocking and offensive, and many of these men would not support these women in any way.
Many of these women are not running for office, however.
When Trump said that, you know, when you're famous you can do whatever you want, women, you can kiss them, they let you grab them by the pussy, of that nature, a lot of women felt in a, it's a similar feeling.
I could only imagine, I'm not a woman.
But when you have a presidential candidate brag about how women let him do, you know, whatever he wants, and then you have allegations against him, women probably feel the same way when they hear that as men do when women say kill all men.
There's a similar feeling of being slighted by this identity group against you for things you can't change, and it feels like it's not fair.
I can only imagine a lot of millennial women are rallying against Trump because of this news about him, because he's considered to be, you know, uh...
The way I kind of frame it is, Trump was created in the era of two generations ago, when things were very different.
When men in the workplace would have secretaries and they'd slap their butts.
That's not acceptable today.
Times have changed, and it's not okay.
So when Trump does the locker room talk, and he says that he can grab women in this way, it might work for the older generation, who yes, they do vote.
But the younger generation is going to be like, dude, not okay.
But here's where it gets really interesting.
Because as much as I might have my opinion on how people feel and how that drives them to vote, there are actually studies going way back, and it apparently is widely believed that the reason women vote Democratic is because they are unmarried.
I was actually shocked to find this.
Before I get into that, I want to make one more point.
People don't remember what you say, they remember how you made them feel.
So even though there's probably many people watching saying Trump has done a great job, that you believe he's doing good things, one of the reasons I do not like Trump is that, I've said this before, he's not confidence building.
What I mean by that is when he talks, He makes people feel bad.
He makes the opposition feel bad.
And that allows them to rally.
And I think we need someone who's going to unite, not divide.
I don't believe he's entirely at fault for this, but I do believe it's part of his character that he is a braggart, boastful, seemingly arrogant guy.
And it doesn't work when he says things like, grab him by the pussy.
I think that's a really bad thing to have.
We need someone who can unite us.
And I believe that Trump is not the cause of the problems.
He's just a symptom of our greater culture war and the issues that are going on.
But let's take a look at some of this data.
This is an old study.
This is from 2002, so it's 16 years old.
Take that into consideration.
This is from JSTOR.
I don't know exactly where this was published.
Oh, I can see here it says it was the Quarterly Journal of Economics from August 2002.
And I'll just read you the abstract.
It says, Why have women become left-wing?
The political gender gap and the decline in marriage.
The last three decades have witnessed the rise of a political gender gap in the United States wherein more women than men favor the Democratic Party.
We trace this development to the decline in marriage, which we posit has made men richer and women poorer.
Data for the United States support this argument.
First, there is a strong positive correlation between state divorce prevalence and the political gender gap.
Higher divorce prevalence reduces support for the Democrats among men, but not women.
Second, longitudinal data shows that following marriage, women are less likely to support the Democratic Party.
And we can see they've actually framed this sentence to support the inverse.
Data show that following divorce, women are more likely to support the Democratic Party.
Now, when I saw this, I said, this is an old study, right?
Is this still a typically held belief?
And so I decided to go to just Wikipedia, very simply.
And it says, this is the Marriage Gap Wikipedia page.
It talks about a variety of, you know, different things between married and non-married.
And it says, party affiliation in the United States.
In the US, being a married woman is correlated with a higher level of support for the Republican Party, and being single with the Democratic Party.
Marriage does not seem to have a strong effect on party affiliation.
32% of married people call them Republicans, 31% say they're Democrats.
While among single people, 19% are Republicans, and 38% are Democrats.
The difference is most striking between married and single women.
Married women respond as being Republicans 15% more.
Single women respond as being Democrats 11% more.
Going back to this claim, they believe that women who are married have more access to wealth.
Essentially what they're saying is that, you know, divorce or being single keeps women poor and men richer.
And this is an interesting thing because it lends itself to an observation I made.
Most of the people that I know who support socialist policies are below the middle class median, and most people I know who support conservative policies tend to be above middle class median.
It's very simple.
When you advocate for more taxes to bring about programs, it makes sense.
If you're below the median, you're going to benefit from these programs, and you're going to benefit from the state taking more taxes from other people.
If you're above the middle class median, you will not benefit.
You will actually be harmed by the government taking more of your money to give to people who have less.
And thus, I've noticed, even around the world, protests against certain... Like in Venezuela, for instance.
You actually have the wealthier people protesting in the streets, because Venezuela is a socialist government that takes their money away and stifles their business.
Whereas in the US, you have the poor people protesting like Occupy Wall Street.
So I find it rather, it's actually rather interesting.
I know a lot of people who are, I guess another way we can frame it too, is outside of the idea of wealth.
It's also, I mean, I think it's also fairly obvious that Women who are married will probably hold more traditional values and views.
It's not that they're married.
There's a correlation, I guess.
It's not that after they get married all of a sudden they become Republicans, but that women who get married are probably more likely to be Republican in the first place, and women who are living in cities and are Democratic are probably more likely to be non-monogamous.
What I do find absolutely fascinating is the swing that after divorce they're more likely to be Democratic and after marriage they're more likely to be Republican.
That's absolutely astonishing to me.
I did not expect to find that.
So a lot of people are saying now that Brett Kavanaugh versus Christine Ford is a man versus woman issue.
There are feminists online saying that there's going to be a gender war.
I don't know if that's true.
But going back to the op-ed in the beginning, that Republicans have lost women.
Older women today are more likely to be Republican, but I firmly believe that moving forward, the millennial women who are Democrats are likely going to stay left-leaning and stay Democrats, and we can see this divide going, you know, it's getting worse.
I have to worry then, is the divide going to be, you know, men versus women, predominantly?
I want to point out that among male millennials, they're only slightly in favor of Republicans, with 47% in favor of Democrats, so perhaps that isn't the issue.
But I can say, Republicans have definitely not done a good job of courting young millennial women.
And I think there's some very obvious reasons for that, as shown in the study I presented.
I think it's also fair to say that younger women, they're just less likely to get married in general, because for whatever reason, times are changing, and that's going to have a profound impact on How things work in the future.
Look at the women who are 18 to 34 today, and move this bracket down a few spaces, and that's where they'll be when they're in their 50s.
And what does that mean for the millennials of the next generation?
I think it's fair to say the Republicans are in trouble.
I've talked to a lot of women who absolutely believe Christine Blasey Ford and don't care that there is no evidence.
Period.
Seriously.
I've asked my friends, I said, wouldn't it be better to not condemn someone like Kavanaugh and say you can't have this job?
Uh, unless we can, you know, we can prove it.
Let me rephrase that.
Wouldn't it be better to have the evidence before making a judgment against somebody and they say, and I've been told by multiple friends, no, because they believe her.
And it's, it's something that's almost impossible to prove anyway.
And that should be disqualifying for him getting the promotion as they described it.
For me, I think that we should allow people to reform.
We shouldn't hold things against people after 36 or so years.
To an extent, I guess it's hard to know for sure how to deal with issues like this.
But I'm also concerned that we're moving towards a future, regardless of the gender, we're moving towards a future where people are going to be more authoritarian.
They're going to care less about liberty and freedom.
When you look at an authoritarian system, you will end up with more innocent people imprisoned.
Yes, you'll probably end up with more criminals imprisoned.
When we recognize that freedom is paramount and protecting the innocent is paramount, it means that we'll end up with less innocent people imprisoned, and also less guilty people imprisoned as well.
But, as Blackstone's formulation goes, it is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer.
So it is what it is.
I don't know.
I can only say that people have accused me of supporting conservatives and all that stuff, and they mistake Issues of liberty with politics.
I just believe in freedom.
I'm a left libertarian.
I shouldn't say libertarian.
I'm a social liberal.
I don't, you know, people often don't understand what that means, but essentially I am in the bottom left quadrant.
I am close to Bernie Sanders.
So I don't know.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
Is this showing us that traditional values are going out the window?
Young millennial women are less likely to be married, and then from Past studies and commonly held beliefs, it is single women are less likely to be Republicans for whatever reason.
One study claims it's because they have less access to wealth.
That may or may not be true.
I'm not a scientist, but at least it was published somewhere 16 years ago.
And also keep in mind, these are just a few data points I've pulled up.
I try to make sure I get all the facts, but actually doing a comprehensive study to determine all of these things is difficult.
I can only say that we have a study from 16 years ago saying that women are likely, single women are likely democratic because they have less access to wealth.
And maybe that's the case.
In which case, ending the, I don't want to say wage gap, but the earnings gap, which is a thing, Perhaps that's going to be something we do need to do.
When we talk about people advocating for socialist policies, perhaps there's something that we need to solve that makes them lean in that direction.
Like, college tuition is absolutely bogging down millennials, and you know if their only solution to solving the college debt crisis is socialism, they're going to advocate for it.
So if you don't like socialism, maybe you need to work with these young people to alleviate that debt.
And however you do it, I don't know.
But at any rate, comment below, we'll keep the conversation going.
