Mitt Romney, Republicans and Women’s Vote: A Lost Cause?

In the aftermath of Rick Santorum’s long-awaited withdrawal from his party’s primaries, Mitt Romney started to address more serious topics. Among his first priorities: to bring back the economic debate to the discussion, so that the slight addition of jobs seems to be slowing down, and above all bridge Barack Obama’s advantageous and considerable gap among female voters, as a war against women brought about by the Republican party is being spoken of more and more. And why not kill two birds with one stone? In effect, Romney insisted in the past several days that the true war against women is the result of the political economic failures of the Obama administration.

Could Mitt Romney bridge the gap in which his party is suffering among female voters? He is well aware that the road to victory needs a response to this question. What is the magnitude of this gap? Why has it deepened over the past few months? Will the efforts undertaken by Mitt Romney permit him to make up for lost time? I attempt here to outline several elements from responses to these questions which will remain at the heart of the debates until November.

For the past few weeks, the Democrats have been drumming the idea of “war” brought about by the Republicans against women, voters further gained by Barack Obama’s party, but certainly an electorate in which partisan choices tend to be to be less solidly fixed than amongst men. The struggle between Romney and Santorum shed light on the resolutely conservative positions of the Republican Party on issues such as abortion, contraception and equality in the workplace, among others. In this context, certain polls recorded considerable gaps between men and women in their respective support toward Romney and Obama. In 2008 Barack Obama earned 56 percent of women’s votes against 49 percent of men’s votes. The most recent polls show that this advantage persists today in his confrontation with Romney. A poll by ABC News/Washington Post conducted April 5-8 showed Barack Obama in the lead by seven points (51 percent to 44 percent), but also indicated the largest jump to this date in favor of Barack Obama among women: 57 percent to 38 percent.

Graph 1: Support for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney among men and women

Source : ABC News/Washington Post Poll : 2012 Election Update, April 10, 2012.

This statistic is exceptionally high, but it reflects a defining trend which persisted during President Obama’s first term in office. For example, the following graph shows that Barack Obama’s approval performance rating is almost always maintained at a level higher among women than among men.

Graph 2: President Obama’s approval rating among men and women (ABC News/Washington Post questionnaires)

Source: ABC News/Washington Post Poll: 2012 Election Update, April 10, 2012.

The ABC News and Washington Post polls suggest that the recent debates around issues dear to and directly affecting women would have consolidated the Democratic president’s advantages in this segment of the population, but Gallup’s weekly stats results don’t note an as-considerably deepening gap, at least not at the moment. Nevertheless, the graph below shows that the advantage Obama holds among women has not waned throughout his presidency.

Graph 3: President Obama’s approval rating among men and women in 2012 (Gallup polls) (image à haute résolution)

Source: Gallup Presidential Approval Center

Here the systematic gap between men and women should be separated from the gap that one sees in the context of actual debates. The voting differences between men and women are not a new phenomenon. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, women voted in greater numbers for Republicans* (around 6 percentage points) because of their support for Prohibition, but the difference between the parties has declined, except in the 1950s when Eisenhower was a bit more popular among women than among men (5 points). But it was only in 1980 that one would find a significant gap, this time to the Democrats’ advantage. Since then, as the graph below shows, the Democrats have been favored among women.

Graph 4: The evolution of the Democratic vote, 1972-2008

Source: Pew Center for the People and the Press, “The Gender Gap: Three Decades Old, as Wide as Ever“

The persistent difference between men and women is largely explained by the differences between the two parties regarding social policies. In effect, in the United States as elsewhere, women have a tendency to support the parties which propose more generous social policies and a less militant foreign policy. It was Ronald Reagan’s arrival on the stage and the resurgence of conservatism in the Republican Party that provoked this gap, in which it is important to note that it manifests itself especially among unmarried women and among those in the workforce. According to a study by Janet Box-Steffenmeier, Suzanna De Boef and Tse-Min Lin (APSR, 2004, limited viewing), the gap between men and women increased as the political climate became conservative, the economy deteriorated and the number of single, economically vulnerable women rose. All these conditions were present this year, which helps us to understand the differences that we’ve already started to see.

Clearly, the radicalizing of Republican conservative discourse counts a lot for the gap that one can see today in women’s support [of the party], which leads the Democrats to accuse their adversaries of waging a “war against women.” Mitt Romney’s retort came in the form of accusations which threw the ball back in Barack Obama’s court while emphasizing that the balance of job losses and gains since January 2009 is clearly unfavorable to women. In fact, according to Romney’s team, the net total of jobs lost since January 2009 amounts to 740,000 and the net loss of jobs among women totaled 640,000, or 92 percent. But this accusation was judged excessive by several impartial observers, including the website Politifact, which judges it “mostly misleading” (among other reasons because the majority of losses sustained during the first months are directly attributable to the Bush administration’s actions, and because the jobs which were most quickly lost during the 2008 crisis were mostly male-dominated professions). Even more, at the moment when he wished to take advantage of the debate on the topic of employment, Romney turned the spotlight on the opposition quasi-unanimously from his party to the first law signed by President Obama, which promoted equal salaries for both men and women (Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009).

In fact, it’s strongly possible that women’s job records represent a Pandora’s box for Republicans. Firstly, as the graph below shows, female jobs (red) were less immediately affected by the recession, because they are concentrated in the service sector, while the jobs which were slashed in the first wave of the recession were those in manufacturing and construction.

Graph 5: The evolution of total civilian non-agricultural jobs for men (blue) and women (red) (image à haute résolution)

Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data

In digging a bit deeper, one notices that a good number of female jobs lost after the recession were in the public sector (teachers, nurses, office employees, etc.), mostly thanks to layoffs created by Republican-controlled state governments. In fact, the following graph clearly shows that the quasi-totality of female jobs lost since the start of 2009 in the private sector have been regained, so that the female jobs in the public sector (especially in state and local government offices) are dropping, which includes the majority of losses deplored by Romney.

Graph 6: Evolution of civilian non-agricultural female jobs in the private sector (blue, left axis) and in the public sector (red, right axis) (image à haute résolution)

Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data

To conclude, it is clear that the difference between men and women is important and that it will remain a determining factor throughout this electoral year. As for the question of the widening of the gap during the last few weeks or in the last few months, the results don’t match but it would be surprising that the Republicans’ attempts to gain favor with women by shifting the debate to the question of employment would bear fruit. In all likelihood, they will only highlight the Republican Party’s role in the reduction of public jobs, of which women hold a predominant number.

And no, I will not speak of the ridiculous controversy surrounding a democratic-leaning (but not Obama-camp) CNN commentator whose tactless declaration “attacked” Mitt Romney’s wife; this is nothing but a flash in the pan which will burn itself out and which will only inflame those whose votes are already set on Romney.

*Editor’s note: In the U.S., women were granted the right to vote in 1920.