if even 2% of single women vote Bush I will be shocked
That's either your usual hyperbole or you are just talking about single women you "know" or "have talked to", your usual method of drawing broad conclusions about this diverse country.
If you divide the electorate into quadrants based on gender and marital status (i.e, married men, married women, unmarried men, and unmarried women being the four categories), President Clinton only won one of the four quadrants (unmarried women) in 1996, but he won that quadrant by 62-28 percent. The numbers are here: findarticles.com.
Gore also won that quadrant, but it wasn't by anything close to 98-2. It was actually about two thirds of single women supporting Gore and one third supporting Bush in 2000:
findarticles.com
GENDER DIFFERENCES. Much has been made about the "gender gap" in voting patterns. However, the actual picture of gender differences in voting is more complex than simple male-female dichotomy. Gender differences have more to do with differences in traditional-versus-modernist sex-role expectations than with whether one is male or female.
According to the VNS, a majority of men--53 percent--supported Bush, while a majority of women--54 percent--supported Gore. In other words, a little more than half of each gender voted for the opposing presidential candidate. On the surface, that isn't a very significant difference. The real delineation comes into sharper focus when we look at gender subgroups. Among married men--a more traditional subgroup--58 percent voted for Bush, while only 40 percent voted for Gore (LA Times). The vote of married women was about equally split. However, among single women (never married or divorced), 66 percent voted for Gore. The point is that single women are more likely than married women to hold modernist sex-role expectations and were more likely to prefer the Democratic candidate.
A recent ABC News poll (hardly a right wing outlet) had some interesting findings about the gender gap and other issues:
abcnews.go.com
This poll was taken before Saddam's capture (it was released Nov. 17 and taken shortly before that).
Bush's overall approval rating was 57 percent. Interestingly, this is near the lowest of his Presidency.... and yet a significantly higher "low point" than most other recent Presidents have experienced. According to ABC, Bush's "current rating, 57 percent, matches the career averages of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. Even Bush's low -- 53 percent [in Oct. 2003] -- is high compared with the previous four Presidents. Clinton's low was 43 percent approval, Reagan's 42 percent. Bush's father bottomed out at 33 percent and Jimmy Carter reached 28 percent."
(That quote is on page 3 of the linked pdf file above).
Where you are getting your often-stated conclusion that Bush is hugely unpopular and nearly certain to lose is pretty baffling to me in the face of those sorts of numbers. Bush is, according to ABC's scientifically conducted polls, more popular on average than any President we have had in the past quarter century. His current ratings are just about as low as they have gotten, and are equal to the average ratings of both two term Presidents of that era (Clinton and Reagan). The two incumbents who were defeated, Bush Sr. and Carter, had dramatically lower approval ratings than this President. I am just mystified as to how that leads to the conclusion that Bush is going to lose.
The gender gap issues are also mentioned in the ABC poll results, and they don't seem to support your assertion that only 2 percent of single women will vote for Bush. There clearly is a gender gap, but it's pretty close to where it has been for many years, around 10-15 percentage points among all women. According to ABC:
Bush's overall [approval] rating is 11 points higher among men than women, 62-51 percent. The gap is also 11 points on Iraq and 13 points on the economy. [see bottom of page 3 of pdf file]...... While 57 percent of men say the war was worth fighting, women split, 48-47 percent. [see top of page 4 of pdf file]"
If Bush's overall approval rating among women is 51 percent and his support among single women is only 2 percent (as you claim), I guess you are saying that virtually every married woman in the U.S. supports Bush. But, of course, that is preposterous: married women split fairly evenly between Bush and Gore in 2000, and I doubt that tens of millions of them have suddenly become Republicans. In fact, I know a couple who are actually Democrats, so it must be true that others are too. <g>
One final note of interest: The ABC poll distinguishes between magnitude of support and opposition. Rather than a simple "approve/disapprove", they divide the answers into Strongly Approve, Somewhat Approve, Somewhat Disapprove, or Strongly Disapprove. This, in my opinion, is a much more effective way to gauge voter sentiment and depth of voter feeling. Here Bush's November pre-Saddam capture numbers are:
Strongly Approve 34 percent
Somewhat Approve 23 percent
Somewhat Disapprove 11 percent
Strongly Disapprove 28 percent
No Opinion 4 percent
Only 28 percent of the electorate strongly disapproves of this President's performance. The Democratic nominee starts with those votes in his or her pocket. That leaves a lot of votes in a lot of places that more typically support Republicans. Single women are less likely to be registered than other groups, but 98 percent of them aren't going to vote against Bush. |
