The real gender gap

David Paul Kuhn, who has just published a book The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma, has a fascinating column today exploring what has been the real gender gap in the past quarter century of elections. When you see "gender gap" most people think of women preferring the Democratic Party. That is often how this gap is portrayed in the media starting with stories about how women were deserting Reagan and other Republican candidates in the 1980s. However, the demographic results show more than that facile summary.

The “gender gap” has been a fixture in discussions about American politics since the early Reagan years. But it is usually cast as a matter of women being turned off by Republicans. By far the greater part of this gap, however, comes from the high number of white men — who make up about 36 percent of the electorate — who refuse to even consider voting Democratic.

In 2000, exit polling showed white women backed George W. Bush over Al Gore by 3 percentage points, but white men backed him by 27 percentage points. Four years later, with John F. Kerry carrying the Democratic banner, the margin was 26 points.

The Bush years have echoed with what-if questions: What if the votes in Florida had been counted differently in 2000, if Ralph Nader had not run or if Gore had been able to carry his home state? What if Kerry had responded more deftly to the Swift Boat Veterans in 2004?

A more powerful what-if is to imagine that Democratic nominees had succeeded in narrowing the white male gap to even the low 20s instead of the mid-20s. Both Kerry and Gore would have won easily.

Kuhn goes on to analyze why it is that white males have deserted the Democratic Party.

Racial animus may have been part of the problem for Democrats. At least Democrats could feel good about themselves while losing elections. But it was one of Johnson’s own confidants, Harry McPherson, who later concluded that the problem with white male voters was far more complex — not confined to the South or racial politics.

“Democratic primaries and conventions often rocked with the language of rebuke,” McPherson wrote in a 1972 memoir. “Very like, it has occurred to me, the language many wives use in speaking to their husbands, particularly toward the end of marriages. You never think of the children, or of my mother, or of me; only of yourself. Substitute the ignored disadvantaged, the homeless, people trapped downtown. The reaction among husbands, for whom read ‘white male voters,’ is what is normally provoked by attempts to burden people with a sense of guilt.”

As portrayed by the new breed of liberalism, the white man held all the cards, and everyone else’s bad deal was his fault. The problem was that the bulk of white men did not feel like dealers or players. They felt like pieces on someone else’s table, and their livelihood, their family’s very stability, was in richer men’s hands, as well. Increasingly, as Reagan assumed the presidency, many white men, particularly those in industrial trades, found their lives marked by instability. This was true in the home, as cultural changes refashioned the role of women and the place of sex in popular culture. And it was especially true in the workplace, as many once-secure union jobs disappeared.

Between 1979 and 1983 alone, more than 9 million Americans were added to the poverty rolls and more than half were from white, male-headed families. In 2004, white men still constituted the vast majority of leading CEOs. Yet many more white men still live the hardscrabble life. About 21 percent of white men and 22 percent of white women who voted in 2004 made $30,000 to $45,000 in household income.

These men are seen as failing to capitalize on “white male privilege.” Those who felt powerless, like so many women and minorities, were told they were indeed powerful. Conservatives came to validate a struggle many liberals had demeaned as merely the anger of the “angry white male.”

“Liberals didn’t realize they had a whole constituency of disenfranchised people without rights who were called standard masculine men,” Harvard University social psychologist William Pollack explains. “I’m not saying that all liberal Democrats saw these men as the enemy, but they didn’t see them as the victim — but these men felt more and more victimized.”

Edwards is trying to appeal to these populist complaints but so far he's had little success. Hillary Clinton is not the candidate to win more of that white male vote than Al Gore or John Kerry did. The Democrats had success in 2006 with candidates like James Webb in Virginia or Jon Tester in Montana. If they go with Hillary Clinton in 2008, they'll have a hard time erasing their gender gap.