Women Sealed the Deal
For the last two years, I've been writing and telling anyone who would listen that American women could elect the next president, if only they voted.
Well, this time they did, and there is no doubt that women were a decisive factor in the election of Barack Obama.
To listen to the pundits, however, you'd think that only youth (bless them!) and minorities turned out in overwhelming numbers to stand on endless lines to elect the first African American and liberal and brilliant president.
Frank Rich, whom I admire tremendously, even missed the boat. In his Sunday New York Times column in The Week in Review, Rich never mentioned the amazing gender gap that catapulted a young and relatively unknown senator to become our 44th president.
Just take a serious look at the numbers. As the data in the Week in Review in the New York Times reveals, women constituted 53% of the electorate, while only 47% of men voted. Among those who voted for Obama, 56% were women and 43% were men. Among unmarried women, a whopping 70% voted for Obama.
There are many variables in this data that need to be explained. The extraordinary female vote almost certainly came largely from minority and young women. But even white, married women, who usually vote more conservatively, went for Obama.
Does this matter? Yes, and here's why. For years, women have been saying that we are invisible in this political culture. The consequence of this invisibility is that our poverty, our economic insecurity, our need for health care, child care, elder care, and equality in wages and training are also ignored.
So, with all due respect to those who are praising the young and minorities, and rightfully blessing their energy and enthusiasm, take a good hard look and notice that it was women who, in the end, sealed the deal.
I'm afraid your analysis is entirely wrong.
Women always make up a significant proportion of the electorate for any Democrat, certainly, but in this election Obama actually underperformed with women compared to the majority of other demographic groups.
Kevin Drum explains it here. Women did not seal the deal. Sorry.
Those who did:
Those who didn't:
November 9, 2008 4:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your unlabeled numbers in parenthesis, Gherald, show the percentage "swing" from 2004. But women were bigger in numbers than any of these other groups. Much bigger in most cases. If you would rather have 30% of a million than 10% of 30 million, Sarah Palin has a bridge in Alaska to sell you.
November 9, 2008 5:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Women are more than half the population, and the largest demographic group? Tell me something I don't know.
My numbers are the swing because that's what matters for an apples to apples comparison.
Point is they didn't seal any deal because they underperformed behind Obama's numbers elsewhere.
All you can get from Ruth's analysis is that Democrats depend on doing better with women to win, just like Republicans depend on doing better with men. We already knew that, and it's irrelevant to "deal sealing".
November 9, 2008 7:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
ADDENDUM:
Doing some calculations of my own, here are Obama's margins of improvement based on 2004 and 2008 exit polls:
White Women: +4
White Men: +9
Now let's multiply this by the percentage of the 2008 electorate, to see how each group affected Obama's topline margin in the popular vote compared to 2004:
White Women: +1.84 points
White Men: +3.69 points
As you can see, among whites the 2008 Democratic margin increased twice as much due to men as due to women.
As another example, let's take the much hyped youth vote of ages 18-29.
Patrick Ruffini already did the math for us, and the youth vote swing was worth an impressive +4.5 points for Obama.
To reiterate: "White Men" and "Youth of all races and sexes, age 18-29" are both at least twice as more significant than "White Women" in raising Obama's numbers.
Don't get me wrong, it's lovely for women that they vote more Democratic than men and are a greater percentage of the electorate, but they barely moved from 2004, and moved less than half of the national trend. In order to be a factor in "sealing the deal", a group has to improve significantly, and white women barely moved (+4 compared to white men's +9 shift, and Obama's +9 among the electorate as a whole)
November 9, 2008 8:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, pretty much nailed that.
November 10, 2008 6:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Not enough credit has been given to the Food Network. They have 381 recipes for arugula salad and only 370 for grits.
November 9, 2008 5:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Finally, saomething that makes sense to me.
November 10, 2008 1:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
The numbers tell the story... the tally for Obama (as of now--there are still votes outstanding) is 65,431,955 votes. Women at 56% of that provided 36,641,895 of those votes. Men, at 43% provided 28,135,741. So, women provided eight and a half million more votes than men did, and Obama's margin of victory was just under eight million votes.
November 9, 2008 5:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm sorry, but this is the worst sort of self-absorbed group politics drivel.
Any number of groups of voters played critical roles in electing Obama. If you took away any particular demographic group of any significance the election might have turned out differently because there wasn't that much of a margin of victory in the overall popular vote count. You wish to claim "women" as the critical element not because they necessarily were, or that you even have a good argument for making that assertion, but because it gives you a chance to blow your horn on the topics you seem to believe are "women's issues". Bah!
You write:
"For years, women have been saying that we are invisible in this political culture. The consequence of this invisibility is that our poverty, our economic insecurity, our need for health care, child care, elder care, and equality in wages and training are also ignored."
Yes, many women have been trying to focus attention on poverty, etc... but so have many men and members of countless other democraphic categories. To imply that women alone or principally have been concerned about this issues is simply absurd. "We" are invisible? "Our" poverty? "Our" need for health care, etc...? That's just preposterous talk as though the "we" includes you who are not poverty stricken nor deprived of health care, day care or anything else you want or need. It's also offensive for anyone to claim that issues such as those you list are the province or interest of any one group even a group so large that it includes one of the two genders of humanity. All of those issues are of interest to us all, regardless of which demographic category or categories we fall into.
The overarching message and lesson of this victorious campaign of uniting people of all kinds for common purpose is antithetical to the outdated group politics approach you trumpet here. And, I would add, it's just an innaccurate take on what took place within the American electorate.
I guess your post is an indicator that some are just going to have a hard time letting go of the group identity game they've played for so long. What a pity. And it's all the worse when it is clear you feel there's some sort of threat that "women" will not be in the spotlight but instead minorities or the young might have a moment of attention and that somehow that might take away from what you're interested in. It's as though you resent these notable blocs of voters getting noticed. That's not a very mature approach in my opinion.
November 9, 2008 5:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't believe you're really sorry.
November 10, 2008 1:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
For what it's worth: I live in a remote area far from the cities. In my area a group of women ages 60-93 were watching the returns and partying for Obama. Apparently we are not a big-deal demographic, but I gotta tell you, we are all just as involved and as excited as any other group out there and our votes counted too!
November 9, 2008 8:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Yes, many women have been trying to focus attention on poverty, etc... but so have many men and members of countless other democraphic categories. To imply that women alone or principally have been concerned about this issues is simply absurd."
It seems to me that there is significant fraud afoot in the land. Whenever we turn to "women's issues" it's the issues a select group of already very well positioned women decide are important--to them--and in the ways that *they* choose to understand them. For example, "equal pay for equal work," when most women still work in "feminized labor."
I spent my wasted youth defending the ladies auxiliary against charges of self absorption and navel gazing.
But I've come around.
November 9, 2008 9:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh please, seems to me (a proud boomer feminist, BTW) that you're really severely spinning that New York Times Week in Review piece.
And I think it's a pity, because it was actually a very good, eye opening piece. I didn't read it that way at all! As a matter of fact, it says in one of the big captions to the graphs in the print edition:
This is not so very different than elections past, the way women break for the Democrat over the Republican! Not much has changed. I even remember articles during the 2004 election about getting single women out to vote, because they were reliably Democratic.
The spin you're giving this really hurts your credibility with me, and I would suspect that it has that effect on a few others. Women have long leaned more Democratic; this is not a story, not the big news you are pushing. Obama does not owe his win to women any more than Kerry or Gore owed them.
In a way I find it demeaning or offensive to say that media should be giving thanks or recognition for the majority of women voting as they have often voted, as if the majority of women are some kind of unified special interest group that deserves specific special interest payback. The women who vote Democrat have diverse reasons for doing so, they are not a monolith.
And if you can't see that it is an interesting and important story that this candidate caused turnout of minority voters who rarely voted in the past, you are blind. But the Times piece does not stress that, it stresses the "change" vote, that Obama's win was due to nearly every demographic but older voters deciding to vote for the Democrat. The article's point, indeed, is that there was no single special interest group that can take credit.
November 9, 2008 11:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
guess I will have to read the link.
personally, I am interested in Unmarried Women - 22 million of them stayed home in 04. can not wait to see the numbers for 08
November 10, 2008 11:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
I find all of these articles assigning the winning margin to a given group (women, Hispanics, independents, NASCAR dads, whomever) to be mathematically unconvincing.
To an extent, if turnout surges among Group A, then one could anoint them as the saviors of the campaign, but if members of Group B and C had turned out in less #s, then the election would have been lost.
In the end, it's the collectivity of votes that make a difference. One could just as well argue that it's the improvement in white men voting for Obama (v. Kerry's #s) that made the difference.
I do think there are plenty of reasons to target voters and celebrate their contribution, but mathematically, the argument for women (or any other group) really doesn't make sense to me. If any group voted less often for Obama, it could have undone the whole thing.
November 11, 2008 4:17 AM | Reply | Permalink