So, I guess the questions raised are:
(Also (3) How many posts before someone claims that the results can be better be interpreted as sexism by the men?)
You would have to have a field full of women, with different positions on the issues, to get a real answer. Men tend to be more conservative, so it’s not surprising that Hillary does better with women. I’m not sure where Rice falls among Republicans.
Additionally, I can’t say I think much of Dick Morris as a commentator, and he’s known to be hung up on the idea of Hillary vs. Condi.
Aren’t both interpretations equally plausible at this point? We don’t know anything about the reasons people responded to the survey as they did. Morris says “women want a woman President,” but only 38 percent of the female Democrats preferred Hillary. She was the top vote-getter overall for the Democrats, which indicates that she’s the most popular Democrat period. If male Democrats preferred Obama and women preferred Hillary, the gender explanation would be plausible. But it sounds like the men liked Hillary the best, too - although Morris doesn’t actually say.
I would hold my nose and vote for Hillary if she won the primary, but I’m not thrilled about the prospect. As a woman, I would love to see a female president in my lifetime, but not necessarily her. In local elections, I have occasionally voted for women on the basis of their gender, because I think it would be great to have more women of all political stripes in office and local politics are the first stepping stone.
New York isn’t a red state. Country housewives are known to favor men candidates more than their city career woman counterparts. The supposition is that it’s partly from the implied validation of their own choices.
Fair enough; the results can be fairly interpreted either way; even though I guess I sounded snarky in that comment, it was not intentional. However, for the men to admit that they vote preferentially for men would be construed as sexist; for women to vote for wome, not so much; this would lead me to favor the commentator’s interpretation.
And the article did not simply say “Who are women voting for”? It showed a 15-point difference between men and women supporting Hillary on the Democratic side; a 8-18 difference between supporting Condi on the Republican. It’s not as simplisitic as some seem to assume.
Rice is not going to be the Pub candidate in 2008. An African-American will never make it through the primaries. A woman . . . maybe. On the Dem side, I hope the kingmakers can see Hillary would go better as running mate. You’ve got to break one barrier at a time – we’ll have a female veep before we have a female POTUS.
You could probably chalk that up to the “minority” (not numerical, but you know what I mean) status of women. I don’t think anyone would call Latinos racist for preferring a Latino candidate, and the same would probably hold true for any non-white, non-male group.
It’s a noteable difference. But like I said, we can’t just assume it’s gender-based. I already mentioned an alternative explanation.
What kingmakers are you thinking of? If she wins primaries, she’ll got the nomination - I don’t think anybody in the party could talk her out of running if she decided to. If those kingmakers matter, many of them would support her anyway out of loyalty to her husband.
I know it’s ironic, feminist me once started a GD thread about how we should have a woman president already, what’s taking so long. I used to be a big Hillary Clinton fan, and I used to specifically put my hopes on her for getting a woman president, but no longer. My preference for president as of now is Barack Obama.
I just don’t foresee a gender gap benefiting Hillary in the Democratic primaries (the way it probably would for any other woman candidate besides her). I’m not voting for Iraq war enablers. I’m voting for antiwar candidates.
No. There are just as many women who are still going to vote for a male. Well, there is according to the ones I’ve spoke to about it.
I suppose there’s plenty of data about this out there already, isn’t there? There have been plenty of elections with female candidates over the years; that ought to tell us one way or another. I, as a male, have voted for women before, but I won’t necessarily pick the woman. In the recent Massachusetts gubernatorial race, none of the women I know voted for the female candidate in the Democratic primary or for the female candidate in the general election.
From what I can tell, gender doesn’t make that much of a difference. Women win elections and lose them, but they do tend to attract more liberal voters (Helen Chenoweth and Elizabeth Dole excepted, of course.) But this might be worth asking. My mother didn’t like the idea of women holding higher office, or even women as bosses. She felt funny about this, she told me, but it just doesn’t appeal to her to have women in power, even though she always hoped my sisters could find fulfilling careers. This is an old-fashioned point of view, to be sure, and is less and less common in much of the country, including our native western Pennsylvania.
Some parts of the country will probably never elect a woman, though. Remember a few years ago when Mike Leavitt stepped down as governor of Utah to head up the Department of the Interior? His lieutenant governor, Olene Walker, stepped in and finished Leavitt’s term. She was challenged in the 2004 Republican primary, and many Utahans said they wouldn’t vote for her because the Bible says women shouldn’t hold power like that. The Queen of Sheba aside, I still don’t know where in the Bible it says that, but enough people believe it that their religious beliefs will force their hand to pull the lever or punch the chad or tap the screen for a man, no matter what. Incidentally, as long as the Republican Party relies on the evangelical vote, I don’t see them ever nominating a woman for president. But on the other hand, evangelical conservatives will vote women into Congressional seats, so maybe it’s just not the executive positions they approve of giving to women? Like president, governor, county commissioner? Are there any Republican women out there who have been elected governor of a conservative state lately? The only female Republican governors right now are in Connecticut and Hawaii—not exactly bastions of conservatism.
In my above post, where I said that some parts of the country will never elect a woman, I’d like to amend that to read some parts of the country will not elect a woman in the foreseeable future to an executive position. (Nuance is so much trouble, isn’t it?)
Palin in Alaska, which judging by the Senators and Representative is a fairly conservative state. No others presently or -elect so far as I can tell from CNN and Wikipedia.
If women particularly wanted to vote for women, we wouldn’t be sitting around waiting for the menfolk to nominate a woman. We’d turn out to the polls in droves and make it happen.
If women particularly wanted to vote for women, we wouldn’t be sitting around waiting for the menfolk to nominate a woman. We’d turn out to the polls in droves and make it happen. I believe we have the numbers to do it.
We totally have the numbers to do it, the question is why don’t we have the will and the organizing to do it. Maybe because other considerations come ahead of gender when we vote. Like right now ending the war. I bet you could get wayyy more women to vote for someone on the basis of ending the war compared to being female. That’s why I’m for Obama instead of Clinton.
Which I guess is another way of saying the war has had the effect of delaying the impending feminization of American politics. If Bush and his neocons hadn’t thrown the world into such a crisis with warmongering, destruction of civil liberties, turning the country over to theocracy, stealing elections, and destruction of the environment, there wouldn’t be so many heavy issues taking priority over the goal of electing women.