Moving Beyond the Gender Gap

The following is an extracted chapter from the book Get This Party Started : How Progressives Can Fight Back and Win (Rowman & Littlefield, January 2006). Buy online.

Moving Beyond the Gender Gap

The shrinking of the Democratic margin among women voters was the most important—and perhaps the least noticed—development of the 2004 election. In the two previous presidential campaigns, the Democratic candidate triumphed among women voters by 16 percentage points (Bill Clinton) and 11 points (Al Gore). In contrast, John Kerry won women voters by a mere 3 points, 51 to 48 percent. Not only did the Democratic candidate garner less support among women than in the past, but the overall size of the gender gap narrowed as Bush maintained a solid 11-point margin among men. The small gender gap is consistent with the results of the 2002 congressional elections, when Democrats and Republicans essentially broke even among women, in contrast to 1998 and 2000 when congressional Democrats won women voters by 6 and 8 points, respectively.

This development is not a happy one for progressives, because it signals the chipping away of the foundation that attached women to the Democratic Party. In the past, economic issues helped cement socially conservative, white, blue-collar women to the Democratic Party, while social issues such as support for a woman’s right to choose kept more progressive, often college-educated women in the Democratic camp. As Democrats failed to compete on economic issues in the last two election cycles, they lost socially conservative downscale women largely on cultural and security issues. In the absence of an economic alternative, security and morality crowded out the issues where Democrats compete most strongly.

But this did not happen overnight; beginning in 1994, Democrats experienced a drop-off of white, social-conservative women supporters as politics became increasingly polarized around cultural issues. Of course, the growing salience of cultural issues began much earlier—as early as the 1960s when the women’s movement and the backlash to societal changes mobilized actors and organizations on the left and the right—but the 1994 elections represent a low moment from which the Democrats have never recovered. The 1996 election with a strong economy, a weak Republican opponent, and a Democratic incumbent with a compelling values narrative was a temporary respite from these trends, but it was just a respite.

To address the issue of women’s declining support for the Democratic Party, progressives need to cease thinking of women as a monolithic voting bloc and understand that the differences among them are fundamental and polarizing. Women cannot be approached politically as a unified set of actors with similar interests; rather, they need to be targeted as distinct groups of voters with different political preferences and agendas. Moving forward, progressives need to consider where they can increase support among like-minded women voters, where they can move persuadable women voters to the progressive side of the ledger, and how they can diminish their losses among other women. Specifically, Democrats should consider the distinct voting patterns of the following groups of women:

• Unmarried women. Unmarried women are among the most progressive voters in the electorate. They are economic populists who are socially liberal and support Democrats by wide margins. Yet, they underparticipate in politics relative to their married counterparts. In 2004, organizations such as Women’s Voices, Women’s Vote successfully helped increase their share of the vote in the electorate, but there is considerable room for growth.

• Older women. Older women are the quintessential swing voters. They have been splitting their vote nearly evenly between the par ties for almost a decade, and their support ebbs and flows depending on how the parties speak to them. In 2004, Kerry lost an opportunity to win older women, which probably cost him the election, by failing to speak to their very serious concerns about their long-term economic security.

•  White, socially conservative women. Democrats lose white bluecollar women and white married women by large margins; in fact, these women could almost be considered Republican base voters. Yet, there are important openings with these conservative voters. They have concerns about their families that can be addressed by progressives, such as the prevalence of violence and sexual content on television, video games, and the Internet. They are pragmatic and want to protect their children, by making sure they have access to comprehensive sex education in school, and their parents, through stem cell research into chronic medical conditions. Progressives should be able stop the hemorrhage among these women by reframing what it means to care about children and families.

 
These strategies do not require progressives and Democrats to shift to the center on issues like support for reproductive rights, support for “traditional marriage," or the advancement of women’s rights. On the contrary, there is no evidence that shifting to the center will bring in socially conservative women, who understand very well that the Democratic Party supports a woman’s right to choose. Instead, Democrats need to offer a strong economic agenda for women that cuts across all of these groups, addressing concerns about health care that are fundamental to unmarried and older women and not an anathema to conservative women. Most importantly, Democrats must reframe the cultural debate, which progressives cannot win in its current incarnation.

THE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN’S VOTE

To understand the decline in the Democratic share of the women’s vote, we need to look at the composition of and changes within the women’s vote over the past twenty-five years.(1)  Traditionally, scholars date the emergence of the gender gap to the 1980 presidential election, when women were less likely than men to support Ronald Reagan’s candidacy.(2) In that year, 47 percent of women supported Reagan compared to 55 percent of men, a gap rooted in greater attachment to the welfare state and humanitarian concerns, opposition to militarism, and the rise of women’s autonomy through their entry into the labor force and high divorce rates.

While the size of the gender gap varied in the 1980s, it was firmly established by the 1990s in presidential and congressional races. Surveys and exit polls consistently showed that women were more likely than men to vote for Democratic candidates and identify with the Democratic Party. In 1992, for example, 45 percent of women supported Bill Clinton compared to 41 percent of men; the gap grew in 1996, when 54 percent of women supported Clinton’s reelection compared to 43 percent of men. Al Gore garnered similar levels of support among women, polling 54 percent compared to only 42 percent among men.

As many scholars note, this persistent gender gap is rooted in the different policy preferences that men and women hold. Women are more progressive than men in their views toward the proper role of government and the scale of social welfare programs. Men support the use of force in international matters and are supportive of defense spending in greater numbers than women.(3) Men are more conservative on racial matters, though women are more conservative about civil liberties, in part because they are less libertarian in their views than men. Women are more progressive on the hot-button social issues of the day such as gay marriage. Thirty-eight percent of women support gay marriage compared to just 22 percent of men.(4) Likewise, 48 percent of women oppose a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, compared with only 39 percent of men.(5) As each party has relatively distinctive real or perceived differences on these issues, it is not surprising that women would lean Democratic while men would lean Republican. The wide margins garnered by Democrats among women in 1996 and 2000 eroded in 2002 and 2004 (see figure 3.1). One of the most prominentexplanations for this erosion of support posits that women moved away from Democrats in response to security issues after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In fact, the decline is actually the result of many years of internal changes in the women’s vote. In particular, starting in the mid-1990s, Democrats experienced serious trouble with socially

conservative, white, blue-collar and married women voters, who began to move over to the Republican Party.

The trend emerged most dramatically in congressional elections (see figure 3.2). Between 1992 and 1994, Democrats lost 10 points among white women without a college education, while actually gaining 3 points with white college-educated women. While Democrats made

up some ground in 1996, when the economy was booming and Clinton easily sailed toward reelection, they lost their standing again in 1998 when Democrats lost white women without a college education by 11 points. In 2000 and 2002, Democrats lost white women without a college education by 10 and 12 points, respectively. While Democrats have also experienced some erosion with white college-educated women, that group remains significantly more Democratic in its voting habits than its bluecollar counterpart.

The decline in support among white blue-collar women appeared in presidential elections as well (see figure 3.3). In 2000, Gore lost white women without a college education by 7 points after Clinton won them by 7 points in 1996. At the same time, Gore maintained Democratic standing with white college-educated women. In 2004, these class divisions were firmly entrenched. Bush made gains with all women, but the increasing softness among blue-collar women took its toll. Kerry lost white non-college women by 19 points, while losing white college educated women by 2 points.

The same pattern of decline among socially conservative white women is evident among white married women, as figures 3.4 and 3.5 attest. White married women remained competitive for Democrats in the 1990 and 1992 elections. In 1994, however, Democrats lost

white married women by 6 points and have never regained this lost ground. In every congressional election between 1994 and 2002, Democrats lost white married women by 10 to 19 points; in 2004, that margin increased to 21 points. In presidential elections, the pattern is a little less clear but follows the same trajectory. Democratic presidential candidates lost white married women by 3 to 4 points in 1992 and 1996, by 9 points in 2000, and by 23 points in 2004.(6)

WHY WOMEN SHIFTED RIGHT

Clearly, the September 11 attacks and George Bush’s standing on the war on terrorism played an important role in the movement of all voters—including women—toward Bush and in solidifying the movement of white, blue-collar, socially conservative women into the Republican camp after the 2000 election. But as these data make clear, the trend among white blue-collar and married women was evident as early as 1994, accelerated in 2000, and was locked in by 2004.

The erosion of support for Democratic candidates among white bluecollar and married women represents a political shift driven by the rise of and polarization around cultural issues in American politics. This transformation story is long and complicated and built upon thirty years of organized “backlash" against the 1960s social movements, particularly around issues of gender, marriage, and sexuality.(7) Suffice it to say that the political parties (in tandem with their allied groups) moved in different directions on many of these issues; while this movement did not necessarily represent a fundamental attitudinal shift among voters (e.g., attitudes about abortion have been remarkably stable since the 1970s), the relative salience of these issues in the electorate increased and were reflected in real and perceived differences between the parties.(8) By the 1980s, Democrats were clearly seen as liberal champions of “rights," while Republicans were seen as conservative defenders of “traditional" values.

Not surprisingly, over time, socially conservative groups moved into the Republican Party, while socially liberal groups solidified their support for the Democratic Party. We see this dynamic most dramatically in the case of white evangelical Christians,(9) but we also see movement among other white socially conservative voters, such as white bluecollar and married voters. Obviously there are many forces producing this shift, and in fact, white men from the South started abandoning the Democratic Party in the late 1950s (10)  But, the most important dynamic to note for this study is that, as the Republican Party successfully de- fined itself as the party of traditional marriage, white, socially conservative women who saw themselves as defenders of traditional marriage moved to the Republican camp.(11)

The mid-1990s witnessed an overall collapse of white blue-collar support for the Democratic Party.(12) No doubt Democrats have been complicit in this transformation, as they have alternately abandoned or struggled with offering an effective populist economic message to bluecollar voters. As Stanley Greenberg argues in The Two Americas, the “missing middle" as a central narrative for Democrats was all but abandoned by Bill Clinton after the 1994 Congressional defeat.(13) More recently, the decision not to fight the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy in 2001 and the failure to offer an economic message in the 2002 congressional elections contributed to a disastrous off-year election for the Democrats. And the absence of a real economic narrative coming out of the Kerry campaign, in an election almost totally focused on security, Iraq, and cultural issues, undercut Democratic advantages on economic issues during a time of great economic uncertainty.(14)

At the same time, the GOP and its allies spent considerable resources undermining Democratic advantages on economic issues, which has had a big impact on women voters. In 2000, when George W. Bush presented himself as a “compassionate conservative" by emphasizing, in part, education reform, he successfully neutralized Democratic advantages on education policy with suburban women. The $20 million spent by the pharmaceutical lobby in the 2002 congressional races diminished Democratic advantages on prescription drugs and retirement issues in competitive House races. In fact, the top two reasons white blue-collar women gave for voting Republican in 2002 were to protect Social Security and to reduce the price of prescription drugs.(15)

The post-September 11 political climate and Bush’s war on terrorism locked these gains in place. White blue-collar and married women—like their white male counterparts—offer high marks to Bush on the war on terrorism and credit Republicans for keeping them safe. But too much has been made of the effect of security concerns on the women’s vote. These favorable views by women toward Republicans on safety matters have been widely cited as the basis for the emergence of the so-called security mom voter—white married women with children who, as “soccer moms" in the 1990s, had supported Bill Clinton, but who shifted sharply to Bush during the 2004 campaign because they trusted him to keep their families safe.(16) Analysts, for example, pointed to the terrorist attack in the fall of 2004 on a school in Belsan, Russia, as the moment in the presidential campaign when these women moved into the Republican camp because news of the Russian attack crystallized their fears about their own children’s safety.

The problem with this popular analysis is that it is not true. Tracking data dispute the claim of a sudden, permanent shift toward Bush by married women with children, and there is no evidence to suggest that the security mom is much more than a caricature created by the media in an effort to explain the shrinking gender gap at a time when security concerns are a constant presence in the headlines. As the above data make clear, the erosion of support among these women began long before most Americans had ever heard of Osama bin Laden—in the mid-1990s, and certainly not in September 2004.

Equally important, in both 2000 and 2002, white blue-collar and married women voted Republican because they found Bush to be a man of faith—a moral leader—at a time when they were also looking for a dif ferent kind of leadership in the White House. Moreover, white bluecollar and married women saw Bush’s decisiveness around 9/11 as an indication of his character and leadership qualities as much as part of a successful effort to make them safer. And they voted Republican because they agreed with Bush on social issues like abortion and to a lesser extent on gay marriage (see table 3.1).

SWINGING WOMEN

Clearly we cannot conceive of a monolithic women’s vote; women voters split nearly evenly in the last two elections, and there are huge internal differences among women.(17) Progressives need to think about how to address women voters as discreet blocs, with different interests and agendas that require different persuasion and mobilization strategies. For unmarried women, the goal should be to increase turnout and Democratic margins. For older women, the goal should be to persuade by tapping into economic concerns. And, for white married women, the goal should be to reframe the debate over cultural values to shave off Republican margins.

Unmarried women

One of the most important societal changes over the past forty years has been the rise of unmarried households. According to Business Week, since 1965 we have moved from a country where 80 percent of Americans lived in a household where the head was married to one where only 50 percent do so today.(18) The shift away from “traditional" arrangements to diversity in the choices people make about their lives and families has huge implications for politics and our society as it undergoes this change. There are deep political differences between married and unmarried voters, a “gap" that has been explored in some depth.(19) The chasm between married and unmarried voters is particularly wide among women, and unmarried women are now one of the most progressive and Democratic groups in the electorate.

Unmarried women today are distinct from previous generations. They are better educated, more professional, younger, and more diverse. Unmarried women in the post-women’s movement era are delaying marriage, pursuing careers, getting divorced, and living on their own at levels never seen before. They hold more “feminist" views than their married counterparts, in part because their experiences have pushed them in that direction. At the same time, unmarried women are among the most marginal economic groups in the country, with 54 percent earning less than $30,000 per year (compared to 35 percent in the population overall and 25 percent among married women). They are deeply concerned about their financial security, in particular the availability of affordable health care and, if they are older, their retirement security. Given this social liberalism and economic marginality, it is not surprising that unmarried women are quite Democratic in their voting behavior.

In 2004, unmarried women voted for Kerry by a 25-point margin (see figure 3.6), a performance surpassed by few “base"  Democratic groups. Kerry also performed particularly well among white unmarried women (55 to 44 percent), even though white women overall supported President Bush by an 11-point margin (55 to 44 percent). In fact, white unmarried women were the only group of white, low-income women to remain solid in their support for Kerry.

Clearly, there is room to increase the share of unmarried women in the electorate. Unmarried women are less likely to be registered and less likely to vote than married women, in part because they are less educated, more mobile, and socially disconnected. Systematic efforts to reach out to unmarried women in 2004 produced an increase in their percent share of the electorate from 19 to 22.4, but this number can be improved.(20) Unmarried women are still underrepresented in the electorate relative to their share of the population.

There may also be room to improve Democratic margins among unmarried women. Just as Karl Rove and the GOP were successful in increasing their margins among white evangelical Christian voters over the past two election cycles, progressives and Democrats have much to offer unmarried women. Unmarried women are particularly hurt by the GOP’s economic and social agenda. They were among the least likely to benefit from the Bush tax cuts and they will be left behind on healthcare policy—their number one concern—through cuts to Medicaid in state budgets. They are significantly to the left of the Republican Party on social issues ranging from a woman’s right to choose to Title IX gender equity issues, and they understand that they are the targets of the Bush administration’s “marriage initiatives." Their number one priority after access to affordable health care is pay equity and retirement security.(21) Progressives and Democrats can easily address these issues.

Older Women

While unmarried women are close to becoming a base Democratic group, older women remain a swing group. Like unmarried women, older women represent a sizeable chunk of voters—27 percent—and will be even larger as the Baby Boomers age.(22) They are “crosspressured" by significant economic concerns surrounding health care and retirement security that conflict with socially conservative views, particularly if they are white and blue collar. Figure 3.7 shows the considerable variability in the voting patterns of older women in the last four presidential election cycles, with their Democratic share of the vote ranging from 47 to 55 percent.

In 2004, Kerry won older women by 3 points, 51 to 48 percent, but lost older white women by 5 points—a 4-point drop in support for the Democratic candidate since 2000. In fact, Bush posted the best performance by a Republican among older women since 1988. Still, Kerry had the opportunity to maintain and perhaps increase Democratic support among older women. In early 2004, campaign advertising in the battleground states emphasized health care and domestic priorities.(23)

During this period (February to April), Kerry held a lead among white older women by an average of 7 points, 49 to 42 percent, and among white older non-college women by 2 points, 46 to 44 points. On Election Day, following a campaign steeped in values and security discussion rather than economic matters, Kerry lost white older women by 5 points, 47 to 52 percent, and white older non-college women by 18 points, 40 to 58 percent. Even more striking, there was a 14-point gap among white, older, non-college women between their identification with the Democratic Party (a 4-point Democratic disadvantage) and their support for Kerry (an 18-point disadvantage).(24) Kerry lost ground with older white women when the national discussion moved from health care, retirement, and other domestic priorities to security, the war on terrorism, and conduct of the war in Iraq. Kerry himself facilitated this shift by staging a Democratic Convention focused on security and military experience, after which economic issues were largely absent from the national debate. The changing agenda significantly hurt Kerry’s chances with cross-pressured older women voters, who were inclined to support Bush on security and “moral values."

Time series data show that support for Kerry dropped precipitously among older white women by September (as it did with all voters), and it never really returned among these voters even as he improved nationally. In the absence of a real economic discussion, these voters swung to Bush as he tapped into their social conservatism, their support for his approach to the war on terrorism, and their admiration of his religious faith.

There is an important lesson to learn from 2004: when we fail to address their issues, we lose older women voters to cultural conservatism. Even in a campaign whose broad themes are about security, it is possible to target older women voters with messages that address their economic concerns, as Kerry did with his early battleground-state advertising. Unlike younger, socially conservative women, older women want to vote their economic security. Democrats need to give them that option. As we are in the midst of an important discussion about Social Security reform, progressives have an outstanding opportunity to stake out ground as the champions of long-term financial security. Doing so will yield critically important support among this key group of swing voters.

MOVING BEYOND THE “SECURITY MOM"

Despite the lively media debate about the fabled “security mom," younger white married women with kids have been moving away from Democratic candidates for years, and 2004 simply represented the culmination of this departure. Kerry fared badly with this group, losing white married women by 23 points, 61 to 38 percent, and white married women with kids by 31 points, 65 to 34 percent (see figure 3.8). Like unmarried women, these white, socially conservative women voters are essentially GOP base voters.

It is unrealistic to believe that Democrats can make major gains with this group, even if our national political discussion moves away from security issues. Their attachment to the Republican Party is based on a wide range of cultural concerns that encompasses far more than just security. Their support has been cultivated over many years by Republicans through highly effective organized activity by conservative groups such as Concerned Women for America and Focus on the Family. Moreover, economic concerns are simply not as salient to younger white married women as they are to older and unmarried women, and they are likely to have benefited from Bush’s tax policies such as the child tax credit and the elimination of the marriage penalty. Unlike older women, Democrats cannot win this group just through an appeal to alternative economic policies.

But white married women with kids have a range of concerns that are perfectly appropriate for progressives and Democrats to address. Reaching them requires reframing the cultural debate and expanding it to include a host of issues that concern their ability to raise children in a safe and healthy environment. Rather than accept the Right’s narrow definition of values (i.e., abortion, gay marriage), progressives should acknowledge the challenges parents face dealing with their kids’ sexuality and peer pressure around drugs and alcohol in an environment overrun

with sex and violence on television, the Internet, and video games. Democrats and progressives should begin to talk about these concerns in simple language and should not shy away from taking progressive positions that are consistent with what moms’ value.

Moms are pragmatic and want their children to be raised with the right kind of values that will allow them to make responsible choices about their behavior. They want their kids to be faithful, be responsible, and understand the “Golden Rule," and they worry that their kids will be sexually active too soon or will be exposed to alcohol and drugs. These concerns are neither inherently liberal nor conservative; many progressives share them and would be wise to engage in a discussion of these values. In this context, progressives can trumpet positions on social issues that are more in step with these voters’ concerns than positions taken by the Republican Party. The vast majority of moms support sex education in public schools and access to birth control, which the Bush administration and its allies oppose through their advocacy of “abstinence only" education. Moms support stem cell research and worry about the impact of pollution on their children’s health and safety, areas where the GOP has staked out entirely different ground.(25)

Democrats and progressives, therefore, have an opportunity to reframe the cultural debate by emphasizing the ways that they care about families rather than by fighting defensive battles that box them into the “antifamily" corner. We do not have to retreat from supporting values we hold most dearly—like protecting a woman’s right to choose or only supporting “traditional" marriage—because, as John Kenneth White argues in this volume, cultural arguments need not have a left-right dimension or be policy specific. Democrats will be successful with women voters if they cast progressive responses to cultural issues in the same commonsense language moms use when they express concerns about their children. Even better, progressives do have policy positions consistent with these concerns.

Progressives can only make gains in cultural battles by taking the offensive in places where we can and should win. At the same time, we need to be realistic: we cannot make major gains with white conservative women in the short run. However, we can make inroads, diminishing the advantage Republicans hold with a core constituency and laying the foundation for a future when we seriously contest, rather than lose, values battles.

WINNING BACK WOMEN

For Democrats and progressives, debate about the women’s vote needs to move beyond whether or not the gender gap shrank in 2004. It needs to put aside narrow arguments about misleading concerns about women and security. Progressives and Democrats instead need to acknowledge that there is a problem with the “women’s vote" and focus on how to rebuild support among white blue-collar and married women, regain ground with older women, and increase the participation of women who support a progressive political agenda. This task can be accomplished by putting aside talk of a monolithic “women’s vote" and thinking about women voters as large, discreet groups with their own agendas. Each group plays a distinct strategic role in building a progressive majority, and each needs to be approached with a distinct set of tactics. But this does not mean that communicating with women should be a narrow or particularistic project. In fact, Democrats and progressives fare badly with women when they do not have a broad economic and cultural narrative that informs who they are as a party or a movement.

Moreover, an effective strategy for reaching out to women voters, particularly married women with children, necessitates going on the offensive in cultural battles where Democrats and progressives have been forced into a defensive position. Because of the positions held by married women, this can be done without sacrificing core progressive ideals.

It is time for progressives to take the initiative and offer a clear, commonsense economic vision while reframing the “values" debate to address the concrete concerns women have about raising their families in a society that often seems to be operating in a different reality than their own. These two foci cut across the concerns of all women voters and are the building blocks for bringing women into a successful progressive electoral coalition.

NOTES

1. Most of the data in this chapter come from the VNS exit polls and the Edison/Mitofsky National Election Pool. Voter News Service (VNS) was founded in 1993 as a consortium owned by ABC, AP, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox to provide conclusive, accurate, and efficient exit polling for major elections. To deal with the problems in the VNS system in 2000 and 2002, ABC, AP, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox created the National Election Pool to provide tabulated vote counts and exit poll surveys for the major 2004 presidential primaries and the November general election. These six major news organizations used Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International as the provider of exit polls. Nationally, they interviewed 13,660 respondents on Election Day.

2. As many argue, the gender gap that emerged between men and women was as much a product of the flight of men from the Democratic Party as it was a result of the influx of women into the party. See Laura R. Winsky-Mattei and Franco Mattei, “If Men Stayed at Home . . . The Gender Gap in Recent Congressional Elections,"  Political Research Quarterly 51, no. 2 (June 1998): 411-36.

3. A poll of 2,186 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press from April 24-May 6, 2000, shows a wide gender gap on support for developing a missile defense system. Forty-five percent of men supported developing this capacity even if it alienates Russia, compared to 27 percent of women.

4. A National Public Radio survey conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and Public Opinion Strategies surveyed 1,002 likely voters on this issue between December 10 and 15, 2003. The survey has a margin of error of ±3.1 percent. It is available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4512392.

5. According to the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey, conducted June 5-8, 2004, and released June 10, 2004. The survey includes 1,230 registered voters and has a margin of error of ±3 percent. The one exception is “women’s issues" such as abortion, where the differences between men and women are relatively small. That said, there is no doubt that for certain women on both sides of the debate, abortion motivates political decision making.

6. The Perot vote obscures these margins to a degree. In 1992, research shows that the Perot vote would have split evenly between Clinton and Bush, suggesting that the margin between white unmarried and married women would have remained the same. In 1996, the Perot vote was heavily Republican; had Perot not been on the ticket, Dole would have performed significantly better with white married women.

7. For particularly strong accounts of this history, see Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Donald G. Matthews and Jane Sherron De Hart, Sex, Gender and the Politics of the ERA (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

8. Edward G. Carmines and Geoffrey C. Layman, “Issue Evolution and in Postwar American Politics: Old Certainties and Fresh Tensions," in Present Discontents, ed. B. E. Shafer (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House Publishers, 1997); Christina Wollbrecht, The Politics of Women’s Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

9. Kenneth D. Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1997).

10. Anna Greenberg, “Why Men Leave: Gender and Partisanship in the 1990s," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August 31-September 3, 2000.

11. Kristen Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

12. Ruy Teixera and Joel Rogers, America’s Forgotten Majority (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

13. Stanley B. Greenberg, The Two Americas (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004).

14. Stan Greenberg and James Carville, “Solving the Paradox of 2004: Why America Wanted Change but Voted for Continuity," Democracy Corps, November 9, 2004, available at http://www.greenbergresearch.com/index.php?ID=1239

dcorps/11052004_Post_Election_2004_solving_the_paradox.pdf.

15. Anna Greenberg, “Where Were the Women," Nation 275, no. 23 (December 30, 2002): 20.

16. Anna Greenberg, “The Security Mom Myth—Updated,"  Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, September 28, 2004, available at http://www.greenbergresearch.com/index.php?ID=1240

17. Anna Greenberg, “Race, Religiosity, and the Women’s Vote,"  Women and Politics 22, no. 3 (2001): 59-82.

18. Michelle Conlin, “UnMarried America,"  Business Week, October 20, 2003, 106.

19. Anna Greenberg, “The Marriage Gap,"  Blueprint 11 (July 12, 2001), available at http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=114&subid=144&contentid=3559.

20. Women’s Voices, Women’s Vote was a national effort designed to increase the registration and turnout of unmarried women. For information, see http://www.wvwv.org.

21. [Anna Greenberg and Jennifer Berktold], “Unmarried Women in the 2004 Presidential Election," Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, January 2005, available at http://www.greenbergresearch.com/index.php?ID=1225

22. Here, we define older as more than 50 years of age.

23. During this period, the Kerry campaign, MoveOn.Org, the Media Fund, and the AFL-CIO and other unions were airing ads in the battleground states. Most of these ads addressed economic issues such as jobs, healthcare costs, and retirement security.

24. Democracy Corps/Institute for America’s Future, “Democracy Corps/Institute for America’s Future Post-Election Survey Frequency Questionnaire," November 2-3, 2004, available at http://www.greenbergresearch.com/index.php?ID=1241.

25. Two surveys conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and commissioned by Club Mom in 2004 and 2005 demonstrate support by mothers for stem cell research and comprehensive sex educational programs. The 2004 study surveyed 1,207 mothers nationally between March 8 and 11, 2004, with over-samples of 139 African-American mothers and 121 Hispanic mothers; it has a margin of error of ±2.82 percent. The 2005 study surveyed 1,003 mothers nationally between February 17 and 21, 2005, and has a margin of error of ±3.1 percent.