A Note on Gender and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
Following Election 2016’s “shocking” finale, many in academic and journalistic circles have seemed less interested in dispassionately analyzing why Trump won than finding excuses for why Hillary lost.
As far as excuses go, sexism or misogyny (like racism, “foreign meddling,” or “fake news”) is pretty effective: it isn’t that Clinton was a non-charismatic candidate with a lot of baggage and a boring platform who ran a bad campaign — instead, those who didn’t vote for Hillary were driven by irrational and immoral impulses, preventing them from embracing the only ‘legitimate’ candidate in this race.
Therefore, it should not surprise that a vast academic literature has emerged on the alleged role of sexism and misogyny in the 2016 U.S. General Election (given that scholars overwhelmingly lean left). Co-occurrence searches on Google Scholar can provide insight into the scale of this enterprise. Restricting our search to 2016 and beyond, “Donald Trump” and “misogyny” yields 4,520 results to date; pairing “Donald Trump” and “sexism” brings in 8,310 hits; “Donald Trump” and “feminist” has 15,400 entries.
There is certainly some overlap between these, but it is nonetheless clear that a large academic corpus is being rapidly produced on this topic – in a wide array of fields, using diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks. Surveying the titles and abstracts of these works, it is difficult to find any that meaningfully challenge notions that Trump and his supporters were sexist, that Clinton lost in large part because she was a woman (or a “strong woman”), or that gender played an extraordinary role in this election cycle. Yet there are many reasons to be skeptical of this consensus position.
For instance, much has been made of the “gender gap” between Republicans and Democrats in 2016: according to exit-polls, the distance between Clinton’s margin of victory among women, and Trump’s margin of victory among men, was wider than it had ever been between the parties. But how much of this effect was actually driven by Trump?
As a matter of fact, the partisan ‘gender gap’ has been a persistent and growing feature of American politics for every presidential election since 1980. That is, over the last 40 years, there have been a progressive series of races where the partisan gender gap was “larger than it had ever been.” Indeed, this was the case in the 2012 election between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama: the magnitude of the partisan gender gap was without precedent. In this respect, then, 2016 seems to be a continuation of long-running trends rather than a departure from the norm.
Moreover, Clinton’s margin among women (relative to Trump), while solid, was not historic. According to New York Times exit polls, Bill Clinton won women by a bigger margin in 1996, as did Obama in 2008. Al Gore won women by about the same margin as Hillary in 2000. Nor was Trump’s margin among men unprecedented for Republicans: Nixon (’72), Reagan (’80, ’84) and George H.W. Bush (’88) all won the male vote by a larger margin than Trump. The “historic” gap emerged because both candidates had slightly bigger margins than usual among either men or women, not because Trump or Clinton did amazingly well with either group.
However, looking at margins of victory is a non-ideal way of exploring this question because, for many reasons, exit-polls tend to oversample Democratic-friendly constituents (therefore, Democratic margins of victory are probably overstated across the board, and Republican margins of victory, understated). However, we can control for this bias by looking at Trump’s female support relative to his Republican predecessors instead: assuming the quality and any bias of a long-running exit-poll is roughly constant across time, longitudinal differences can be held to reflect authentic changes in support among different constituencies.
What do we find? Among Republicans, Trump won the lowest share of the female vote since 1996. But of course, this does not imply Hillary Clinton did well with women. In fact, she did poorly with women as well: Going back two decades on the Democratic side, the only candidate who got a lower share of women than Hillary – the first female president at the top of a major party ticket — was John Kerry (2004).
How can this be explained? Many analysts have latched onto race. After all, Trump won a majority (53%) of white women. But this is nothing extraordinary either: Going all the way back to 1972, Republicans have won the lion’s share of white women in all but two cycles (1992, 1996) – and even in these instances, Bill Clinton could only muster a plurality of the white female vote. Democrats have never won an outright majority in this demographic in at least the last 40 years. But actually, Trump did equivalent or worse with white women than his immediate predecessors Romney (56%), McCain (53%), and Bush II (55% in 2012). In short, Clinton’s poor performance with women was not a result of race being especially salient in this cycle among female voters. Placed in historical context, Trump’s performance among white women was middling at best for a Republican candidate.
Nor does it seem to be the case that women had “internalized misogyny” and, themselves, couldn’t embrace the idea of a female president: most female Obama voters who defected from the party in 2016 did not go for Trump (again, his performance among women, including white women, was relatively low) – they went instead to Green Party candidate Jill Stein. And far from being more genteel or amicable than Clinton (i.e. a more “acceptable” female option for those who could not accept a “strong” woman), Stein was more aggressive and subversive — far bolder than Hillary — in her rhetoric, in her manner, in her policy platform, etc. So it does not seem to be that women just couldn’t support one of their own, or were turned off by an assertive and confident woman.
In fact, Hillary didn’t just get one of the lowest female vote shares of any Democrat over the last six elections among those who did turn out — fewer women headed to the polls this cycle overall. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, female participation dropped by 0.4 percentage points in 2016 as compared to 2012 — and 2.5 percentage points as compared to 2008.
Had Hillary won the same share of women as Obama, or even her husband — or if she had equivalent (or especially increased) rates of female turnout, she almost certainly would be president today. Why didn’t she? Again, women didn’t defect to Trump en masse, they didn’t seem have a problem voting for a woman (given that the lost votes gravitated mostly towards Stein). The problem seemed to be Hillary Clinton in particular: her message, her platform, her character. And of course, the same factors that drove so many women away from Clinton likely also depressed her performance with men (that is, just as women had reasons to vote against Clinton other than her gender, so did men). Indeed, had Clinton won, she would have been (like Trump is) the least-popular victorious candidate in modern U.S. history.
Given these realities, unsettling questions emerge about how the election has typically been explored in the literature up to now. For instance, why so much focus on men, “threatened masculinity,” and sexism, rather than exploring how women exercised their agency in this election? There is a moral dimension to this question — shouldn’t we be especially concerned with female perspectives, and female agency, in the age of Trump? However, there are theoretical considerations as well.
For one, the story among women seems more analytically interesting: It is truly striking that Clinton performed so poorly (in terms of vote share and turnout) considering her historic status as the first female candidate at the top of a major party ticket, and given the unending media portrayal of her opponent as a sexist, misogynist, serial harasser with a policy agenda for women that was just as horrible as his rhetoric.
The story among women is objectively more important too: Women made up a majority (52%) of the electorate in 2016 – and indeed they’ve represented the majority of voters for every election of the last 30 years. They consistently represent an even larger share of the Democratic base. Therefore, if one wanted to understand an electoral outcome on the basis of gender, one should start by analyzing and contextualizing the vote preferences of women and how they’ve changed. It is a priority error to focus on men, given they are relatively less significant to determining how most races shake out.
The choice to focus on men seems to be driven more by a desire to prove a particular thesis about the role of gender (sexism, toxic masculinity, the patriarchy, etc.) than to understand the relationship between gender and the electoral outcome per se. As I demonstrate in an article for the forthcoming volume of The American Sociologist, “Race and the Race for the White House: On Social Research in the Age of Trump,” similar peculiarities hold in the burgeoning literature on the role of race and racism in the 2016 election.