Here we go again …
Gallup’s headline “2012 election had the largest gender gap in recorded history”
- The gender gap in the 2012 presidential election was the largest since Gallup began tracking the metric in 1952.
- Obama won women by 12 percentage points, while Mitt Romney won men by 8. That’s a 20-point gender gap.
- 2012 was the fifth straight election to feature a double-digit gender gap.
OK, CNN’s topline numbers do, in fact say that Obama won women by 10 points and that Romney won men by 9 points … a gender gap of 19 points.
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But, digging deeper, Romney may have lost “women” by 10 points, but he won white women by 14 points.
Romney got shellacked with Black and Latino women … but, at a rate that’s comparable to the shellacking that he took with Black and Latino men.
Said differently, it looks to me like the racial divide is driving the numbers, not gender.
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Note also that married women – in aggregate – favored Romney … by 14 points.
Proportionately more white women are married … suggesting again that race may be driving the apparent gender differences.
At least, that’s what the numbers say …
Tags: gender gap
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