 | | President Biden won 48 percent of men in the 2020 election.Doug Mills/The New York Times |
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The gender gap is one of the best-known dynamics in American politics. Put simply: Women lean liberal, men lean conservative. (As a character in "The West Wing" put it: "If women were the only voters, the Democrats would win in a landslide every time. If men were the only voters, the G.O.P. would be the left-wing party.") |
Similar, but more obscure, is the "marriage gap," which describes the fact that single people trend liberal while married people skew conservative. |
If both men and married people lean to the right, one would expect married men to be an extremely reliable Republican constituency. That is why it has been so surprising that recent analyses of the 2020 election show that in the past five years, married men, though still more Republican than not, significantly shifted in the direction of Democrats. |
What's going on here? And what could it mean for the political future? |
"Democrats are going to have to figure out if this shift is permanent," said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster. |
Recent data from the Pew Research Center revealed that married men went from voting 62 percent for Donald Trump and 32 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016, to 54 percent for Trump and 44 percent for Joe Biden last year. That sizable shift — a 30-percentage-point margin sliced to 10 points, and a 12-point jump for the Democratic candidate — was underscored by the much lower movement Pew found among unmarried men, married women and unmarried women. |
Both the Cooperative Election Study and the Democratic data firm Catalist found smaller but still notable four-point shifts toward Biden among married men in the two-party vote share, or the total tally excluding votes for third-party candidates. |
"That's definitely statistically significant," said Brian Schaffner, a professor of political science at Tufts University who co-directs the Cooperative Election Study. "Married men are a pretty big group," he added, "so that's pretty meaningful in terms of the ultimate margin." |
A partial explanation for this shift, and the simplest, is that the gender gap itself got smaller in 2020. Biden won 48 percent of men while Clinton won 41 percent, according to Pew, even as female voters in aggregate hardly budged. Biden also improved on Clinton's margins among white voters; his movement among white married men was responsible for the shift among all married men, according to Catalist. |
Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster, said that Biden's outperforming Clinton among this group "doesn't surprise me at all." |
In other words, this story may have less to do with Biden, and may even be the rare Trump-related story that has less to do with Trump. Rather, it is a story about Clinton and sexism — a "gendered" view of the candidate, as Greenberg put it — in which the potential of the first woman president raised the importance of issues like feminism, abortion and the culture wars, all of which help explain the gender gap in the first place. |
"She was not well-liked by large numbers of the public, but especially by independent and Republican men," said Eric Plutzer, a professor of political science at Penn State University. "There were opportunities for Biden to win back some of that demographic." |
The pool of married men was also very different last year than in 2016. The Cooperative Election Study asked respondents whom they had supported in both 2016 and 2020, and found that married men were not particularly likely to have switched between the parties, Schaffner said. However, because of death, divorce and marriage, the composition of this group changed. It got younger and more millennial. And that meant it got more Democratic. |
"This is not your father's married man," Schaffner said. |
Indeed, the elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich floated a theory on a recent podcast that the sharp increase in mail-in voting last year — when, thanks to Covid-19, numerous states made that option easier and unprecedented numbers of voters chose it — led to more married couples discussing their votes, perhaps even seeing each other's ballots, and that this, in turn, led to more straight-ticket household voting. And if married men moved toward the Democrat while married women were consistent, it would seem likelier that husbands acceded to their wives rather than the opposite. "Wife Guys" for Biden? |
Greenberg said it was impossible to know if this had happened, but noted that "vote-by-mail was heavily Democratic." |
Finally, a big story of the election was a divide among voters based on education, as those with college degrees moved toward Biden and those without headed toward Trump. That could help explain the shift among married men, who are likely to be middle class, Schaffner said. |
For Plutzer, the shift of the married men carries an indisputable lesson: Swing voters may be an endangered species, but they are not mythical. "This was something we debated a great deal in the run-up to the last election: whether campaigns only needed to focus on mobilization," he said. "This shows that there are groups that actually do swing, that are responsive to what a president does in office, and responsive enough that they look for alternatives." |
Anderson, the Republican pollster, cautioned that Democratic momentum with this group might be fleeting: "Since Biden's taken office," he said, "in our own polling, Republican liability among college-educated suburbanites has decreased since last fall." |
To Greenberg, the thought of deliberately targeting married men — and white married men especially — is unfamiliar to say the least. Democratic campaigns tend to target different kinds of female voters and voters of color, she said. |
But that could change as soon as the midterms. "There certainly are heavily suburban districts that are going to be heavily contested next year," Greenberg added, "where they definitely are going to take a look at some of these suburban well-educated married men." |
Justice Breyer, under pressure to retire from the Supreme Court, says he has not decided on his future. |
Justice Stephen Breyer, 82, says he has no plans to retire despite calls from progressives demanding the 27-year Supreme Court veteran step down voluntarily to ensure that Senate Democrats have the opportunity to confirm a liberal successor. |
Breyer, speaking to CNN in an interview posted today, said he had not decided on his future, but was relishing his new role as dean of the court's remaining liberals after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death last year gave conservatives a commanding six-to-three majority thanks to her replacement, Justice Amy Coney Barrett. |
When asked what factors would determine his decision, Breyer replied, "Primarily, of course, health," adding, "Second, the court." |
Some progressives have called on Breyer to step down immediately, citing the fragility of the Democrats' slim control of the deadlocked 50-50 Senate, which is contingent on the tiebreaking vote by Vice President Kamala Harris. |
Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, blocked President Barack Obama's appointment of Merrick Garland to the high court after the 2016 death of Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative. Garland is now President Biden's attorney general. |
McConnell rammed through the confirmation of Barrett just over a week before the 2020 election — and many Democrats believe he will be able to block any nominee proposed by Biden if Republicans win back control of the Senate in 2022. |
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a leader of the Democratic Party's left wing, has joined another New York progressive, Representative Mondaire Jones, in suggesting that Breyer step aside. |
"You know, it's something I think about, but I would probably lean toward yes," Ocasio-Cortez said when asked on Sunday whether Breyer should retire soon. "I would give more thought to it, but I'm inclined to say yes." |
But Breyer, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the court in 1994, is showing no signs of a quick exit, saying that he is enjoying a new position of influence on the court as the most senior of a liberal faction that includes Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. |
During the session that just ended, he also assumed a central role on majority decisions that spanned the court's ideological camps, including the third, and perhaps decisive, rejection of a challenge to the Affordable Care Act. |
Breyer said his new place in the overall court pecking order — he now gets to speak third in deliberations after Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas — "has made a difference to me." |
This piece comes from our live briefing, where you can find more updates on the latest political news. |
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