Think for a moment about what you didn’t hear about in the recent election season. Something you were probably sick of hearing about in news coverage in every election for the past few decades. All about how Republicans don’t fare well with women voters. They called it the “gender gap.”
For years, it was put forward that Republicans were at a disadvantage among female voters largely due to the abortion issue. Those crazy Republicans' pro-life tendencies were the cause of it all. If only the GOP would not allow those radical pro-lifers to run their party and stop being so intolerant and mean, then maybe women would flock to their cause.
Every election cycle we heard it again, but with a new twist. There was the “Year of the Woman” in ’92, and then “soccer moms” all through the late ‘90’s and 2000. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the 2004 election. The gender gap disappeared.
Well, sort of. I say sort of because the 2004 exit polls tell us that, if there is anything close to representing a “gender gap” in American politics today, it is the Democrats' gender gap among men. That’s right, the “no testosterone” party is down among the Y chromosome crowd by a whopping 11 percent. Women, on the other hand, slightly favored the Democratic nominee, but only by 51 to 48 percent. And this year, men made up 51 percent of all votes cast.
This goes a long way towards explaining why you DON’T hear the predominantly liberal media talking about the “gender gap” any more…because it doesn’t cut against Republicans. That’s journalistic integrity for you.
But what about other gaps? There is the “abortion gap.” That’s the one that shows the difference in support for the two parties among voters based on their position on the abortion issue.
A post election poll conducted by Worthlin Worldwide demonstrated that pro-life candidates had a nearly two-to-one margin of support among the 42 percent of voters that said the abortion issue “affected how they voted.”
Further, eight percent of voters responded that abortion was “the most important issue” in determining who they voted for. Six percent went for Bush and two percent for Kerry – a pro-life advantage of four percentage points of total turnout. When you consider that the average election in America is won or lost by less than five percent of the vote, the importance of that number becomes pretty clear. (See Florida, 2000 and Ohio, 2004).
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