Clinton’s fate won’t depend only on gender
Political scientists say neither men nor women typically make their pick based primarily on a candidate’s sex
WASHINGTON — There are those who believe that women will propel Hillary Clinton to the presidency in November, seizing the opportunity to put the first of their kind in the White House. After all, that’s what black voters helped to do for Barack Obama in 2008.
Clinton herself hopes this is true. In declaring victory over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, for example, Clinton played up the historic nature of her candidacy, crediting her win to “generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible.”
The storyline around the 2016 election may focus on a battle of the sexes. Polls show that women favor Clinton, while Trump is doing better than she is with men.
But the latest political science research indicates that neither sexism nor feminism is likely to decide this race.
It turns out that other factors — primarily the political party of the candidate — are much more important than gender stereotypes, which seem to barely matter at all.
“There is very little evidence that women are more likely to vote for women candidates simply because they are women,” says Kathleen Dolan, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee whose 2014 book “When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections” examined votes for women who ran for Con- gress and governorships in 2010. Likewise, Dolan says, “There is very little evidence that men don’t vote for women candidates because they are women.”
Clinton , in other words, can’t count on a boost from women, but nor should she fear a backlash from men.
Overall, in the primaries, Clinton won the women’s vote handily.
Clinton also enjoyed an advantage among women in her 2008 primary campaign.
Clinton on average received 8.6 percent more votes from women than she got from men in the 2008 primaries and 10.6 percent more in 2016, according to research by Barbara Norrander, a political science professor at the University of Arizona.
That, at least, is an indication that Democratic women may favor a candidate of their own gender in a primary contest.