KAVANAUGH
Ahead of Tuesday’s election, both parties claimed the emotionally charged debate over sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh would motivate their supporters to turn out. And it did.
Nationally, three-quarters of voters said the tumultuous battle was important to their vote, including 48 percent who said it was very important. Voters who considered it especially important broke for their Democratic House candidate, 56 percent to 43 percent.
But in key Senate races in the Republican-leaning states where Republicans flipped Democratic seats, those who ranked the debate as very important to their votes leaned toward the GOP. Voters who said the Kavanaugh hearings were very important broke for the Republican 60 percent to 40 percent in North Dakota, 56 percent to 42 percent in Indiana, and 53 percent to 44 percent in Missouri.
Kavanaugh faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct from his youth, which he denied, and was confirmed by a GOP-controlled Congress following widely followed hearings.
The allegations against Kavanaugh were leveled roughly a year after the start of the #MeToo movement, which has brought national attention to sexual harassment and assault. Overall, 43 percent of voters said they were very concerned about women not being believed when they make allegations of sexual misconduct, and another 35 percent were somewhat concerned.
About as many said they were at least somewhat concerned about men not being given the opportunity to defend themselves against allegations of sexual misconduct.
While voters across most demographic groups considered Kavanaugh important as they cast ballots, there were wide differences in concern over the underlying issue.
Majorities of both men and women said they were at least somewhat concerned about women not being believed when they make allegations of sexual misconduct, but women were more likely than men to say they were very concerned about this, 52 percent to 35 percent.
Views varied widely by gender among Democrats, and just modestly among Republicans: Fully 74 percent of Democratic women A long line of people wait in the dark on Tuesday to vote at the Los Angeles County Registrar Recorders office in Norwalk on Tuesday.
said they were very concerned about women not being believed, compared with a smaller majority of Democratic men (56 percent). About a quarter of Republican women, and 2 in 10 Republican men, said they were very concerned about this.
While 55 percent of voters in urban areas said they were very concerned about women not being believed when they make allegations of sexual misconduct, 43 percent of suburbanites and 38 percent of voters in small towns and rural places said the same.
AP VoteCast is a survey of the American electorate conducted in all 50 states by NORC at the University of Chicago for The Associated Press and Fox News. The survey of 116,792 voters and 22,137 nonvoters was conducted Oct. 29 to Nov. 6, concluding as polls closed on Election Day. It combines interviews in English and Spanish with a random sample of registered voters drawn from state voter files; with self-identified registered voters conducted using NORC’s probabilitybased AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population; and with self-identified registered voters selected from nonprobability online panels. Participants selected from state voter files were contacted by phone and mail, and had the opportunity to take the survey by phone or online. The margin of sampling error for voters is estimated to be plus or minus 0.5 percentage points. All surveys are subject to multiple sources of error, including sampling, question wording and order, and nonresponse. Find more details about AP VoteCast’s methodology at http://www.ap.org/votecast