ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 12, 1996 TAG: 9602130064
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
THE GENDER gap - the greater tendency of women to vote for Democrats and of men to vote for Republicans - is "something we live with," says a Virginia-based GOP activist, quoted the other day in The Christian Science Monitor. "It's not a killer influence. I've not seen an election where we've been knocked over because of the women's vote."
The activist may want to revise her statement, given the recent special U.S Senate election in Oregon.
There, the gender gap not only was huge (19 percentage points), but the Republican lost despite running slightly better among men than the Democrat ran among women. How so? Women, though only 51 percent of the adult population, comprised 57 percent of those who voted.
Unusual circumstances may have contributed to the gender-gap size and the turnout disparity: Oregon's use of mail-in balloting, the sexual-harassment episodes of former GOP Sen. Robert Packwood that had led to his resignation and the special election.
But politics also tends to run in cycles. If 1994 was the year of the angry white male, 1996 may occasion more electoral expression by angry females.
Less speculative than predictions about the future effects of the gender gap (it cuts both ways, after all) is the fact of its existence and persistence. Oregon aside, virtually every poll shows President Clinton running well ahead of Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, Clinton's likely GOP challenger, among women. Virtually every poll shows more men than women identify with the Republican Party, and vice versa, and the gap apparently is widening.
A commonplace explanation is that the GOP embodies manly virtues like national strength and fiscal solidity, while the Democratic Party embodies womanly virtues like caring and compassion. If this has an air of gross oversimplification to it, it also reflects some real differences.
And while party polarization may help explain the gender gap, so too may the gender gap account for part of the much-noted decline in civility in American electioneering and public discourse. To an increasing extent, contemporary politics may encompass the ancient battle of the sexes in new venues.
LENGTH: Short : 46 linesby CNB