The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday showed Barack Obama ahead 50% to McCain’s 46%. The two candidates were even among men and Obama leads by eight points among women.
A rough estimate assuming equal numbers of male and female voters: Obama’s entire lead comes from the “gender gap.” Even when Democrats lose, their share of female voters has been consistently higher than their share of male voters. Republicans have consistently done much better among men. The fact that both parties share the male vote evenly at this point is a very bad sign for Republicans.
Do gender issues matter or are they merely hyped spin on coincidental polling numbers? Feminist politics is about civil rights and family. For millions of American men, the “economy” has little to do with Wall Street and everything to do with feminist regulations adopted by the federal government, arbitrarily intruding and manipulating their lives. Not merely their wealth, but their freedom is at stake. They may be jailed for not meeting arbitrary government requirements. The effects of feminist politics have led to the destruction of the institutions of marriage and family, awakening a much broader constituency to the urgency of the problem.
Imagine yourself with your children in a war zone in a nation so torn by political corruption that food is scarce. At that moment, what is your priority? Do you care more about who might do a better job managing war next year or about the rifles pointed at your head right now? Do you care more about capture and incarceration today or the potential long-term implications of banking regulations? Someone who does not believe that gender politics is important to men may just as well imagine that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could have been elected President of Israel if he had notably mentioned the “middle class” before Shimon Peres.
The history of the McCain’s gender preference has been clear in this campaign. He has spent much time and effort going after Hillary supporters, particularly women. Certainly the screeching far-left feminist opposition thought his choice of a female running mate was specifically for that purpose. Hence their bizarre claim that Sarah Palin is not a woman.
McCain’s effort exposes a critical problem in the broader and longer term Republican Party strategy. Their problem is Ronald Reagan or rather, the Reagan myth. The problem for Republicans is that the effect of their involvement in gender issues directly contradicts their traditional social and political conservatism.
In 1980, Reagan won 55 percent of the male vote and 47 percent of the female vote. Not a bad polling among women for a Republican especially since his opponent Jimmy Carter got only 45 percent of women’s votes. Reagan won among women in 1984, despite the fact that the first female vice presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro ran against the Reagan ticket with Walter Mondale. And Reagan won by a landslide among men.
The public myth is that Reagan won by convincing “liberals” that “conservative” policies are better. The seldom exposed fact is that Reagan ran up to his first presidential run solidly in bed with feminist allies. During his eight years as president, under the cover of conservative welfare-reform theology, the Reagan administration built a feminist empire within the government bureaucracy, a sort of hidden government within the government that would have its way with men for decades to come. The legal tactics employed pushed Constitutional protections aside and paved the way to the broader elements of socialism currently concerning much of the electorate.
It would take time for the negative effects of Reagan reforms to become a negative election politics; time for the public to feel the effects and blame politicians. Reforms went into effect in 1990 and the Democrats, Bill Clinton included, spent years, incredible political effort, and billions upon billions of taxpayers’ money to get on the Reagan reform bandwagon.
In 1992, Bill Clinton won the White House. In a three-way race, George H.W. Bush received 38 percent and 37 percent of the men’s and women’s vote, respectively. “End welfare as we know it” Clinton won re-election in 1996, helped by a 16-point advantage among women. source
Does the male vote matter or do women ultimately decide elections? Well – if you passed grade school math you will most likely conclude that men’s votes matter. The point here however, is that they matter more to Republicans.
In 2000, George W. Bush won the election despite losing the women’s vote by 11 points. In 2004, with women comprising 54 percent of the electorate and giving a 51-48 majority of their vote to Mr. Kerry, President Bush nonetheless won re-election by nearly 3.5 million votes. His secret? He crushed Mr. Kerry by 11 points (55-44) among men, obliterating the seven-point gender gap in the process.
In 2000, Bush ran in the aftermath of Clinton, who along with the Democratic Party had been running on a strong feminist platform. Clinton spent eight years shoving anti-male feminist doctrine in the faces of men and they felt it. During the Clinton years, anti-male, anti-father propaganda was extremely intense and politicians thought nothing of running over the civil rights of men. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. actually introduced a proposal to send poor fathers who fell behind in paying arbitrarily high welfare-reform enabled child support to military interment camps. Rather than questioning the civil rights implications and the arbitrary political manipulation of child support orders, the Old Media promoted the idea as “tough love†for “deadbeat dads.”
In 2004, with the Clinton years still in memory the most influential men’s and fathers’ rights oriented news site, Men’s News Daily carried a link to the RNC website and published op-eds endlessly bashing the Democratic Party, even while spending much less space exposing Republican history and weakness. The point was still to punish the Democrats.
When Ronald Reagan ran, gender issues mattered most to feminist groups and Reagan was rewarded for playing to them. Most people thought the Constitution would hold the effects of feminist extremism in check. Most men felt no need for any kind of organized political opposition to them. During the Clinton years, only those directly effected by the reforms understood the radical changes. Clinton milked them to death and heard the applause die out while in office. George W. Bush left gender issues out of his campaign.
Both current campaigns are leaving direct discussion of gender issues out this time, sticking to vague references. Obama returned to the conservative rhetoric of Reagan welfare reform theology (ironically in a Fathers’ Day speech) eloquently avoiding exposure of its real meaning. The Republican Party Platform and the McCain campaign carefully hide their lack of will to fix marriage and family law, blaming activist judges.
In 2008, the situation is much different. Despite some years of Republican Party rule, the Republican Party has failed to put the extremism in check. Despite the fact that the Democratic Party platform is still a feminist platform, it is difficult to find a signal that the Republicans are at least a lesser-of-two-evils. Continued adoring references to Reagan – even in this year’s Republican primary – have been outdated and distasteful. If Republicans want the male vote, along with other conservative support, they need to concretely communicate that they have come to their senses and will throw off the yoke of feminist extremism.
Many related articles can be found in Roger F. Gay’s archive. Special suggestion. Ronald Reagan’s Mistake.
