Nate Silver: ‘Gender Gap’ Near Historic Highs

[highplainsdem]

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/gender-gap-near-historic-highs/

Although polls disagree on the exact magnitude of the gender gap (and a couple of recent ones seemed to show Mitt Romney eliminating the president’s advantage with women voters), the consensus of surveys points to a large one this year — rivaling the biggest from past elections.

The gender gap is nothing new in American politics. Since 1972, when exit polling became widespread, men and women split their votes in three elections: 1996, 2000, and 2004. They came close to doing so on several other occasions. In 2008, for example, Mr. Obama won resoundingly among women, beating Mr. McCain by 13 points, but only won by a single point among men.

The biggest gender gap to date in the exit polls came in 2000, when Al Gore won by 11 points among women, but George W. Bush won by 9 points among men — a 20-point difference. The numbers this year look very close to that.

-snip-

This suggests the gender gap instead has more to do with partisan ideology than with pocketbook voting; apart from their views on abortion, women also take more liberal stances than men on social issues ranging from same-sex marriage to gun control.

-snip-

[JaneyVee]

1. Of course to the MSM this is translated as a "tie". Anything for a horse race.

Sickening.

[powergirl]

2. Amoong the credible polls, Women are voting for Obama 18% more than Repubs

Getting tired of MSM pretending that Romney closed the gender gap.

Since the first presidential debate in Denver, there have been 10 high-quality national polls that reported a breakout of results between men and women. (I define a “high-quality” poll as one that used live telephone interviews, and which called both landlines and cellphones. These polls will collect the most representative samples and should provide for the most reliable benchmarks of demographic trends.)

The results in the polls were varied, with the gender gap ranging from 33 points (in a Zogby telephone poll for the Washington Times) to just 8 (in polls by Pew Research and by The Washington Post). On average, however, there was an 18-point gender gap, with Mr. Obama leading by an average of 9 points among women but trailing by 9 points among men.

[justiceischeap]

3. As I posted elsewhere on DU yesterday, the polls aren't making sense

Supposedly President Obama is leading with women, african-americans, hispanics and the millennial's, so how can Mittens expect to win with the white, male vote (and the percentage of women saying they support him)?