A new Quinnipiac University poll finds that among women, Democrats are leading on the generic congressional ballot by a 58% to 33%, a 25-point margin. Republicans, though, lead among men 50% to 42%, an 8-point margin.
That large gap between how women and men say they will vote in the midterm election is consistent with an average of live interview polls taken since June. The gender difference in the average is 26 points.
President Donald Trump has a history of making vulgar remarks about women (such as in the infamous Access Hollywood tape). Lately, he poked fun at the #MeToo movement. Comments like these are why it’s not too surprising that the 2016 presidential election featured the largest gender gap on record.
The question for the midterm elections is whether there will also be a large difference between female and male voting patterns without Trump or Hillary Clinton (the first woman major party nominee) on the ballot. The polling suggests that there will be.
If the average of polling since June holds through November 2018 will have the largest gender gap on record for a midterm election since 1958 (when we first had polling available).
Still, it’s unclear how much of the 2018 gender gap is because of Trump compared to an existing trend towards diverging women and men voting patterns. Before this year, no midterm election had had a wider gender gap than 20 points in American National Election Studies (ANES) polling, exit polls or an average of the two when both are available. That record, though, was set in 2014.
A key difference between 2014 and 2018 is the percentage of women who are voting for Democrats compared to Republicans, according to this CNN article.
In the average poll since June, Democrats are leading among women by an average 20-percentage point margin compared to trailing among men by 6 points. If this holds, this would be the largest margin that Democrats would win women by in a midterm election since at least 1958.
The two best years for Democrats before this year were the 1974 and 1982 midterms when Democrats won among women by about 14 and 17 points respectively. House Democrats are also doing considerably better than in 2014 when they won among women by 4 points, and Democrats this year are doing better than Clinton did in 2016 when she won women by 13 points.
Read more on cnn.com
