Race, gender, and partisan politics in the United States

Two well-known features of US politics are the greater support for the Democratic Party among women and Black Americans. Since the early 1980s, women have been more likely than men to identify with the Democratic Party and vote for Democratic candidates, and since the 1940s, Black Americans have been more likely than non-Blacks to align with the Democratic Party. England et al. (1) document a surprising and overlooked connection between these two well-known patterns: A significant portion of the gender difference in presidential voting can be attributed to the greater proportion of Blacks among female than among male voters.

The gap between men’s and women’s partisan leanings has been fairly stable over the past four decades, but its political significance has increased. The two major political parties are highly competitive at the national level: The difference in two-party popular vote in the past six presidential elections has averaged less than 3.5 percentage points, while partisan control of the House or Senate has changed eight times in those same 24 y. Moreover, as the two parties have become more distinct from each other, the policy consequences of election outcomes have grown. In this highly contested and highly polarized environment, even modest trends in support of one party or the other can have enormous consequences, making the roughly eight percentage point difference in voting between men and women highly consequential.

The Emergence of the Partisan Gender Gap

In the 1950s and early 1960s, American women were slightly more likely than men to identify as Republicans (2). This Republican advantage among women had dissolved by the late 1960s, but the greater tendency for women than men to lean toward the Democratic Party emerged in presidential voting only in the 1980 contest between Reagan and Carter. Early scholarship on the emerging partisan gender gap tended to focus on Reagan’s opposition to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment (3–5), his bellicose foreign policy and strong anticommunism (6), his opposition to government support for the needy (5), and women’s disadvantaged economic position relative to men (5, 7).

Some of these factors were attributed to long-standing average differences in the personality orientations or economic experiences of American men and women (8). Males’ greater openness to violence and physical aggression was thought to contribute to men’s greater support for an aggressive foreign policy and higher spending on national defense. Women’s greater “nurturance” or concern for the well-being of children and families was believed to contribute to women’s greater support for spending on domestic social programs such as healthcare, education, food assistance, and antipoverty efforts. Women’s more favorable views on government social support were also understood to reflect women’s disadvantaged economic position (5, 7). During the 1960s and 1970s, women earned about 60% of what men earned (based on full-time year-round workers; the ratio is now about 83%) (9).

But if these gender-related personality differences and the lower earning power of women were evident in the 1960s and 1970s, why did the gender gap in partisan voting emerge only in the 1980s? Scholars who addressed this question have tended to focus on two factors: evolving gender norms in the second-wave women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the (related) demographic changes that contributed to the increasing percentage of unmarried American women.

Politics had long been viewed by both men and women as a male realm. “The almost perfect agreement [in political attitudes] between husband and wife,” the prominent political scientist Paul Lazarsfeld wrote in 1968, “comes about as a result of male dominance in political situations.” (10, p. 141). Corroborating this view, survey-based studies at the time showed that married couples’ political views became more homogeneous and closer to the husband’s original political views over time (11).

The traditional gender roles that characterized the 1950s and early 1960s eroded strongly during the following decades. By the mid-1970s, far more Americans (and American women, in particular) rejected the notion that “a woman’s place” was in the home (12, 13). Changing beliefs about gender roles both reflected and reinforced women’s growing economic independence from men as marriage rates declined and women’s labor force participation increased. Age at first marriage rose gradually starting around 1960, and divorce rates doubled between 1960 and 1980 (14). Among married women, labor force participation rose from about 34% in 1960 to over 70% by 1985 (14). Throughout this period, Black women had modestly higher labor force participation rates, and Latina women modestly lower participation rates than White women, but the labor force participation of women in all three groups increased dramatically between the 1960s and the late 1980s (15).

The mutually reinforcing changes in gender role norms and the increase in women entering the labor force or living independently of a male spouse facilitated the political independence of women from the men in their lives and the emergence of an enduring partisan gap between men and women. At the same time, women’s disadvantage in the labor market and disproportionate child care burdens meant that women were more likely to benefit from the government social supports that had long been identified with the Democratic Party.

A significant portion of the gender difference in presidential voting can be attributed to the greater proportion of Blacks among female than among male voters.

The Emergence and Persistence of Democratic Party Preference among Black Americans

The strong connection between Black Americans and the Democratic Party is often attributed to the civil rights legislation passed under President Johnson. But this pattern began decades earlier. Truman’s integration of the armed forces, his administration’s other (modest) steps toward racial inclusion, and the large-scale migration of Southern Black Americans to cities outside the South made the Democratic Party more attractive to Black Americans and made Black Americans an important constituency for non-Southern Democrats. By the mid-1950s, Black Americans leaned heavily toward the Democratic Party, with about three times as many Blacks claiming Democratic as Republican Party preferences (16).

Over the next decades, Democratic Party preferences among Black Americans were further strengthened by the growing division between the parties on civil rights. Gradually gaining strength within the Democratic Party coalition, civil rights activists succeeded in forcing a strong pro-civil rights plank onto Kennedy’s 1960 election platform. Johnson’s subsequent push for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Goldwater’s rejection of racial equality, cemented the two parties’ opposing positions (at least outside the South, where many Democratic politicians continued to support racist practices). By 1965, fewer than 10% of Black Americans identified as Republicans, a dramatic shift from the partisan parity among Blacks 20 y earlier (16).

By the time the gap in men’s and women’s votes emerged in the early 1980s, Black Americans were by far the most consistently Democratic demographic group, a distinction they still maintain (17). Even the Democratic Party’s neoliberal shift in the 1980s and 1990s, and Bill Clinton’s attacks on welfare and embrace of racialized tough-on-crime rhetoric, made little dent in Black Americans’ presidential voting or party identification (17). Of course, civil rights was not the only factor in Black American’s embrace of the Democratic Party. Compared with non-Blacks, Black Americans tend to hold more liberal views on social welfare, health care, foreign policy, and immigration, among other issues (18).

The Disenfranchisement of Black American Men

Incarceration rates rose dramatically in the United States beginning in the early 1970s. In 1972, there were about 150 incarcerated people per 100,000 population; by the early 1990s, there were over 750 (19). Although Black Americans had always been incarcerated at much higher rates than non-Blacks, incarceration rates rose more for Blacks. By 1980, the imprisonment rate for Black Americans was over six times that of Whites (19).

Among the many damaging consequences of mass incarceration is the disenfranchisement of large numbers of Black men. About 13% of Black men are currently disqualified from voting due to a felony conviction (20), and even when voting rights are regained, voter turnout is about 30% lower for citizens who have felony convictions than otherwise similar individuals (21). Since Black men are far more likely to have felony convictions than Black women (as is true for other racial groups as well), the carceral system serves to disproportionately depress voting among Black men.

The decreased numbers of Black male voters skew the broader populations of male and female voters, resulting in a higher percentage of Blacks among female than among male voters. But the racial skew of male and female voters is not evenly distributed across all age and life-stage groups. Because contact with the criminal legal system is concentrated among young men, the racial composition of male and female voters diverges more among the never married than among married or divorced Americans. England et al. (1) report a 4 percentage point larger representation of Blacks among female than male voters overall but a 12 percentage point difference among the never married. As England et al. show, this helps to account for the much larger gender gap in partisan voting among the never married (14%) than among married voters (5%) (1).

Polarized Politics and the Composition of the Electorate

In our politically polarized era, few voters can be enticed to support a candidate from the other party, which makes battles over the composition of the electorate crucial to winning elections. Efforts to influence who can vote, and what obstacles they must overcome, do not pivot solely on voters’ race. But given the overwhelming tilt of Black Americans toward the Democratic Party (and the parallel, but less strong, preference among Latinx and Asian American voters), voter suppression efforts are frequently aimed at Black and other racial minorities, continuing the sordid history of racial disenfranchisement in the form of voter ID laws, purging of voter roles, felon disqualification, and related policies.

Observers often explain election outcomes on the basis of the partisan and policy orientations of different social groups, with race and gender figuring prominently in such commentaries. England et al. (1) draw our attention to the interplay between these two social dimensions, showing how the gender differences that have become a persistent part of partisan politics result, in part, from the differing racial composition of male and female voters. That this gendered racial imbalance is itself largely rooted in the racially discriminatory practices of American policing and mass incarceration serves to underline the continuing centrality of race in American politics.