Hillary's Gender Challenge

A few weeks ago a had a short post discussing Hillary's challenge as a female presidential candidate. Given her present status as the prohibitive favorite to win the nomination it is probably appropriate to expand on that previous post.

Polls have consistently shown that a significant percentage of the American people will not vote for a woman for President. Gallup, CBS News, Rasmussen and Newsweek have each polled this issue and their results fall between 5% and 17%, with an average of 12%. Additionally, this is the type of issue that will underpoll. Many people will be a little reluctant to admit to a pollster that they wouldn't vote for a woman, as a result they may not tell the pollster the truth. I suspect that the polls have under counted this result by a few percentage points.

By simply extrapolating the number of Presidential voters in 2000 and 2004 you can roughly assume there will be 140,000,000 voted cast in the 2008 Presidential election. If we are conservative and assume that the actual percentage of voters who won't vote for a woman is 8% that would mean a loss of 11,200,000 votes for Hillary right out of the box. If we further assume that 2/3 of these voters are Republicans that still leaves Hillary with a loss of 3,696,000 votes. Keep in mind that the popular vote in the 2000 election was separated by 543,816 votes and the 2004 election was separated by 3,012,499 votes. It is important to note that Presidential elections are not decided by the popular vote, but by the Electoral College. And it is hard to say the effect of this bias on the Electoral College system. I think it would be exaggerated as the election is usually determined by three of four states whose Democrats are blue collar Reagan Democrats and are prone to the bias discussed above.

I understand that the above mentioned polls were based on a generic female candidate and not Hillary. However, given voters high negative opinion of Hillary anyway, these polls don't bode well for her. It will be interesting to see how accurate the polls are for the upcoming primaries, and if they hide an bias against female candidates.