Women Vote More Than Men, So Should They Be the New Default Group?

Many were surprised when white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but they shouldn’t have been.  

Even though women overall tend to vote for Democrats, white women have regularly voted Republican since the 1950s, a fact that may have been obscured by traditional voter analysis that sets white men as the default group.   “When you use white men as the standard, of course women look super Democrat, because white men are disproportionately much more heavily Republican,” says Jane Junn, professor of political science and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Southern California.  “When you use that as the baseline category from which everything else is then analyzed, you fail to see that pattern of white female support for Republicans, and Trump in particular, and the same thing happens in [2020].”