Are You More Likely To Vote For A Woman Or A Man?

Being a woman is more disqualifying for a candidate in the eyes of Republican voters than Democrats, a new poll suggests.

At the request of FiveThirtyEight, the online media and polling firm Morning Consult asked 2,030 registered voters a series of questions about the presidential election and gender, which has been an explicit issue in the campaign, particularly in recent weeks. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a Hillary Clinton supporter, repeated a line that she’d used often before — “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other” — in the context of calling on others to back Clinton over Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination. (She later wrote, “I did not mean to argue that women should support a particular candidate based solely on gender.”) Clinton supporter Gloria Steinem said of women voters, “When you’re young, you’re thinking, you know, where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.” (She later apologized and said she’d misspoken.) And rapper Killer Mike quoted Tuesday from what he said was a comment made by a woman activist and fellow Sanders supporter that “‘A uterus doesn’t qualify you to be president of the United States. You have to be — you have to have policy that’s reflective of social justice.’”

The results of the poll show that the gender gap on how voters weigh gender is much bigger between parties than among supporters of different candidates in the same party.

Morning Consult asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for a candidate who is a woman?” A greater share of Clinton supporters than Sanders supporters or supporters of the five top Republican candidates said more likely.

Morning Consult also asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for a candidate who is a man?” More supporters of every candidate said more likely than less likely, but the gaps are especially big on the Republican side. For Republican voters, the preference among women for a male candidate is nearly as big as among men. (Most people said in response to both questions that the gender of a candidate would have no impact on their vote.)

That’s consistent with a report from the Pew Research Center last year that party matters more than gender in determining whether people hope the U.S. elects a woman president in their lifetime.

Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said the results may point to a challenge for Republican women seeking elected office. Among members of Congress and state legislators, Democratic women greatly outnumber Republican women. Walsh and her colleagues have pointed to institutional factors, like the lack of a strong Republican counterpart to Emily’s List, a political action committee that backs Democratic women candidates who support abortion rights. But these polling results raise the possibility of built-in opposition among a significant minority of Republican voters to a woman candidate, Walsh said in a telephone interview. “Is there a resistance on the Republican side to voting for women, all things being equal?”

Teasing out causality is tricky here. Although the question about women candidates in the poll didn’t specifically name Clinton, she is the most prominent woman candidate today, so it’s possible that Republicans had her in mind when responding. (That might also be one reason why far more Clinton supporters than Sanders supporters said they’d be more likely to vote for a candidate who is a woman.) Then again, if some Republican voters really are less likely to vote for women — and more likely to vote for men — that might help explain why Carly Fiorina, who was the only woman candidate in the Republican Party’s large presidential field, drew minimal support in Iowa and New Hampshire before dropping out.

Other measures also showed a big party gap:

But the vast majority of supporters of all candidates, Democratic and Republican, said they thought a woman could serve as an effective commander in chief.

One other finding from the poll that caught our eye: Steinem may have had a point, in one very narrow way, about how young women compare with older women: Women voters under 30 were much more likely than older women to say that their friends influenced their vote.

But men were more likely to say they were influenced by friends than women were — especially young men. Also, almost no Democrats said that whom their friends support was the most important factor to them in selecting a candidate. Of course, with this question, as with all other questions on surveys, it’s important to remember that people don’t always give accurate answers. That’s true even for polls like Morning Consult’s that are administered online rather than by phone. You can see the full results at Morning Consult Intelligence (registration required).