{"id":95677,"date":"2021-06-09T06:34:04","date_gmt":"2021-06-09T11:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/?p=95677"},"modified":"2021-06-09T06:34:04","modified_gmt":"2021-06-09T11:34:04","slug":"women-vote-more-than-men-so-should-they-be-the-new-default-group","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/2021\/06\/09\/women-vote-more-than-men-so-should-they-be-the-new-default-group\/","title":{"rendered":"Women Vote More Than Men, So Should They Be the New Default Group?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"VOA \u2014 Many were surprised when white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but they shouldn\u2019t have been.<\/p>\n

Even though women overall tend to vote for Democrats, white women have regularly voted Republican since the 1950s, a fact that may\u00a0have been obscured by traditional voter analysis that sets white men as the default group.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you use white men as the standard, of course women look super Democrat,\u00a0because white men are disproportionately much more heavily Republican,\u201d says Jane Junn, professor of political science and gender and sexuality\u00a0studies at the University of Southern California.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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\u00a0[2020].\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Voters<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>
Voters wait in line to vote during the midterm election in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, November 6, 2018.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Junn has co-authored a paper<\/a> suggesting that voting behavior analysis that interprets the results for women as a deviation from the patterns set by men is outdated and obscures true voter preference.<\/p>\n

When it comes to voter analysis, the default group is traditionally the largest voting group. And even though women outvote men\u2014and have done so since the 1960s\u2014white male voters continue to be the norm against which all other voting groups are compared.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt violates what we would ordinarily do when we use statistics to interpret group-based behavior,\u00a0and that is,\u00a0it is identifying the modal group incorrectly.\u00a0\u2026 Mode just means the largest group,\u00a0and males\u2014in particular,\u00a0white males\u2014are not the largest group of voters in the United States,\u201d Junn says. \u201cThat is actually females. White females are the modal group in U.S. voting behavior,\u00a0and that goes for national level\u2014presidential voting\u2014and also\u00a0at the local level.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2020, 68% of women<\/a> who were eligible to vote reported that they voted, compared to the 65% turnout for men. In the 2016 presidential election, 63% of women and 59% of men reported voting.<\/p>\n

When it comes to race and gender, 69.6% of white women<\/a> reported voting, compared to 67% of white men in 2020. While in 2016, 66.8% of white women and 63.7% of white men reported voting.<\/p>\n

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\"Women<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>
Women listen to then-U.S. President Donald Trump speak at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, October 26, 2020.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Junn says the white male-centric approach to voter analysis is limiting because it doesn\u2019t take the dynamic nature of the electorate into consideration.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe vantage point encourages us to think in static terms,\u201d she says. \u201cIt encourages us to think about behavior only as a function of the past, or mostly as a function of the past, and it encourages us to just think things are stable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rethinking how votes are analyzed requires undoing centuries of conditioning, says Ashley Koning, director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is the modal group? What is the norm? What is the ideal within the political sphere?\u201d Koning\u00a0asks. \u201cThe political sphere has always been synonymous with male and with masculinity, and I think it takes a lot of time to change, to overturn,\u00a0and to evolve from something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Marygrace<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>
Marygrace Vadala holds a political sign in support of now-President Joe Biden outside her home in Archbald, Pennsylvania, October 28, 2020.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Setting white men as the normal standard\u00a0to\u00a0which everyone else is compared can imply that anything that is dissimilar from that is abnormal or deviant, according to Junn.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy do we still say, you know, the senator from Kentucky, but we have to say the female senator from West Virginia? Or the candidate for\u00a0president,\u00a0Joe Biden and the\u00a0Black female vice presidential candidate?\u201d Junn says. \u201cThe modifiers are always attached to categories that are unusual or different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Koning agrees.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou’re creating a very specific frame through which the political system is being seen\u00a0that\u00a0frankly, may not be the frame that is beneficial or is most beneficial for the public good and the advancement of society.\u201d<\/p>\n

She thinks it will take many more election cycles to break the historical habit of painting men as the modal group.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis discussion has leveled up in the classroom. I think this discussion is bubbling up within gender studies and women in politics programs. I don’t know if\u00a0this\u00a0discussion has really reached a mainstream level,\u201d Koning says. \u201cI don’t think it is a conversation that is being had at the forefront yet, even after all of this, even after all these decades.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

VOA \u2014 Many were surprised when white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but they shouldn\u2019t have been. Even though women overall tend to vote for Democrats, white women have regularly voted Republican since the 1950s, a fact that may\u00a0have been obscured by traditional voter analysis that sets white men as the default group. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":95678,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-recposts"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95677"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95680,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95677\/revisions\/95680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}