The Republican Party and the voting “gender gap” in historical perspective

Hillary Clinton, on losing the 2016 presidential election, faced criticism for failing to mobilise a voting “gender gap” in her favour, but greater support among men than women consistently characterised Donald Trump as a politician. Even if, to be sure, among white women Trump’s margin over Clinton was nine percentage points, this was broadly in line with other presidential elections of the twenty-first century. Among women as a whole, Clinton was stronger than Trump by thirteen points. Despite the exceptional nature of Trump’s political idiosyncrasies, the maleness as well as the whiteness of his electoral foundation has long characterised the Republican Party as a whole. This paper explores the relationship between the Republican Party and the gender gap in longer-term perspective, asking why – and with what consequences – its base acquired this nature. Although it was in 1980 that the arrival of the gender gap – according to which more men than women voted for Ronald Reagan and the Republicans – won public attention, even in the 1960s politicians were starting to notice a decline in a traditional association between women and conservatism. Whereas the Republican hostility to ‘big government’ alienated women in greater numbers than men, the new convergence between conservatism and populism mobilised men more strongly. Over time, it was at best in an ineffectual manner that Republicans tackled the problem of their declining support among women; on the one hand, their party possessed an ideological preference for smaller government, and on the other, Richard Nixon influentially pioneered a political appeal implicitly – though not explicitly – targeted at men. Meanwhile, the normative consequences for policy as well as a politics of a party system within which gender- as well as race-based cleavages were significant received little scrutiny. If the gendered nature of Trump’s appeal, in interaction not only with race but also with personal characteristics such as marital status and level of education, formed part of the Republican Party’s evolution since the 1960s, Trump embraced yet more strenuously the assertive populism that had helped to foster these electoral disparities between men and women. Doing so helped to define the party in his own mould as well as foster instability within the political system. The paper investigates how the Trump administration followed an agenda according to which there was governing as well as campaigning in mobilisation of a gender gap.