Thursday, September 18, 2008

More on the Palin gender effect

I noted earlier that tapping a female vice presidential nominee doesn't necessarily bring more women voters to the ticket. I was also interested to see whether the sizeable McCain/Palin post-convention bounce was due to women crossing party lines to support the GOP ticket. It doesn't look like it. Here are Gallup's weekly aggregates:There was definitely a bounce, but it seems that men were more impressed by the GOP convention than women were. This trend looks the same if you just focus on white voters. Indeed, the current race seems to be reinforcing the gender gap rather than mitigating it. If anything, the main effect of the Republican convention seems to have been to bring moderate and liberal Republicans back into the fold (which, of course, is the purpose of conventions). Support for the GOP ticket among this group went up by seven points in the last two weeks.

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