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November 25, 2012

Men are ultimate swing voters

By Connie Cass Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Sorry, fellas, but President Barack Obama’s re-election makes it official: Women can overrule men at the ballot box.

For the first time in research dating to 1952, a presidential candidate whom men chose decisively — Republican Mitt Romney — lost. More women voted for the other guy.

It’s surprising it didn’t happen sooner because women have been voting in larger numbers than men for almost three decades, exit polls show.

But men, who make up less than half the U.S. population, always have exercised power greater than their numbers and they aren’t about to stop now.

When it comes to elections, males as a group are more influential because they show less party loyalty than women, who skew Democratic.

Despite all the focus on candidates courting Hispanics or the working class, men are the nation’s ultimate swing voters; they’re why Republican George W. Bush became president and Republican John McCain didn’t.

Their move away from Obama this year expanded the voting “gender gap.” It wasn’t enough to determine the outcome, but came close.

So presidential hopefuls staring into the gender gap in 2016 might want to look beyond the usual controversies over “women’s issues” such as abortion or the polling fads such as “Wal-Mart moms.” Maybe it’s time to pause and consider the fickle male. Maybe it’s time to ask, “What do men want?”

In the voting booth, that is.

“I don’t think we fully understand it yet,” political scientist Christina Wolbrecht of the University of Notre Dame said about why men and women vote differently. But she said plenty of research on elections going back to the 1950s indicates it’s not because of issues such as equal pay, birth control coverage in health plans or Romney’s awkward reference to “binders full of women.”

Paul Kellstedt has some ideas. A Texas A&M associate professor of political science, Kellstedt studies what American men and women want from their government and how that shifts over time.

Like Wolbrecht, he noted that the sexes aren’t that different, at least when it comes to the issues.

Studies have found that the opinions that separate liberals and conservatives, even on issues such as abortion, don’t divide the sexes much.

“The flighty, moody ones are the men, not the women,” Kellstedt said.

 

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