Why Have White Women So Often Voted for Republicans?

Here’s a bit of political trivia that’s been going around: In how many presidential elections from 1952 to 2016 did a majority of white women support the Democrat rather than the Republican?

“The answer,” says the USC political scientist Jane Junn, “is two.”

Junn posed the question to complicate the conventional wisdom that Democrats benefit from a “gender gap,” with women favoring them over Republicans. In fact, she wrote, women of color overwhelmingly support Democrats, but white women are not reliable Democratic partisans. White women often support Republican candidates. “While the white female vote is often closely split between the two major parties, white women have only voted more Democratic than Republican twice in the 17 U.S. Presidential elections since 1952,” she wrote in November 2016. “It is the introduction and steady growth of minority voters in the U.S. electorate over the last six decades that drives higher overall proportions of female support for Democratic Party candidates.”

That “intersectional analysis” is clarifying. Looking at gender and race gets us closer to understanding partisan affiliations in presidential elections than looking at gender alone (as does incorporating still more variables). But something went awry when Junn’s statistic about white female voting in the past 17 elections spread from academia to popular discourse: Left-leaning commentators began to cite it as if it constituted evidence that the driving force in how white women vote is protecting their racial privilege by upholding white supremacy and patriarchy. That simply doesn’t follow.