obsessed with personal responsibility narrative blaming the people who fault -- fall off the tightrope for the catastrophes that follow. >> watch sunday night at 9:00 eastern on book tv on c-span2. a political scientist and author of a century of votes for women, american elections since suffrage discusses how politicians in the media have tried to classify women as voters. the passage of the 19th amendment. she also analyzes the assumptions about women voters in the 2016 election. the first to feature a female presidential candidate from a major party. >> good evening. i think there's a few more people in here. we are more rust -- robust.

good evening everyone. yes. i am the fellow and american art and culture here at the boston athenaeum. and sinceretinct pleasure to welcome you and our speaker this evening. before we begin, i want you to please take note of the two emergency exits that are marked at the front and rear of the room. [laughter] if you will also take a look to please silence your cell phones so we do not disrupt this fascinating talk. while you are doing that, i would love to share with you an installation that i recently curated on our north wall entitled anti-suffrage. using materials from the special collections, we take a look at how the suffrage movement contributed to redesigning women's roles and responsibilities in society from

their perspective as they buy for equality. it represents the equality -- for women and for people of color in the past and today. please take a look at the talk. i would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. if you have any questions, i will definitely be here to answer them. wehould also mention that have an exhibition across the way. required reading reimagining a colonial library. that exhibition showcases rarely seen historic books that are treasures of 17th century boston. community partners and each of us including you are asked to consider which books should be considered required reading today. there is fascinating and important choices why a variety of different community partners. there is a place for you to share your own ideas as well you free gallery admission to the

anti-suffrage and required reading exhibition are one of the many benefits of membership here. we are grateful to all of our members for their support. how many of you are members and how many of you are visitors? welcome back to all of our members and welcome to all of our visitors we are glad you are here. you are welcome to tour the gallery, pick up a newsletter, i doubt about the events we plan here at the front desk. you can join as a member and if you are thinking about it but not quite sure, we also have day passes available. come in, check it out, spend some time and we will hope to see you back again. , our guest is a professor of political science, director of the center for the study of the directordemocracy and of the washington program at the university of notre dame.

in addition to the book she will discuss tonight, she is the author and co-author of counting women's ballots, female voters come suffrage through the new deal and the politics of women, women's rights. parties positions and change it as well as a myriad of articles on women as political role models, the representation of women, and positions on -- how have american women voted in the first hundred years since the ratification of the 19th amendment? in a century of both for women, our speaker tonight offers an unprecedented account of women overs in american politics the last 10 decades. please join me and offering an exceptionally warm [applause]

dr. wolbrecht: you so much. it is such an honor and a thrill for me to be here. this is literally what i thought academia was going to be like all the time. [laughter] office lookshat my like. but in my dreams this is what my office looks like. [laughter] this is actually the release date for a century of votes for women. [applause] thank you. i'm really excited to be here talking with you about that book today. as you probably know, 20/20 is the centennial of women's suffrage. it has been 100 years since the 19th amendment prohibited denial of voting rights on the basis of sex. since that time, the question on everyone's minds, journalists and voters themselves,

definitely politicians, what would women voters do? what should we expect of women voters? the field already suggested what we see when we look over this hundred year. there is lots of ideas about what it is women are going to do , how impactful they're going to be as voters, the kind of things that might affect their voting behavior. so the headlines on here date from the petticoat one is from 1928. the emotions as 1956. down to that 16 ways of looking at a female voter, from 2008. and women may decide the election, from 2016. i promise you in this we will start in the 1920's but we will get to 2060 and maybe 2020 by the end. i want to use a couple of examples of conventional wisdom about women voters over time that has shaped our thinking about women and their impact on politics in the united states.

one of the things i hope you will take away from the lecture is to think about ways in which what we believe about women , asrs, is, in some ways important as what women voters actually do. voters-and of women politicians think of women voters as say, soccer moms, white women who live in the theybs and drive minivans, will craft appeals and design public policy and ways to try to appeal to that they have in mind as a woman voter. white,, however, that married women in the suburbs are not actually a very large proportion of the female electorate. they have become less so over time. aboutant to help us think what do we think we know about women voters, and what do we actually know? first,start with the what i like to call the twitter hot takes about women in the

early 1920's. the very first conventional women -- wisdom about women voters was the idea that women's suffrage had been a failure. these are headlines from 19231923 at 90 24. 1924.3 and goodeadline from housekeeping and one from the washington post, from harper's magazine, etc.. it was not just journalists who can included almost immediately after the 19th amendment that women's suffrage have been a failure. this was something scholars tended to believe as well. for reasons i can talk more about, we have very, very little data about women voters in the. immediately after suffrage. as you probably are aware, citizens do not place pink and blue ballots into ballot boxes. so we do not actually, from the official voting record, have a way to know how wet men and women voted. not have a waydo

to know how men and women voted. in illinois they did count men's and women's allis differently in 1916 and in 1920. -- ballots different late. virtually everything we know about how women voted comes from one state and two elections. before gallup and everyone else went on to invent survey research in the 1930's and the 1940's turn we see this also in popular histories. a book, popular history of the 19 20's. in another, she seemed to be little interested once she had it. , no i didjust skipped not. what we actually know? in some ways we can kind of excuse observers in the 1920's. they did not have much to go on. they were interviewing party

leaders and trying to understand. this graph shows how over time and five 21936, elections, the turnout rates of men in gold and women in purple. as you can see, in the first elections after women won the right to vote there is quite a gap, 30 points between the turnout of men, which in 1920 is almost 70% of men are turning out to vote. this is from a sample of 10 states. and about a third women in that first election after the 19th amendment are turning out to vote. sense it looks like there is truth to the story that most women did not actually choose to use that new right once they had it. the story gets more complicated if we start to look at different groups of women. that is another theme of my talk. to talk about the woman voter

makes almost no sense. about women to talk depending upon where they lived. this is showing you turnout of, again, women in purple and men in gold, in 10 states. end,nia is at the massachusetts is next, connecticut, oklahoma, minnesota, kansas, illinois, iowa, missouri and kentucky. i hope you can see there is a huge variation, depending on where you lived and what women's turnout looked like in 1920. in some places, women's turnout was incredibly low. fewer than 10% of women turned out to vote in virginia in 1920. only a little bit higher, 20% here in massachusetts and connecticut. on the other hand, there were other places where the turnout of women was quite impressive.

northern half of women took advantage of -- more than half of women took advantage of the vote once they were able to do so in kansas -- in missouri and kentucky. about missourint and kentucky compared to nasa juices, virginia and connecticut? we have similar that compared to massachusetts, virginia and connecticut? of the things this data reminds us of, is that in the united states, we have the right to vote. but the obligation rests almost entirely upon the individual. you have to register yourself, you have to get to a polling place. you have to know when to vote. you have to, maybe in some places we are about to talk about, pay poll tax or register far in advance of the election. what that means is that different groups capacity to

overcome barriers and differences in the barriers they face, are going to explain a lot about how much people vote, and how likely they are too turnout on election day. what makes these different places different? virginia, acid chooses and connecticut all had -- virginia, massachusetts and connecticut had poll taxes or literacy tests, barriers. they have long registration periods. that enforceaying southern states, women did not vote in the presidential election of 1920. those states had six month long registration periods, at least six months if not longer. the 19th amendment was ratified in august, six weeks before the election in november. those four states said, we are sorry, it is nice you have been enfranchised, but you missed

registration deadline. so we will see you in 1924. other states, including massachusetts, had similar restrictions but found ways to let women vote. almanac,ad the boston the report from the electoral office in 1920, you can tell they were a little put out because the state legislator meant and first told them you have to take the women registered for school board elections and move them to the regular. then you have to hold all the special days just for women to come and vote. there is this passive-aggressive, it was much work but we managed to register all of these women to vote. we know that the places that have more electoral restrictions are going to have lower turnout. that was, of course, the very point of most of these restrictions. in virginia, things like a poll tax and a literacy test are meant to exclude, in particular african-american voters.

i would love to tell you more about how some african american women in virginia got around that and did vote in early elections. of course, most did not. it to exclude poor white. and it had particularly strong rather thanmen, men. if you're going to pay poll tax in your household and you cannot afford it too, you're probably going to pay it for the male head of household and not for the woman. missouri and kentucky, on the other hand -- i should say, in massachusetts and connecticut, massachusetts in 1920, 60 percent of the population was first or second generation immigrant for the purpose of those laws or for those who are already in power to try to keep these new immigrants away from poles and not having as big an impact on voting. -- polls. missouri and kentucky had few registration requirements, no poll tax or literacy test.

the other thing that makes these two groups of states different is the level of competition. the 1920's were a time in which most american states were overwhelmingly blue or overwhelmingly red. this is the solid democratic south that in most elections in the south in this. there are not even republicans being fielded or nominated for office. hand, massachusetts and connecticut are overwhelmingly red during this. . they will be one of the dramatic switches in the new deal. . but are overwhelmingly republican in this. . -- and this time. the only two that could be classified as competitive and this time would be missouri and kentucky. the presidential election in 1920 was decided by .05% of the boat. what happens when elections are competitive? elections are salient. there is a lot of campaigning. parties have an incentive to

reach out to every single vote. suddenly those norms about women not voting do not seem nearly as important in an election that is going to be that close. what we know is these effects were in the 1920's larger for women than for men. this is showing that women on the left and men on the right, the coldest places with a lot of election restrictions and the purple is places that have almost none. for both men and women there is a drop off. if you live in a place that has a lot of laws you are going to cs much turnout. the drop-off is greater for women than men. these were brand-new voters trying to learn the ropes. things that discouraged voting were more likely to discourage women voting. we can see something similar for competition. here, purple is democratic one party places, the south. gold art republican places, mostly the north and the west.

the few competitive examples we have. the same pattern across men and women but a bigger impact. the source of laws. -- the same pattern across men and women but a bigger impact for women for these kinds of laws. while there are always gender differences the patterns are the same. it turns out men and women are both rational, reasonable human beings who pay some attention to politics and have views on the sorts of things. ofwith generations resistance to women's suffrage is important from ever that while women got enfranchised and while some were disappointed that there was not a revolution, the fact that there was not suggest that this is a population perfect capable of-at least as capable as men were, of participating in elections. that the means, is difference between the turnout,

the average turnout of a woman in kentucky and a woman in virginia is 50 points. difference is larger than the difference between women and men in any one of those states. if you want to understand turnout, it is better to know where somebody lived then whether they were a man or woman. justverall gap in 1920 is 32 points between men and women, but that gap between different kinds of women, women who lived in the south and women who lived in the competitive border states is much larger than that. that will be a theme you will hear again tonight as well. there are lots of differences between women that dramatically outpaced differences between women and men in general. , because we are going to jump to the future at the end of the talk. it took until 1980, 60 years after the 19th amendment was

ratified, women have been more likely to turn out in presidential elections than men. that difference has grown over time but it is fairly steady. again, you will see when turnout goes up with one it goes up with another. nonetheless, women have been more likely to turn out to vote since 1980. to say. allen has more about women voters. he goes on to say not only was she little interested in voting once she could but she voted mostly as the unregenerate man about her dead. what did he mean by this? another popular conventional wisdom that we start in the 1950's that men were reported to be telling women how to vote, headline from the boston globe the 1920's. the second headline from the detroit free press in the 1950's. for most of the first half of the 20th century this presumption that women voted the way that their husbands told

them, was really prominent. in a sense, what people were trying to do was make sense of the fact that woman got the right to vote and voting patterns look so similar. oh, we thought women were so different and they are voting the same as men are in general. what could possibly be the reason? was, men were telling their wives how to vote. i will tell you a secret. my husband and i also vote. the same way in presidential elections. and i will let you come to your own assumptions about the direction of influence there. [laughter] wisdom hastional consequences. so, in the 1930's, george gallup and others eventually fred harris and others become the first folks doing sophisticated polling in the united states. where they are randomly selecting people. they using good methods. we finally have this opportunity and a systematic way to better

understand the attitudes, thoughts and behaviors of people in lots of ways. what kind of cereal thereby but also what kind of candidates they support. they bu kind of cereal y. purposelylup at first under sampled women. the reason was he was trained to understand how people decided who to vote for. as farce he was concerned, there was no puzzle when it came to women. women would just do what their husbands told them the night before. if you want to understand how people decide how to vote, you really have to focus on men. and see their thought process in their understanding. great if yous not want to understand anything about women during this. . i'm about to violate a rule and put a lot of words on a powerpoint slide. you do not need to read these all. if you had the luck to go to graduate school in clinical signs and study political

science these would be names written upon your heart. these were the very first studies, systematic scholarly studies done of voters in the united states. the first book, reporting on elections in 1940 in 1952 is called voting come out of columbia university. the second quote is from the famous book, the american voter, published in 1960, about 1952 and 1956. the last is a quote from a book chapter that forms a foundation of virtually all studies of public opinion in the united states. i bring these up because as i just suggested, raj would students and scholars in american politics still read these books. becausee shaped, mostly they are all very well done in a most every other way, our understanding of american voters and what we teach to undergraduates and the way our scholarship goes about four generations cents. right? since.generations

and many of these people created the first scholarly surveys, things like the american national election study, to our long election study which is been on every year since 1948, presidential election study. so what are the scholars who are going to shape generations of us thinking about elections, what did they decide about american women voters in the middle the 20th century? they decided that women's were mostly doing what their husbands tell them to do. they also observed that women are not that different in their political views. these are the conclusions they come to. in the second one, the wife who votes but otherwise pays little attention to politics, tends to leave not only the sifting of information to her husband but abides his ultimate decision as well. or, the wife is very likely to follow her husband's opinion however imperfectly she may have absorbed their justifications

any more complex level. these are scholars. these are people bringing evidence to bear. let's look at some of the evidence. i'm not focusing on the very top quote. it makes forhasize claimsal claims, four of fact we could evaluate. tellirst is that husbands their wives how to vote. there's a direction of influence and someone is being told. the second claim, they do not take lily respect them. that men when it comes to politics do not respect their wives. in the side of wives there is trust. on the side of husbands there is the need to reply or guide. two more." two more empirical claims. this is before excel. as are graphs that show up in the book to support these claims. are going to see whether a woman or man said she would go to a family member to discuss the

political question in june, and whether or not a woman or a man said they discussed politics with family matters in october. they're trying to show that people talk more about politics right before an election than in the summer, which means true. onant to focus, though, specifically on what this question set. have you talked politics with anyone recently? who was the last person you discussed the election or candidates with? absolutely, suggested by this date at which i have ever reason to trust, that women are more likely to talk to family members about politics than other people. whether or not that also means women are more likely to take husbandss from their -remember the question is not about husbands, it is about family members, is not something they directly observe or ask about. take directions

from their husbands? maybe, probably some did. i just do not know well from this data. it is worth saying, that one printable of social science would be just how likely are you to talk to anyone? if we know, as we do, that this is a. in which large percentage of women did not work outside the home, simply the probability that the last person you talked to was a family member is going to be higher for women than men. so i cannot tell you women did not take directions from their husbands, they may have. but i am going to tell you that the empirical evidence for that is not particularly strong. are three more empirical claims made here about women and trust, and men and their respect for their wives. there are no questions asked about that in the surveys at all. what is happening, and it is what we all do every day, is people are looking at facts and they are saying what explains

those facts? and our explanation for the stocks are going to be rooted in our understanding of the way the world works. if the way the world works and my understanding is that women are not inherently interested in politics, that the traditional family structure, the man is the leader of the family and would give instructions to the rest of his family than i'm going to look at this information and say, obviously, this is what is going to happen, or this is what is happening. i want to be clear, we still do this today. another lesson we want to come out of our book, is we need to be thinking about the biases and assumptions we bring to evaluating political information, any kind of information whatsoever. there were people with other ideas. i'm guessing you cannot read this. this is a writer in the york times in 1956. this says, if married couples tend to book the same way and they do, it is because the environment gives them the same

orientation rather than because the woman rubber stamps the man's choice. in social science we would call that another hypothesis. and one that we would certainly like to have the data to be able to understand now that we do, i can tell you that sure enough, married couples tend to have lots of shared characteristics that are also associated with how they vote in presidential and other elections. everyone is excited now. [laughter] so it is very easy to pick on the past, i say in this beautiful historical building. to say back then, they do not know, there were different gender norms and without such changes. and we have. it is remarkable to changes in women's lived experiences from 1920 until 2020. we get to 2016, surely we are going to have more data and more information. we are really going to understand what is going to happen.

i went into 2016 thinking this is my year. i have studied women and politics for 25 years now. we are going to have a woman nominee. i am ready. i have trained for this, right? and then the woman nominee turns out to be the 10th most interesting thing, or different or historic thing happening in the 2016 election. on the one side we have the first woman nominee of a major party. on the others we have this unusual nominee, and by unusual i mean no military or political experience, etc.. a nominee, and i will not repeat you the things he has been credibly accused of doing and has set about women. obviously, obviously, we are going to have a giant gender gap in 2016, right? so npr on the top, this the onular voting website 538 the bottom. pre-election, we are going to have a giant gender gap. of course women are going to book for hillary clinton. course women are going to put against donald trump.

because, i want to keep in mind the assumption, because gender is the thing that most explains women's voting behavior, right? if we think that then surely women are going to vote for a woman nominee and vote against trump. what this is. this is the gender gap in presidential elections from anti-52 through and until 2012 2012, the52 through percent women voting democratic minus the percent men. this means that the line as it is a 1952, 1956 and 1960 is below zero but women were more republican than men. and for the most part that is what we see prior to 1960's. when we did all this media stuff there are the stories about women fainting over at john kennedy. and then more of them voted for richard nixon.

until 1980, the second bump i can talk about, 1976. we really get a systematic, what we call the modern gender gap as opposed to the traditional one, in which women on average are more likely than men on average to vote for democrat candidates. the largest there is 1996, the reelection of bill clinton. happen ins going to 2016? surely this race is going to get us the biggest gender gap we have ever seen. so i want you to prepare yourself because here comes. i don't know if you missed it that. [laughter] there it is. one of the ways, and i'm going to dispute my own claim in two seconds, what i say to students is one of the most unusual present elections in modern times, when people actually showed up on election day, the patterns were pretty consistent.

including the fact, and most portly that 90% of women who identified as republican voted for the republican nominee. and 90% of women who voted for -- who identified as democrats voted for the democratic candidate. pretty much the same percentage as did men in both of the camps as well. caught onto this idea that not all women are the from 2016. fallout we had lots of attention to the ,eality that 52% of white women voted for donald trump and 2016, right? the question becomes how, why, how can we possibly understand this, right? what i'm showing you now is the percentage of white women who voted for the republican nominee since 1952, they are in gold.

and the percentage of african-american women who voted for republican nominee and purple. what you're going to see is that only tworeally instances since the 1950's in which a majority of white women have voted for the democratic candidate. 1, 19 624, which as you can see, everybody voted against barry goldwater. in 19 624. 1964. you notice 1992 looks like that as well. this is the two-party vote if we add in that ross perot got a portion of the vote and neither candidate -- none of the candidates got a majority from white women. i will focus on the two. we see this cavern in the voting preferences of white women and african-american women. this is latina women.

we have not had that date as long. i would also argue that we have been focused on the black white racial gap and there is really interesting stuff happening among this rowing part of the population that is latina that i think is going to be very important going forward. in i'm showing you here is 2016, men are again in gold and men and purple, whites to my ,ar-right and african american the percent in 2012 voting for the republican candidate. extremely low levels of african-american support from what men or women for mitt romney in 2012. we see that same gender gap. this is another thing to notice. the pattern is usually the same across virtually every group. right? we see the same pattern, gender gap but a majority of white men and women voting for mitt romney. remember the most radical thing mitt romney said about women is that he had binders full of them. right?

so we would think, given such a different candidate in 2016, surely we are going to see something really different? the answers that we did not, for white women overall. what is stunning, actually, would be the stability of this. but i'm going to come look at that more in just a second. it turns out you need to thing about race and you need to think about class and you need to think about lots of things to understand voting patterns in the united states and that there's always some dynamic going on there. for african-americans there was a small increase, i'm not sure either are statistically significant, in support. i would describe this is more about 2012 effect than a 2016. this is sort of a return to more noble patterns among the african-american community. coming down from the heights of support for president obama in 2008 and in 2012. thati want to emphasize is all of those gender differences

are so small compared to the differences in terms of race. right? so two things can be true at the same time. in general, women are more likely than men, similar men, to vote for democrats. and that is usually what we focused on, since 1980, this idea of a gender gap. and when we say women are more likely to vote for democrats than are men, what we hear is, women are democrats. most women are democrats. but, as you can see, it is possible for most-for white women to be less likely to vote republican but still a majority of them to vote for the republican candidate. lamy, look at this. let me make one more point. this is important because our electorate is become more diverse over time, so the gray line here is for the census from 19422016, the percent of the 1940-2016,-- from

the percent of the electric that is a racial minority, not just aft and then over time the percent that is a female minority and then a percent male minority. you may be able to see up here the extraordinarily high turnout tominority women, now close their presence in the electorate . african-american women in particular are more likely to vote than white men. and there only barely surpassed by white women which is an extraordinary development when you start here in the 1940's, right? that's a long story we could tell that my clock is ticking. i will tell you one more story. story and said white women voted for donald trump. but even that turns out it's pretty, located.

you could've gone away thinking there was no change in women, nothing interesting happening. again, this is men and women but only whites in 2012, voting for mitt romney. the difference is, this group is women and men who do not have a college degree, whatever level of education but have not gotten a college degree. about small gender gap women votingd less for republicans in 2012. this is the data for women and men who have at least a college degree and anything beyond that. again, the same overall pattern but lower support for the republican candidate in 2012. does that make sense? i know i am flipping so many graphs up there. hopefully that helps. this is 2012. again, no college degree on the left and a college degree on the right. what happens in 2016? let's look first at noncollege educated women. what i want you to notice is

there is a small increase among white men without a college degree. if you read the new york times, these are the only people being interviewed in diners in pennsylvania, right? [laughter] the truth is they go up a little bit in their republican support, but not dramatically. the traumatic shift, especially in such a close election, is among noncollege educated women, so much so that they swing to the republican candidate, that gender gap where they are supposed to be more democratic than men reverses. again, bully -- again, probably most accurate to say they're the same but if anything white women without a college degree become or likely to vote republican and white men without a college degree. what happens to college-educated men and women? here at the pattern is moving the other way. we see a decline among whites with a college degree and support for the republican candidate in 2016.

but again, as we saw with those without a college education, the shift among men is small. it might not he can be statistically significant. the shift among women is much more dramatic. aboutain, as we think what the differences are between women and men, i want to again suggest that much more the interesting clinical changes happening in the differences between different kinds of women. there is no question the gap between noncollege educated women here, and college-educated 2016, is probably larger than any of these male-female gaps. if that makes sense. youne of the things i hope leave this room convinced of is are as diverse in their interests and identities as are men.

[laughter] and when we try to understand how women vote, we want to thing about-we certainly do not to think -- want to thing about the women voter. for a long time, the woman voter wants this, the women voter wants that. nobody tends to say that anymore. there a lot of kinds of women voters. that does not mean gender does not matter. you're looking at one exception now. in most cases in different racial groups, indifferent education groups, i can chase similar information like this, income would tell a similar tory, that gender gap tends persist. what makes noncollege educated women so interesting here, is it is one place where we see that change. i did see a headline this week that claims non-college-educated women are returning to the democratic fold. and we will see how that goes in 2020. so i'm here to tell you, what women will do in 2020. [laughter] you will notice the slight is

blank. is blank.e [laughter] i will say the 2016 election was deeply huddling for many political scientists including myself. so i make no productions anymore. the past is always our best picture of the future. i predict women will continue to be very diverse. i assume that there will still be a gender gap, with women subtly more supportive of the democratic candidate than men i expected education, race, income will be hugely important in thinking about pro-choice and 2020. and that those gaps in most cases will be larger than any gender gap. with that i will say thank you for your time and attention and i welcome your questions. [applause] >> please.

>> let the first person with a microphone come running up. >> the discussion you presented dealt with party differences and i wonder if you have analysis that looks at issues. obviously as the elections proceed, some would-be during times of war. in 2008, health care is a big issue and health care's big issue this year. do you have information on that? i'm tryrecht: i do and to think what i have in all the other slides. the story about issue differences is similar to the differences, the partisan differences. they exist but they are not enormous. people have tried to understand the dedrick -- the gender gap and why women have become more democratic, a lot of people have looked to attitudes about social welfare in particular.

in general women are more supportive programs and government policies to help the poor, the infirm, elderly, etc.. again, there are not huge differences but they exist. as you suggested, we know that in general women tend to be less supportive of the use of force. so, going back to many, many wars-and you see that rhetoric in the newspaper coverage as well. women are voting so they do not send their husbands and their sons to work. so there is that as well. -- two war. so they do not send their husbands and their sons to war. women show more tolerance in general. they move quicker in a liberal direction on things like gay and lesbian rights for example. i will say two additional things about that. a lot of the original gender gap was blamed on women's issues specifically.

the other thing ends going to happen in the 1970's, and that comes to head and 1980, is that the parties made apart on women's issues from the early 1970's they are not that different on abortion, probably because nobody is talking about abortion until after roe v. wade. that is an exaggeration. prettyve apart then people thought this was obvious, the women are going with the party that is moving in what was understood as the feminist direction at that point. that understanding was pretty much debunked in social science almost immediately. the truth is, men and women do not hold dramatically different positions on things like abortion and the correct amendment. they are slightly different on may be sexual harassment and equal pay, those sorts of things. but they are not very large. the other thing to say to that is that again, women have lots of interest. so they might say they prioritize those issues more. they probably do.

but that does not mean those issues overwrite other interests in the state of the economy, in war and peace, as he suggested, etc.. at the last addendum i will give -and i give long answers, my students will attest to that. general model of democratic politics is look around the world until this is what we should do about social security. and this is what we should do about the environment. and from that we say this is the party closest to my views and then we support that party. and that is a good sort of democratic theory way to thing about it. everything we know is that partisanship is a value and an identity that can most closely be traced to childhood. that by the age of nine or 10, children know to say we are democrats paired or we are republicans. see the world becomes shaped by that partisanship. we are more likely to believe

the things said by people that share that identity with us. so, i do not have it with me, but the data on republican public opinion about russia, and the switch it has made since donald trump became president in 2016, is enormous. from overwhelmingly negative to much more positive. right? because now we have a republican leader sending different signals about russia than previous republican leaders had. thei'm not picking on republicans, i could chase more things for democrats as well. show you similar things for democrats as well. that is an important driver. it is linked to other identities. it is linked to our racial identities, our religious identities, and our regional identities, cultural identities, etc.. in that way it is extremely reinforcing. >> thank you very much.

polls mentioned gallup and other sources of data. what are your best source is now going into 2020 for that kind of demographic information linked to voting patterns? that is a good question. despite what you have heard polling is not dead. it has gotten harder. would pick up a phone and talk to the other per -- the person on the end of the line the matter what. people do not do that anymore. it is harder to get people interviewed. but they're also smart people trying to figure out how to do that better. some of our academic polls come from organizations that literally exchange for gift cards or even having a computer in their home, people agree to be part of a monthly survey they take. that could be on everything from cereal to politics. there are a of organizations

known for being particularly good at these things. for scholars, that is the america national elections study that comes out of michigan. that is not really useful for you though because it does not get released until after the election and then we turn through it hurt the pew research center's outstanding, excellent - and then wechurn through it. the pew research center is outstanding, excellent. there are number of surveys done by newspapers, wall street journal has done one with cvs for a long time. those are credible -- with cbs for a long time. those are credible and well done. most of the major long-established news media sources try to do a good job, by which i mean try to have a truly random sample. try to ask questions that are not leading and they are not trained to get a certain outcome, etc.. anything done online where people can just -- where they

are not trying to get a certain outcome. anything done online is for fun and for clicks and not really for knowledge. >> two patterns persist at the state and local levels as well? patterns persist at the state and local levels? peter: the short answer is yes. dr. wolbrecht: a lot of this is rooted in partisanship. one of the interesting moments of the last 20 years is how it nationalized our politics have been. vote for one candidate for president. but at the local level you might support a different party because you know this guy who is running for the city council. party,l, he is not of my my member of congress, but look at all the good stuff he or she has done for my district. that clicks plain a lot of

voting in the middle of the 20th century. it explains a lot less voting today. say, myht look and member of congress, she is a really nice person. but she is going to go vote with that other party when she gets to congress. and i do not that. that. i do not want the reason we see similar patterns are people are bringing that same partisan lens to local and state luck elections now. -- local and state elections as well. >> the winning candidate at the state and local levels, it is dominated by the parts of you as opposed to there's no lift for gender even for women candidates? >> we know a lot more for women candidates at those levels because there are some. right? [laughter] the truth is we do not over much about women running for president. because it is kind of a new thing everybody is doing. so, women running in state legislative races for the house

and senate, very well studied. lots of ways to figure out if there is an advantage or disadvantage for women. in recent years, again i mean last 10 years or 20 years when we do experiments, when we show people randomly to candidates and call one jane and one john, it looks like women and democrats actually do have a slight preference for women. right? we can think about why that might be, the assumptions they might bring that women candidates must be x or y. in the real world it is very difficult to see any evidence that there is an advantage or -and i think this is important-a disadvantage to being a female candidate. there does not seem to be a bump either way. if there is a disadvantage, it is mostly for republican women. because we tend to stereotype women is more liberal, and more collaborative and progressive, to the extent that is not going to fly well with rispoli can constituents.

-- with republican constituents. because ideological purity is an important thing on the republican side. that may help them a little. but even that is not enormous. that is not mean there is not biased. when i was in graduate school we would talk about if women run, women win. that seemed to be true, as i said, when women run they is likely to win as men are. so we were talking about how to get more women to run? research since has shown that, when women on they are equally likely to win. but it seems to be because they are medically overqualified. dramaticallyre overqualified. the women who run have more qualified and more experience. so in some ways it is depressing that they are equally likely as men. i'm not saying all the men candidates are unqualified. but that on average, women only run when they have every degree and every experience in all sorts of background.

way in the back? i want to see you run. i, too, was utterly shocked that white women voted for trump. i would like to know, you're talking about women who voted it is my understanding, many women did not vote because they assumed hillary was going to get it anyway and i do not know if you have any data on that as to have any people say -- figured she's going to win anyway, why bother? if wolbrecht: i do not know i have data on that particular question. i do not remember. that does not mean it did not happen. much talk, or any talk about climbing turnout among women, in 2016. that does not mean there was not climbing turnout among some roots of women. -- among some troops of women. and you might have just given me

a good idea for a paper, to take a quick look at that. you'll be a co-author, is going to be fine. [laughter] this is how get all my best ideas. describe why women might have not voted, hillary is going to win it. and certainly, that was the conventional wisdom. woulds, and in this you be like every political scientist for other, something of a cost-benefit analysis. right, i am running home from work and i have to get all these things done and do i have time to vote? we know that when it rains, turnout does go down. people say it is not really matter, right? conventionals that analysis this almost never works. because even if we think it's really close and it's going to make a difference, the probability that your vote makes a difference is very small. why do people actually turn out to vote? they turn out to vote because i

get inherent value from voting. let me be clear. i feel strongly about the inherent value of voting. it turns out if all of you do not turn out to vote that will have a consequence. part of that inherent voting is a sense of duty. certainly people have suggested that one of the reasons women's turnout, and especially african americans women's turnout is so high now is because of a sense of duty in general. the girls are more likely to do what they are told. but also that women have a strong sense of community. and the need to vote to rep or center community. -- to represent their community. i was going somewhere with that, we also vote because voting is a ritual in which we affirm that we live in a democratic country, and i am part of a democratic process. inwhich citizens get a say what our elected officials do.

i tell my students, i have a cold, dead, political science heart and i still tear up everything up time i vote. because i know people have died to have this right. and how valuable this job this form of government. my hypothesis might be different. and that the same way we saw incredible increases in african-american turnout in 2008, with the ability to vote for the first african american president, we might have seen, and my nonrandom circle, some evidence that women felt like, i have to show up for this one. whether i vote for hillary or not, i still feel like i want to say i was part of this historic moment. like i said, that is a good question and one i do not have a lot of a pickle evidence on. i will be getting back to you with a draft of the paper. -- a lot of empirical evidence on. >> i have not been repeating the

questions, but i hope the microphone is -- >> i'm curious, i've heard there's a significant gap in voting patterns between married and unmarried women? could you say more. dr. wolbrecht: yes. so the question was about differences between married and unmarried women. right. exactly again, as we think about different women and different ways we expect them to behave. unmarried women especially unmarried women with children look very different from varied women and particularly compared to married women with children. in general married women with children, even when you control for other things, social class, region, ethnicity, race, though sorts of things, are more likely to vote republican than our single women and particular the single mothers. so our single dads.

but we cannot say much about them because there are so few of them in. [laughter] to really be able to look at. things going on there and i do not think we have the perfect answer about why married women and single men are so distinct. it may be a sense of self interest. it is worth saying we talk a lot about women are so caring, that is why they support social welfare programs. women are also the vast majority of people working in schools and hospitals, and these sorts of social work agencies. these places where women work. it may be that single women who rely more on their own income, that calculation looks different. but that is another interesting thing to watch going forward and it will be interesting because college-educated women are more likely to be married. so that is going to push into the front ways. two at is going to push in different ways. last question. [indiscernible]

dr. wolbrecht: the question was about the blue wave of 2018. i think it is important to say that a lot of things matter in elections. certainly voters matter in elections and in some sense have the final say. but voters are of course affected by a lot of different things. by activism, by people who come and knock on doors, by the candidates choose to put themselves forward. by whether or not they are getting donations. while women's turnout might not have been medically different in 2018, women who were active, attended protest rallies, called to the member's of congress, gave donations to political candidates, organized in their communities, canvassed, you name it, off the charts in 2018. in that sense, everything you have heard is backed up by the data we have. certainly, women were very blue in 2018. certainly there were more women candidates by a longshot and we have ever seen before, most of

them of course, democrats eyes to of course but it is only been trip about the last 20 years. i also think the other ways in which women mattered in 2016's network of democracy that is so important to making this system work. -- mattered in 2016 is the work of democracy. thank you for your questions. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

>> you're watching american history tv, covering history, c-span style, with event coverage, eyewitness accounts, archival films, lectures, and college classrooms and visits to museums and historic places. and visits to museums and historic places. all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. >> monday night, on the communicators. from the state of the net conference, justice department associate attorney general and former fbi general counsel, on encryption technology and

privacy. facebook encrypts, the company itself will lose visibility into what is happening on his platforms and the estimation is that 75% of those tips will go dark. we will never learn about it. they can about all the children who are being abused as we speak who we will not be able to track down. >> my view is law enforcement needs to rethink its approach to encryption in light of the fact that congress will not act, in light of the fact that there are these get cyber threats. and actually embrace encryption instead of trying to find ways to so-called break it. that is not really what law enforcement is trying to do, in other words it needs to embrace corruption as a way to enhance the cyber security and therefore the security of all americans. next on lectures in history,

university of north carolina at check hill professor teaches a class about expanding rights in the 1960's and 70's. looking at women's grecian and the gay rights movement. he covers birth control, the equal rights amendment and the stonewall riots. i want to start with a little story. woman sherry, which is a pseudonym, was featured in a life magazine article. the story was about a choice that her family was facing. she was pregnant. her husband had recently traveled to europe where he acquired a drug called thought of mind. thalidomide had not been approved for use in the united states of america but it was approved in european countries.