good evening everyone. there's a little more people here. before we welcome our guest, good evening everyone. >> good evening. >> my name is the tyson. in american art and culture here at the boston massachusetts. it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you and our speaker christine. before i begin i want you to take note of two emergency exits that are marked at the front and rear of the room. if you will also take a moment to please silence your cellphones so we do not disrupt this fascinating top. while you are doing that, i

would look to share with you and installation that i recently curated entitled anti separate. using materials from the at the name collections, we take a look at the suffrage movement and how it contributed to be designing women's roles and responsibilities and societies from various perspectives. it also presents the complexities of the struggle to secure and protect voting rights for women and people of color in the past and today. please take a look after the top. i'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you have any questions, i will definitely be here to answer them. i should also mention that we have a large exhibition and our gallery across the way for required reading, reimagining a colonial library. that particular exhibition showcases rarely seen historic books that are treasures a 17th century boston. community partners and each of us including you, are asked to

consider which books should be considered required readings today. there's some fascinating unimportant choices there. there is a place for you to share your own ideas as well. free galleries mission to the anti suffrage and required reading exhibition or one of the many benefits of membership here at the at the name and we are grateful to all of the 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 the newsletter, find out about the myriad events that we plan here at the front desk. you can join the at the name as a member, and if you're thinking about it but are not quite sure, we have the passes available now. so come in, check it out, top with this spent some time and we hope to see you back again.

christina while bright, she is a professor of political science, director for the study of american democracy, see robert henry director of the washington program at the university of -- in addition to the book she will discuss tonight, she is the author and coauthor of counting women's ballots, female voters from suffrage through the new deal, and the politics of women. women's rights. parties, positions and change. as well as myriad articles on women as political rolemodels, the representation of women and party positions on education policy. how have american women voted in the first 100 years since the ratification of the 19th amendment? how have popular understandings of women as voters both persisted and changed over time? in a century of those four women, our speaker tonight offers an unprecedented account

of women voters in american politics over the last ten decades. please join me and offering an exceptionally warm welcome to christina well brent. (applause). >> i thank you so much. what an honor in a thrill for me to be here. this is literally what i thought academia was going to be like all the time. this is not what my office looks like, but in my dreams it's what my office looks like. this is a really exciting day for me to be here, talking to all of you. this is actually the release day for a century of votes for women. (applause) thank you. i'm really excited to be here and talking to you about that book today. as you probably know, 2020 is the centennial of women's suffrage.

it has been 100 years. since the 19th amendment prohibited the denial of voting rights on the basis of sex. with the 19th amendment did, since that time, of course the question on everyone's mind, journalists, voters themselves, definitely politicians, what would women voters do? what should we expect and women voters? as the already suggested when we look over this 100-year period, there are lots of ideas about what it is women are going to do. how impactful they are going to be as voters. the kind of things that might affect the rubble voting behaviors. the headlines here the petticoat one was from 1928. 1956 the motions, down to the 16 ways of looking at a female voter which is from 2008. women may decide the election from 2016. i do promise you in this we're going to start in the twenties and get to 2016.

maybe even 2020 by the end. what i want to do is use a couple of examples of some conventional wisdom about women voters overtime that have shaped are thinking about women and their impact on politics in the united states. one of the things i hope you will take away from this lecture is to think about the ways in which, what we believe about women voters is in some way, some ways, as important as what women voters actually do. if we think of women voters and politicians think of women voters as say, soccer moms, white women's who live in the suburbs and drive mini vans, they will craft their appeals, they will design public policy, all in ways to try to appeal to what they have in mind as a woman voter. we know however, that white married women in the suburbs are not a large proportion of the female electorate.

they become less so overtime. again, i want us to think about, what do we think we know about women voters and what do we actually know? i'm going to start with what i like to call twitter heartaches about women in the early 19 twenties. the very first convention, wisdom about women voters was this idea that women suffrage had been a failure. these are headlines from 1923 and 1924. this might be the only top you see this year, where one of the headlines is from a housekeeping as well as the washington post, etc. it was not just a journalist who concluded almost immediately after the 19th amendment that women's suffrage had been a failure. this was something that scholars tend to believe as well. for reasons i can talk more about, we actually had very little data about women voters

in the period immediately after suffrage. as you probably are aware, citizens do not placed pink and blue ballots into ballot boxes, and so we do not actually, from the official voting record, have a way to know how men and women voted. there is one exception to that which is illinois, because of the unusual way they initially franchised women, actually did count women men to women's ballots differently. in the 1916 to 1920, what that means is virtually everything that we know about how women voted comes from one state and two elections. before george gallup was going to invent survey research in the 19 thirties and forties. we see this unpopular history allen book only esther day was really popular history of the 1920s. the american women won the suffrage in 1920. she seemed, it is true to be very little interested and what

once she had it. i think i just skipped -- no i did not. so, what do we actually know? and some ways we can kind of excuse observers in the 1920s. they did not have much to go on. they were out there interviewing party leaders and trying to understand. let this careful show you is overtime from 1920 to 1936, that was five elections. the turnout rates of men in gold and women and purple. as you can see, in the first elections after women when the right to vote, there is quite a gap. 30 some points between the turnout of men which 1920 is almost 70%, men are turning out to vote. this is from a sample of tennessee, about a third of women in that first election after the 19th amendment are turning out to vote. in some sense, it looks like there is some truth to the story, that most women, the

majority of women did not actually choose to use that new right once they had it. the story gets a little bit more complicated if we start to look at different groups of women. that is going to be another theme of my top. to talk about the women voters, makes almost no sense in american politics. here, i want to talk about women depending upon where they lift. this is showing you turn out again. women in purple, men and gold. in ten american states. i can't read it very well here, virginia is at the end. massachusetts is next, connecticut, oklahoma, minnesota, kansas, illinois, iowa, missouri and kentucky. what i hope you can see is that there is huge variation depending on where you live and what women's turnout looked like in 1920. and 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 just around 20% in massachusetts and in connecticut. on the other hand, there were other places where the turnout of women was actually quite impressive. more than half of women took advantage of their right to vote the first time they were able to do so in both missouri and kentucky. so the question is, what is different about missouri and kentucky compared to massachusetts, virginia, and connecticut? what is happening in these two different states? as you can see, we have similar patterns among men. turnouts much higher, here on your right then on my left. one of the things that this data reminds us of, is that the united states, we have the right vote, but the obligation rests almost entirely upon the

individual. you have got to register yourself. you have got to get to a polling place. you have got to know when to vote. you have got to, maybe in some places, pay a 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 that they face are going to explain a lot about how much people vote, and how likely they're going to turn out on election day. what makes these two different places different? virginia, massachusetts, and connecticut, all have, for example, a large number of electoral laws that provided barriers to many voters and pull taxes, or literacy tests which connecticut and virginia both hat. they had long registration periods. it is worth saying, i do not have that appear, but in for southern states, women did not vote in the presidential election of 1920.

those states had six month long registration periods, at least six month if not longer. the 19th amendment was ratified in august, about six or so weeks before the election in november. those four states said, oh we are sorry, it is nice that you have been enfranchised but you missed the registration deadline, so we will see you in 1924. other states, including massachusetts, had similar restrictions, but found ways to let women vote. if you read the boston almanac, the report from the electoral office in 1920, you can tell that they were a little put out. the state legislator first told them you have to take all the women who are registered for school board elections because we let women do that, and move them over to the regular. then you have to hold all the special days just for women to come and vote. so there sort of this passive aggressive, it was much work, but we managed to register all 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 the pole tass and literally literacy tests were meant to exclude american african voters. i will tell you more about african women and they did actually vote in the early elections but most did not, but also to exclude poor whites, also we will see had a particularly strong effect on women rather than men. if you will pay a pull tax in your household and you cannot afford to, you will probably paid for the mail of the household and not the women. missouri and kentucky in the other hand, i should say massachusetts and connecticut rather, in 1920, 60% of the population was first or second generation immigrants. the purpose of those laws for those who are already in power

to try to keep these new immigrants away from polls and not have them have an impact on voting, and we will talk about that as well. missouri and kentucky had very few voter registration requirements. no poll tax, no literally no literacy tests etc. the other things that make these two groups of states different is the level of competition. the 1920s were a time period in which most american states were overwhelmingly blue, or overwhelmingly red. this is the solid democratic south, that did most elections in the south in that period. republicans were not even fielded or nominated for office. on the other hand massachusetts and connecticut i should say are overwhelmingly red in this period. but our overwhelming republic held during during this period. among these ten states the only two that would be classified as competitive during this period

they are, missouri and kentucky, you guessed it. the presidential election in 1920 was decided by point oh 5% of the vote. what happens when elections are competitive? elections are really ceiling. it a lot of campaigning, an incentive to reach out to every single vote. suddenly those norms about women not voting do not seem merely as important when an election is that close. what we know, is that these effects tend to be or were in the 20s larger for women than four men. with this is showing is that women on the left and men on the right, the gold is places that have a lot of election restrictions, and the purple is places that had almost none. for both women men and women there is a drop off. if you live in a place with lots of laws you will not see much of a turnout. but the drop off as i hope you can see is even greater for women than it is for men. these were brand-new voters trying to learn the ropes things that discouraged voting

or even more likely to discourage women's voting. we can see something similar for competition. here purple is democratic one party places, so the south. gold, republican places most of the north and the west, and the few competitive examples that we have, again that same pattern across the men and women, but it bigger impact for women of the sorts of laws. i will stop and make another point. i want you to be watching throughout as i'm showing you lots and lots of graphs, that while there are always the gender differences, the patterns are still the same. it turns out that men and women are both rational, reasonable human beings who pay some attention to politics and have used on the sorts of things, and so given the resistance, the generations of resistance to human suffrage, women got enfranchised and while some were disappointed that there was no revolution. the fact that there wasn't sort

of suggests that this was a population that was perfectly capable of -- let me put it this way, it was at least that's capable as men were of participating in elections. what this means is that the difference between the turnout, the average turnout of the women in kentucky and a woman and virginia is 50 points. let me point out, that 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 someone lived then whether it was a man or a woman. the overall gap in 1920 is just 32 points between men and women. but the gap between different kinds of women, women who lived in the south and women who lived in the competitive border states it's much larger than that. that will be a theme you're going to hear again tonight as well. there are lots of differences

between women that dramatically outpace any differences between women and men in general. i will point out, we will jump to the future coming closer to the end of the stock. since 1980, it took till 1980, so 60 years after the 19th amendment was ratified, women had been more likely to turn out and elections than half men. that difference has grown over time but it is fairly steady. again, you'll see one turnout goes up but nonetheless, women have been more likely to turn out to vote since 1980. mr. alan has more to say about women voters. he goes on to say, not only was she very little interested in voting in which she could, but she but she voted, but mostly as the and regenerate men about her did. what did mr. allen mean by this? another really popular conventional wisdom that we start in the 19 fifties that

men are reported to tell women how they got to vote as a headline from the boston globe in the 1920s. the second headline is from detroit free press, for most of the first half of the 20th century, this presumption that women voted the ways that their husbands told them was really prominent. in a sense, what people were trying to do was make sense of the fact that women got the right to vote and voted voting patterns looked 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? the reason was, men were telling their wife how to vote. i'll tell you a little 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 their. (laughs) these conventional wisdom has consequences. in the 1930s george gala and

some others like fred harris and others, becomes the first folks doing sophisticated polling in the united states where they are randomly selecting people, using good methods and we finally have this opportunity in a systematic way, to better understand attitudes, thoughts and behaviors of people in lots of ways, what kind of serial they by, but also what kind of candidates they support. in his first polls in the thirties and forties, george gallup purposely under sampled women. the reason was, he was trying to understand how people decided who to vote for. as far as he was concerned, there was no puzzle when it came to women. women which is to with 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. their thought process, their understanding. the data is not great, if you

want to understand anything about women during this period. i'm about to violate a rule and put a lot of words on a powerpoint site. you do not need to read these all. if you had the luck to go to graduate school in political science and steady american politics, these would all 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 48 and 52 it's called voting at the columbia university, second quote the american voter published in 1960, about in 52 and 56, and the last is a quote from a book chapter that really forms the foundation, virtually all studies of public opinion in the united states. i bring these up because i just suggested, graduate students and scholars of american politics still read these books. they have shaped our

understanding of american voters and what we teach to undergraduates and the way that our scholarship goes about four generations since. this is really important work. many of these people invented, literally, created the first scholarly survey. things like the american national elections steady. a two hour long election steady that has been done every year since 1948. what do the scholars that are going to shape generations thinking about american elections, what do they decide about women voters in the middle of the 20th century? what they decided is what the newspaper said as well. that women are mostly doing what their husbands are selling them to do. they also observed that men and women are not that different in their political views, and these are the sort of conclusions they come to. for example, and the second one, the wife who votes but

otherwise pays little attention to politics, tends to leave not only -- abides by his ultimate decision. or, the wife is very likely to follow her husband's opinions however in personally she may have absorbed their justification's in a more complex level. these are scholars, bringing evidence to bear. let us look at some of that evidence. now focusing on the very top quote. when i want to emphasize to you about this one is that it makes for empirical claims. for claims. claims that we could in fact evaluate. the first is that husbands tell their wives how to vote. there is the direction of influence. second claim, they do not particularly respect them. men, when it comes to politics do not respect their wives on the side of wives there is trust, on the side of husbands there is the need to reply or guide. two more empirical claims.

this is long before xl. these are the actual graphs that show up in that book to support these claims. what you're going to see is whether a woman or man said that she would go to a family member to discuss a political question in june and whether or not a woman or man said they discussed politics with family members in october. with this is trying to show, not surprisingly, is that people talk more about politics right before an election than they do in the summer which still remains true. i want to focus with those questions sent. have you talked politics with anyone recently? who is the last person you discussed the election or the candidates with? it is absolutely suggested by this data, which i have every reason to trust. women are more likely to talk to family members about politics in general.

whether or not that also means women are more likely to take directions from their husbands -- remember this is not about husbands but family members, is not something that they directly observed or ask about. did women take directions from their husbands? maybe. probably some of them did. i just don't know very well from this particular data. it is worth saying that one principle of social science would be just how likely are you to talk to anyone if we know is we do, that this is a period in which a 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 a lot higher for women then it will be four men. i cannot tell you that women did not take direction from their husbands, they certainly may have, but i'm going to tell you that the empirical evidence for that is not particularly strong. now, of course as i pointed out, there are at least three more

empirical claims that have been made here about women and trust and men and their respect for their wives. there are no questions asked about that and these surveys at all. what is happening, and is what we all do every day, its people are looking at the facts and they are saying what explains those facts? our explanations for those facts are going to be rooted in our understanding of the way the world works. if by understanding the way the world works is that women are not inherently interested in politics, that the traditional family structure, the man is the leader of the family, and he gives instructions to the rest of the family, then i will look at this information and say, obviously, this is what is going to happen, or this is what is happening. i wanted to be clear. we still do this today. another sort of less and we want to come out of our book is that we need to be thinking about the biases and the assumptions that we bring to evaluating political information any kind of

information whatsoever. we are people there were people with other ideas and i'm guessing you cannot read this. this is a writer in the new york times in 1956 and it says, if married couples tend to vote the same way, and they do, it is because of the environment giving them the same orientation, rather than because the women understands the men's choice. we would call that another hypothesis, right? we would like to have the data to be able to understand, and now that we do i can tell you that sure enough, married couples tend to have lots of short shared characteristics that are associated with how they vote for presidential and other elections. everyone is excited now. it is very easy to pick on the past. back then, they did not know. they had different gender norms, we've had such dramatic

changes. we have, it is remarkable. the women's lived experiences from 1920 until 2020, no question. when we get to 2016, surely we are going to have so much more data, more information, we are really going to understand what is going to happen. i went into 2016 thinking i have studied women in politics for 25 years. now we're going to have a women nominee. i am ready, i am trained for. this and the woman nominee tint turns out to be the tenth most interesting thing or historic thing happening in 2016 elections. on the one side we have the first woman nominee of a major party, on the other side we have an unusual nominee, meaning no military or clinical experience. a nominee who i will not repeat you for things that he has been incredibly accused of doing and that has said about women. obviously, we are going to have

a giant gender gap in 2016. npr on the top, this is the popular voting website 5:38 on the bottom. pre-election, we're going to have a giant gender gap. of course women are going to vote for hillary clinton. of course women are going to vote against donald trump, because keep in mind with eaves absorption, gender is the thing that most explains women's voting behavior. if we think that, then surely women are going to vote for a woman nominee and vote against president trump. let me explain what this is. this is the gender gap and presidential elections from 1952 through until 2012. basically, it is the difference and percent women voting democratic minus percent men. when the line, as it is in 50 2:56 and 60 is below that zero, women were actually slightly more republican than were men. that was that is what we see

prior to the 1960s. i love this, because we did all this media stuff there's all the stories about women fainting over john kennedy. then more of them actually voted for richard nixon. it is really not until 1980, the second side of bump i can talk about 76. we really get a systematic, a modern gender gap as opposed to the traditional line. women on average are more likely than men on average to vote for democratic candidates. the largest there is 1996 the reelection of bill clinton but what is going to happen in 2016? surely, this race is going to get us the biggest gender gap we have ever seen. i want you to prepare yourselves. here it comes. i don't know if you missed that.

(laughs). there it is. i will dispute my own claim and two seconds. what i say to students, the most you unusual presidential election, people actually showed up on election day and the patterns were consistent. including the fact that 90% of women who identified as republicans voted for the republican nominee and 90% of women who identified as democrats voted for the democratic candidate. pretty much the same percentage as did men and both of those camps as well. the media caught on to this idea that not all women are the same in the fallout from 2016. 52% of white women, the majority, a slim majority, but a majority of white women voted for donald trump in 19 excuse

me, in 2016. the question becomes, how? why? how can we possibly understand this? what i'm showing you now is the percentage of white women who voted for the republican nominee since 1952. they are going to be in gold, and the percentage of african american women who voted for the republican nominee in purple. what you are going to see is that there is really only been two instances since the 19 fifties in which the majority of white women voted for the democratic candidate. one in 1964, which is you can see everybody voted against mary goldwater. again in 1996, we saw this really large gender gap. if you have really good eyes, you notice that 1992, this is the two party vote, if we add in the fact that respiratory got 19% of the vote in 1982.

none of the candidates got the majority of votes from white women so i will focus on just these two. of course what we see, is this cavern in the voting preferences of white women and african american women. this is latino women, we have not had the data as long. i can also argue that we have really been focused on the black white racial gap and there is really interesting stuff happening among this growing part of the population that is latino. i think that is going to be very important going forward. what i'm showing you here is in 2016, men again and gold, women and purple, whites to my far-right, and african american -- the percent in 2012 voting for the republican candidate. extremely low levels of african american support from men or women for mitt romney in 2012 and we see that same gender gap, and this is another thing to

notice the pattern is usually the same across -- we see the same pattern of gender gap, the majority of white men and women voting for mitt romney. the most radical thing that really might romney said about women is that he had binders full of them. we would think, given such a different candidate and 2016 surely we will see something different. the thing is we did not. . for white women overall. what a stunning, would be the stability of this. i will complicate that even more in just a second. it turns out you need to think about race, class, lots of things to understand voting patterns in the united states, and that there is always a different dynamic going on there. for african americans, there was actually a small increase, i am not sure if those are statistically significant, and support, i would describe this more of a 2012 effect than a

2016. this is sort of a return to normal patterns among the african american community, coming down from the heights of support for president obama in 2008 and 2012. when i want to emphasize and what i hope for the millions time is that all of those gender differences are so small compared to the differences in terms of race. two things can be true at the same time. in general, women are more likely than men, similar men, to vote for democrats. that is usually what we focused on since 1980, this idea of a gender gap. when we say women are more likely to vote for democrats then our men, what we hear is women are democrats. most women are democrats. but as you can see, it is possible for most white women to be less likely to the republican, but still a majority of them to vote for republican. let me make one more point.

this is incredibly important. our lectures between -- the gray line here is the census from 1940 to 2016. the percent of electorates that is racial minorities, they are not just african american, and overtime the percent of the female electorate that is a minority, that will be in purple, and the male minority that is african minority as well. what you might be able to see appear, an extraordinarily high turnout of minority women. african american women in particular are more likely to vote then white men and are only barely passed up by white women. this is a really extraordinary development when you start, of

course, here in the 1940s. that is a long story that we can tell but my clock is ticking. i will tell you one more story. i told you the story and i said white women voted for donald trump. but even that, it turns out to me it's complicated and maybe you could have gone away thinking there is no change in women, nothing interesting happening. again, this is went men and women only whites, in 2012 voting for mitt romney. the difference is, this group is all women and men who do not have a college degree. again, a very small gender gap, but about 60% of men, a little less of women voting 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'm flipping to so many

graphs, but hopefully that helps. this is 2012, no college degree on the left, college degree on the right. what happens in 2016? let us look first at non college educated women. what i want you to notice is that 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 and pennsylvania. the truth is, they go a little bit and publican support but not dramatically. the dramatic shift especially and such a close election is among non college educated women. so much so, that they swing to the republican candidate, that that gender back, where there are supposed to be more democratic than men were verses. again most accurate to say there are about the same, but if anything, white women without a college degree become more likely to vote republican

then our white men without a college degree. what happens to colleges educated men and women? here the patterns remain 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 with other college education, the shift among menace pretty small. it might not even be cystitis tickly significant. the shift among women is much more dramatic. so again, if we think about what the differences are between women and men i want to again suggest that much more of the interesting political changes happening in the differences between different kinds of women. there is no question that the gap between non college educated women here, and college educated women here in 2016, it's probably larger than any of these male and female

gaps if that makes sense. so one of the things i hope that you leave this room convinced of is that women, and here i will blow your minds. are as diverse in their interest and identities as our men. when we try to understand how women vote, we want to think about, we certainly do not want to think about the women voter. but for a long time, the war women voter once this, the women voter wants. this there are all kinds of women voters, but that doesn't mean gender does not matter. but what we've seen in most cases, you are looking at one exception now, is that in different racial groups, different educational groups, i can show you a very similar information just like this for income which tells a similar story. the gender gap tends to persist which makes non-college educated women so interesting here. it is one place where we see that changing. i did see a headline this week

that claims that non college educated women are returning to the democratic fold and we will see how that goes in 2020. so, i am here to tell you what women will do in 2020. you all know it is that the slide is blank. (laughs) if anything i will say that the 2016 election was very humbling for political scientists, including myself. i make no predictions anymore, whatsoever. the past is always our best predictor of the future. i predict that women will continue to be very diverse. i assume that there will still be a gender gap with women slightly more supportive of the democratic candidate than our men. i continue to expect that education, race, income are going to be hugely important to thinking about poll choices in 2020, and that the gaps in most cases will be larger than any gender gap.

with that, i will say thank you for your time and attention and welcome your questions. (applause) all of the discussion that you presented dealt with party differences. i was wondering if you had any analysis that looked at issues, because as the elections proceed, some would be during times of war, 2008, health care was a big issue, it is a big issue this year. do you have any information on that? >> i do. i am capable of speaking without a graph, so i will do that. the story about issue differences similar to the partisan differences which is

that they exist, but they are not enormous. when people are trying to understand the gender gap and why women have become more democratic, a lot of people have rightfully looked to attitudes about social welfare in particular. in general, women are more supportive of programs and government policies to help the poor, the infirmed, the elderly, etc. again, there are not huge differences but they do exist. as you suggested, we also know that in general, women tend to be less supportive of the use of force, and so going back to many wars, and you see that rhetoric a lot in newspaper coverage as well, women are voting so that they don't send their husbands and their sons to war. there is that as well. there is good evidence that certainly, now and by now i mean the less the last ten or 20 years, women show more tolerance in general,

particularly, they move quicker and liberal directions on things like gay lesbian rights for example. but then i'm going to say two additional things about that. a lot of the original gender gap was blamed on women's issues, specifically. the other thing that's going to happen in the seventies and it comes to ahead in the 19 eighties, the parties move apart on women's issues. early 19 seventies, they are not that different on abortion, because nobody is talking about abortion till after room in wade. equal rights amendments which was pushed back in the news again, etc. everybody looked at this and thought this is obvious, women are going with the party that is what is understood as the feminist direction at that point. that understanding was pretty much debunked and social science almost immediately. the truth is, men and women do not hold dramatically different positions on things like abortion, and the equal whites

rights amendment. may be different on sexual harassment and equal pay, those sorts of things, but they are not very large. the other thing to say to that of course is that again, women have lots of interests. women might say they prioritize those issues a little more and they probably do, but it doesn't mean that those issues override other interests in the state of the economy, war and peace as you suggested. just prepare yourself i give long answers. my students will attest to that. our general model of democratic politics as we look around the world and we say this is what we should do about social security, about the environment, and then from that we say this is the party that is closest to my views, and then we support that party. certainly that is a good democratic theory way to think about it. everything we know is that partisanship is a value and an

identity that can most closely be traced to childhood. by the age of nine or ten, children know to say we are democrats or republicans. the way we 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. i don't have it with me but the data on republican public opinion about russia and the switch that it has made since donald trump became president in 2016 is enormous. from overwhelmingly negative to much more positive. because now we have a president, a republican leader, sending different signals about russia than previous republican leaders had. i am not picking on republicans. i can show you similar things for democrats as well. with that is a way to say is that, writing along partisanship here, i think it is a really important driver to things that are going. on it is linked to other

identities. it is linked to racial identities, religious identities, regional identities, cultural identities, etc. and that way it is extremely reinforcing. i will try not to make them all that long. thank you very much. >> please. >> you mentioned gallop polls and other sources of data. what are your best sources now going into 2020 for that kind of democratic information linked to voting patterns? >> despite what you have heard, polling is not dead. it has gotten harder. my grandmother, she picked up the phone, we talk to the person on the other line no matter what. people do not do that anymore. it is harder to get people to interview, but there are some smart people trying to figure out how to do that a little bit better, so some of our academic polls come from organizations that literally in exchange for

gift cards, or even have their computers in their home, people agree to be part of a monthly sort of surveyed that they take. that will be from cereal to politics sort of a thing. there are a couple of organizations that are known for being good at these things. for scholars, that is the american election steady that comes out of michigan. that is not useful to you though, because that stuff does not get released until after the election and we kind of churn through it. the pure research center is outstanding, excellent. their graphs are beautiful. that would be michael. you can tell i really love my graphs. there are a number of surveys done by major newspapers, so wall street journal has done one with cbs for a long time. those are also very credible and well done. i am reluctant to say. this in a period of a lot of distrust about the news media, most of the major long

established news media sources try to do a good job, by which i mean, trying to have a truly random sample, trying to ask questions that are not leading or trying to get a certain outcome. anything done online, where people can just call in or register their opinions, you do not need to bother looking at that, because that is for fun and for clicks, not really for knowledge. >> do these patterns persist at the state and local levels as well? >> that is a great question. the short answer is yes. in part, because a lot of this is rooted in partisanship. one of the really interesting developments in the last 20 years is how nationalized our politics have been. the idea that you might vote from when president, when

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, or well, he's not of my party but look at all of the good stuff he or she has done for my district. that could explain a lot of voting in the middle of the 20th century. it explains a lot less voting today. you might think my member of congress, she is a really nice person, but she will go vote with that other party when she gets to congress and i do not want that. so the reason we see those similar patterns are in part because people are bringing that same partisan lens to local and state elections as well. >> yes. >> at the state and local levels, it is all dominated by partisan view as opposed to there is no lift about gender even for women candidates? >> we know a lot more about women candidates at those

levels because there are some. the truth is, we do not know very much about winning women running for president. it is kind of a new thing that everybody is doing. women running in state legislative races for the house or for the senate, very well steadied. there are lots of ways to try to figure out is if there is an advantage or disadvantage for women. in recent years, and the last ten or 20 years, when we do experiments, when we show people randomly two different candidates and we call one chain and we call one john, it looks like women and democrats actually do have a slight preference for women. we can think about that why that might be. the assumptions that they bring oh well women candidates must be ex or why, instead. era in the real world, it is very difficult to see any evidence that there is an advantage or, and i think this is important, at this advantage to being a female candidate.

there doesn't seem to be a bump either way. if there is a disadvantage, it is mostly for republican women, because we tend to stereotype women as more liberal and more collaborative and progressive, to the extent that that will not fly very well with republican constituents, because they are not liberal, and ideological purity is an important thing on the republican side. that may help them a little, but even that is not enormous. that does not mean that there is no bias. when i was in graduate school we will talk about, if women run, women win. it seems to be true, so we were all talking about how do we get more women to run? that's what we were focusing on. greece's recently research shows when women run there more likely or equally likely to win, but that is because they're dramatically overqualified. the women who run have more qualifications, more experience,

etc. in some ways it might be a little depressing that they are equally likely than man i'm not saying all the male candidates are qualified. i'm saying on average women only run when they've got every degree and every experience and all sorts of backgrounds. >> hi there there is one way in the back. >> i too was utterly shocked that white women voted for trump. i'm sorry doctor floyd is not alive. i would like to know, if you're talking about women who voted, if my understanding many women did not vote because they assumed hillary would get it anyway. i don't know if you have any comments on that as to how many people were saying well she will win anyway so why bother? >> i don't know if i have data on that particular question.

i don't remember. it does not mean it did not happen. much talk or any talk about the claiming turnout among women in 2016, that does not mean there was a declining turnout among some groups among women, and you might have just giving me a good idea for a paper to take a quick look at that. you will you will be a coauthor, it will be fine. this is how i get on my best ideas. the way that you described why women might have not voted because they thought hillary would win. that was the conventional wisdom. this assumes, like every political scientist, something of a cost-benefit analysis. so i'm running home from work, i gotta get all these things done. oh do i have time to vote. we know that when it rains turn out does in fact go down. people are saying it's raining now. the problem is the analysis never works because even if you

think, only if i vote it's gonna make a difference, the probability that your vote makes a difference is incredibly small. so why do people actually turn out to vote? they turn out to vote because they get some inherent value from voting. let me be clear. i feel strongly about the inherent value of voting. it turns out that if all of you do not turn out to vote it will have a consequence. part of that inherent voting is a sense of duty, and certainly people have suggested that one of the reasons women's turn out and especially african americans women's turnout is so high now, is because the sense of duty in general. girls are more likely to do what they are told, but women have a strong sense of community and they want to represent their community. i was going to go somewhere else with that. just one second. now i will forget it.

oh, we also vote because voting is a ritual in which we are firm that we live in a democratic country and are part of the democratic process in which citizens get a say who are elected officials are. i tell my students have a cold, dead political science heart, and they still tear up every single time i vote. i know people have died to have this right and how valuable it is to have that form of government and how important it is. my hypothesis might actually be different, which is that in the same way that we saw an incredible increase in african american turnout in 2008 with the ability to vote for the first african american president, we might have seen, some evidence that women felt like, i have to show up for this one. whether i vote for hillary or not, i feel like i want to say i was part of this important moment. that is a good question, and

when i do not have a lot of empirical evidence on. i will be getting back to you with the drafted paper. can we do one more after that? >> i was curious. there is quite a significant gap in voting patterns between married and unmarried women. can you say a little bit more? >> the question was about differences between married and unmarried women. you are exactly right. again as we think about different women and different ways we are expected to behave, unmarried women especially unmarried women with children look very different from married women and again 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 all those sorts of things, are more likely to republican then are single women and particularly single mothers. so are singled that, spoke to it turns out we cannot say much about them because there are so few of them. to really be able to look at. there are a lot of things going on there and i don't think we have the perfect answer about why married women an unmarried women are so distinct. it might be us a sense of self interest. it is worth saying that we talk a lot about women are still caring, that is why they support social welfare programs. women are also the vast majority of people working in schools and hospitals and all the sorts of social work agencies. these places where women work, and maybe single women who rely more on their own income, that calculation looks a little bit different. i think it is another interesting to watch going forward. it will be interesting because

college educated women are more likely to be married, and so that will sort of push into different ways. last question here because you have been waiting so patiently. >> the question was about the babe of 2018 and that is a great question. it is important to say that a lot of things matter in elections. voters matter and elections. voters are affected by lots of different things. by activism, by people who come and knock on doors, by the candidates who choose to put themselves forward, by whether or not they are giving donations. while women's turnout might not have been dramatically different in 2018, women who were active attended protest, rallies attended congress rallies made donations, organizing their own communities, canvassed, you

name it off the charts in 2018. in that sense everything you've heard is backed up by what data that we have. certainly, women were very blue in 2018. there were more women candidates by a long shot than we had ever seen before. most of them of course democrats. i say of course, that is only been true for the last 20 years. i also think the other ways in which women mattered a lot in 2016 was that work of democracy that is so important to making the system work. thank you for your question. thank you. (applause).

welcome, today's subject is lyndon johnson. and it's fair to say that he is best remeed