Sexism and Joe Biden’s shot at the White House

The former VP is doing well largely because sexist anti-Clinton Democrats and Independents are coming back to the party

Last week, I wrote about why Biden seems to be doing well in polls in rural states. As I wrote, he is out-performing Hillary Clinton in states with the lowest population densities. This runs counter to our expectations; Over the last two decades, the trend in urban-rural polarization has been for Democrats to do better in cities and Republicans to outperform in the sparsely-populated countryside. There was a large increase in the correlation between population density and Democratic vote margin from 2012 to 2016. So it’s worth asking why that trend would be reversing in 2016.

The clearest explanation to me seems to be that voters who would have otherwise voted for a Democrat in 2016 didn’t so because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton. And there are probably multiple explanations for that. Some voters were likely turned off by her embrace of non-whites. Others probably didn’t like her long ties to Washington. But the clearest explanation, and one that gets shunned by a lot of media times when I raise it, is that many voters are sexist (both explicitly and implicitly) and that biases them again voting for women.

I said (or hypothesized) as much in my newsletter last week. Evidently some of y’all are better at my job than I am because I received several emails and Twitter DMs with actual data to back up the point. Here is an exchange I had with Obinna Onwuchekwa, who analyzed data from the Democracy Fund and UCLA’s Nationscape poll. He says:

In Nationscape, voters who voted for Trump but would now pick Biden over him strongly prefer male bosses over female ones.

Which is pretty interesting. And he added:

Another thing: they aren’t particularly racist. They see lots of discrimination against Af-Ams and Muslims. They also don’t buy the argument that whites, men and Christians face discrimination. Their beef with Clinton seemed to be mostly about gender.

I asked whether his shrugging-off of the racism hypothesis was properly situated in the comparative context; what we care about is whether these Trump-to-Biden switchers are more racist than the average voter, not their absolute levels of racism. He clarified:

They don’t seem to differ very much from the mass public on the racial issues. Where they really stand out seems to be gender, particularly attitudes to a male boss and to women who complain about sexual harassment.

That’s a pretty good starting point. I’m going to crunch some more numbers on this and write a big piece about it later. Racial resentment and racial status threat were big reasons why Trump won in 2016, but many people have ignored the role of sexism in Clinton’s defeat. It might be the big story of 2020. Biden’s victory in the Democratic primary was certainly due in part to a similar dynamic.