What Gender Gap? : The Women’s Vote Was a Deciding Factor in Electing Bush, Feminists and Analysts Now Say

When the presidential election campaign began, George Bush was not the preferred candidate of the organized women’s movement. Michael Dukakis had a 20-point lead among women voters and a track record mostly in accord with the feminist agenda.

Throughout the election year, feminist leaders predicted that women would elect the next President. Yet when the election was over, it seemed as though they had cried “gender gap” once too often.

But with this week’s impending inauguration of the 41st President, political analysts and feminists are now discussing, with a mixture of consternation and vindication, a hypothesis that says the feminists were right all along.

Newly released data suggest the narrowing of the gender gap from that original 20-point lead to only a six-point difference was a major factor in deciding the election.

Bush Took Women Seriously

In explaining what happened, analysts and leaders of the organized women’s movement are putting it bluntly: the Bush campaign took women seriously; the Dukakis campaign took women for granted.

“It was a gender canyon the Republicans were facing last spring,” Vince Breglio, president of Research Strategy and Management and a pollster for Bush/Quayle ‘88, said recently. “There was no way we could win with numbers like that. Targeting of women was a priority.”

At best, he said, all Republicans face a built-in gap, because women are more heavily Democratic: Out of every 10 women voters, 4 almost always vote Democratic, 2.5 vote Republican and 3.5 are split-voters.

“We had to win 2.5 of the splits. It was a major, major task, and we accomplished it,” Breglio said.

In what was the first presidential election in which men and women differed significantly in their vote, exit polls interviews showed that 54% of the men chose Bush; 52% of the women chose Dukakis.

Gender Gap Favored Dukakis

Breglio’s analysis sounded in no way at odds with that of Democratic pollster and vice president of the Analysis Group, Celinda Lake, who agreed that the built-in gender gap favors Democrats.

“The Democrats still have an edge with women, but they don’t appreciate that you can’t take it for granted. They did not target women; Dukakis did not effectively target any group. He did at the end in California and it was very effective,” she said, but repeated the “too little, too late” comments many have made.

“The Republicans did not take (women) for granted. They may have responded symbolically, but they responded. The Democratic campaign did not listen and develop a strategy at the national level,” Lake said, adding that they let Bush control and set the agenda and define Dukakis.

Both Breglio and Lake presented their analyses--as did political scientist Ethel Klein of Columbia University--to more than 1,000 participants at the recent Women’s Agenda Conference II organized by BPW/USA (the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs) in Kansas City.

According to Klein, what the campaign had produced by election day was a climate in which women did not so much vote for George Bush as they decided not to vote against him.

The conference, a coalition of more than 50 national women’s organizations with a combined, bipartisan membership of 10 million, first met last January in Des Moines, Iowa. Last year they adopted an agenda for the presidential campaign calling for a broad range of family policies, health care, reproductive freedom and economic equality, and a budget that balanced defense and development. This year they stood behind the same agenda, in an effort to make their concerns known to the new Administration and Congress.

In introducing the gender gap briefing, BPW president Betty Forbes said: “Women were a majority of the electorate Nov. 8; by early estimates, by as much as 8 million votes.”

Forbes took note of Bush’s successful strategy, highlighting not only his appearance at the BPW national convention soon after the GOP convention, where he announced his national child-care program, but also his call for a “kinder, gentler” nation and the high visibility of women in his campaign.

Dukakis’ choice of Susan Estrich as campaign manager notwithstanding, many Democratic women have criticized the campaign for the lack of a role for women. In Los Angeles, Marilyn Kezziah, coordinator of a liberal, bipartisan group, Women For, said: “(The Dukakis campaign) wanted the usual scut (menial) work, and did not see them as policy makers. Of course women had a great deal of frustration with the entire Democratic Party. Paul Kirk (chairman of the Democratic National Committee) at the beginning said he did not want to see special interest groups dominate, ‘like women.’ Women are hardly a special interest group.”

Saying in the final analysis that a presidential election gets down to “who can make the best future for the country,” Breglio said Bush stressed economic issues, the national deficit and foreign policy and, at the same time, successfully “articulated his personal agenda,” which included child care, education, health and children.

The charges of fear tactics and racism that were attached to Bush’s use of Dukakis’ furloughing of convicted rapist Willie Horton became, in Breglio’s analysis, the broader area of crime and drug abuse: “It focused on what most people picked up on as a vulnerability of the Dukakis record--a lack of judgment and feeling. . . . Bush emerged as a stronger leader.”

While women leaders at the conference and elsewhere did not praise Bush for his use of the Willie Horton issue, several did give him credit for having spotted “a women’s issue” and took themselves to task for not being more sensitive to it.

“What we haven’t acknowledged is that there is a fear side to women, from their personal security to national security,” Sarah Harder, president of the American Assn. of University Women, said. “(Women) will continue to be manipulated by the specter of violence, whether it’s Willie Horton or the Evil Empire, until we are ready to provide contrasting, empowering images as compelling.”

Why Gap Narrowed

Celinda Lake credited the narrowing of the gap to three actions Bush took: “He broke with Ronald Reagan at the convention and said, ‘I’m not him;’ he showed that he understood the modern family, and talked of day care and education, saying he was willing to use government as a tool to help; third, he said he was for change. On the eve of the election, men were for the status quo and women were for change.”

Since women’s experience made them more pessimistic about the economy, the improvement of the short-term economy by Election Day helped, Lake said. “They (the Republicans) worked hard to change the way women thought about it.”

Former campaign manager Estrich dismissed much of the criticism of Dukakis and his campaign.

“The reality is that each year the gender gap tends to narrow as the election gets closer. It’s largely a reflection of economic issues,” she said. “It involves women who do not self-identify as feminists, who are not liberals or progressives and who do not necessarily belong to traditional or new women’s organizations. It was not the membership of the feminist, organized women’s movement that was up for grabs. It was conservative women and some went back to him. His appeal with an issue such as crime went to that constituency, not women with more liberal progressive views.”

Estrich said Dukakis did take women seriously, did address a full range of economic issues and went out on a limb to make abortion and his support of existing legislation an issue.

“It was,” she said, “a very conscious effort to reach out.”

Effort at the End

Ann Lewis, a political consultant to business and professional women and a former political director for the Democratic National Committee, watched that conscious effort--at the end of the campaign, she said.

“The women (both parties) had to reach, the potential splits, are issue-driven. The Dukakis campaign nationally failed to reach them. Those of us who watched it happen in California could see that it worked, but not in time.”

Disagreeing with Estrich were Irene Natividad, president of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and Kate Michaelman of NARAL, the National Abortions Rights Action League.

“Michael Dukakis lost an opportunity,” Michaelman said. “He had a record. He had philosophical position. He didn’t use it . . . . Reproductive freedom, even when it was used negatively, was the issue that galvanized people. Women were ready to be tapped as a political force. . . . In the end, many didn’t vote for George Bush because of his positions, but they did not get out and vote for Michael Dukakis.”

Natividad described Dukakis’ women strategy as “a serious attempt not to address the issues.”

As far as shortcomings of the organized women’s movement itself, she said: “I think we should have picked up the ball in terms of our relations with the Democratic Party. The message from the campaign to all constituencies was, ‘Be quiet. You know where he is.’ We should have been more forceful to call the campaign’s attention to what mistakes were being made.”

What this all means for the future is still uncertain, but the women are clear that there will be no honeymoon with George Bush.

“George Bush has a real mandate to fulfill,” Lake said. “Women did not fall in love with him. They made up their minds at the last moment. Will he deliver substantively on child care, education . . . ?”

Harder agreed. She said a Bush message delivered to the recent conference by video and by surrogates seemed to be “resistance to solutions like family medical leave. It still boils down to no new taxes, no new mandates. How they get beyond lip service, beyond once more effectively seducing women” remains to be seen. For starters, she said, they are looking closely at the number and level of female appointments he makes.

For all the what-could-have-beens and wariness about future relations between the women’s movement and the Bush Administration, there seems little self-criticism among the women themselves, who seem to see the election as proof of their growing importance.

‘Issue-Driven Voters’

Eleanor Smeal, the founder/president of Fund for the Feminist Majority, wrote a book in 1984 called “Why and How Women Will Elect the Next President.” She did not sound at all apologetic about that title when asked about the election.

“Women voters are not only the majority, they are issue-driven voters,” she said of the lessons of the election. “They not only affect whom we choose but the agenda they run on. It was a little confusing in this election because we broke our votes. But a key change was that the quest for women’s votes dominated the winning campaign. . . . Now there’s no need to prove (the gender gap).”

Looking ahead, Ann Lewis pointed to two courses of action necessary in the next four years. “Raise the political activity of our members and raise the political responsibility of the political system around our priority issues,” she said.