Gender Mathematics Adding Up to Unusual Factor for Both Parties

To anyone who has ever tried to plan a vacation, pick a movie or choose between the rake and the hammock on a Saturday afternoon, it may not come as news that men and women occasionally disagree. In politics, this instinct has manifested itself most famously in the gender gap--the tendency of women to favor Democrats and men Republicans in presidential and congressional elections. Now the gender gap is migrating into new territory--the internal races for the parties’ presidential nominations themselves.

Vice President Al Gore--despite (or maybe because of) his new status as an aspiring alpha male--is running much better with Democratic women than men in most polls. Texas Gov. George W. Bush, though his appeal is more balanced, also shows better with Republican women than men. Conversely, the two guys chasing the front-runners--former jock Bill Bradley and former Navy pilot John McCain--poll much better with their party’s men. In a recent Dartmouth College survey in New Hampshire, Bradley ran 19 points better with men than women and McCain, 12 points; a new Times Poll there found Bradley and McCain both running 10 points better with men than women.

This is a more uncommon phenomenon than it might seem. No consistent gender gap emerged in Bill Clinton’s race against Paul E. Tsongas for the 1992 Democratic nomination. Even polarizing Patrick J. Buchanan didn’t generate much of a gender gap against Bob Dole in the 1996 GOP race. But this year it’s reached the point where Gore is clinging to women’s support like a life raft, and even Bush’s advisors are bracing for a world where they rely on women’s votes to survive a tilt toward McCain among men in early primaries.

Both broad and narrow factors explain the trend. Dartmouth political scientist Linda Fowler (who supervises the college’s poll) notes that women tend to plug into political campaigns later than men; they may be supporting Bush and Gore in greater numbers now simply because, as the front-runners, they are better known. Fred Steeper, Bush’s pollster, points to another broad explanation. “Men tend to be political risk-takers,” he says, which makes them more willing to back a challenger--Bradley or McCain--over the better-known Gore and Bush.

Personal factors are also key. As a presidential candidate, Bradley is emphasizing his former career as a professional basketball player far more than he ever did in the Senate; that juices men more than women. Likewise, McCain’s advertising highlights his experiences as a Navy pilot and a prisoner of war in Vietnam, both to define his character and to cement his credentials as a potential commander-in-chief. That’s also drawing men, especially older men. “It isn’t necessarily that women are against Bradley and McCain, it’s that men are drawn to them,” Fowler notes.

Issue differences appear secondary in this division, but they reinforce it. While McCain pledges a strong national defense and an assertive American role in the world, Bush’s touchstone is his call for a “compassionate conservatism.” The issue Bush has addressed in the most depth (even after his big foreign policy speech last week) is education. Both in tone and specifics, that focus opens doors with women. So far McCain has been the candidate from Mars, Bush from Venus.

There’s not as clear a gender (or astrological) split in the Democratic debate. While Gore has stressed education more than Bradley, both are talking primarily about health care, an issue important to men and women alike. Instead, the most relevant difference may be attitudes about Clinton. Both the Bradley and Gore campaigns believe that antipathy toward Clinton after the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal is more intense among Democratic men than women--who have accumulated a deeper emotional investment in the Clinton presidency (and thus Gore’s succession) after years of struggle with Republicans on issues like abortion and Medicare.

These gender divisions are only one of several important fissures that have emerged in each race. On the Republican side, ideology matters, with McCain showing his greatest strength among moderate voters, Steve Forbes relying on conservatives and Bush demonstrating the broadest ideological appeal. In the Democratic contest, education matters most--with college-educated voters generally preferring Bradley and those without a degree, Gore. Yet now that the gender gap has emerged, it too is likely to shape the strategies in both primaries.

Bradley faces a problem of simple arithmetic. One result of women’s overall preference for Democrats is that female voters now constitute the majority of the Democratic primary electorate in almost every state. That means if women prefer Gore by about the same margin as men prefer Bradley, Gore will win most primaries. Guy appeal has given Bradley a solid base, but to best Gore he’ll have to woo women in greater numbers--which helps explain why his first ads last week prominently featured a woman praising his work for legislation mandating that insurance companies cover 48-hour hospital stays for childbirth.

Bradley’s second challenge will be holding his advantage among men when the primary calendar moves inland in March, away from the socially liberal voters along the coasts. Bradley’s support for allowing gays to serve openly in the military, and his opposition to the 1996 welfare reform bill, are likely to be a greater problem with men than women in the Midwest and, especially, in the South.

The Republican math reverses the Democratic. In most states, men constitute a clear majority of the GOP electorate. That should help McCain. His problem is that Bush is more competitive with men than McCain is with women; so far, at best, McCain is running even or slightly ahead among men in New Hampshire, while Bush is maintaining a double-digit lead among women. That suggests McCain’s most urgent task may be to convert more women.

McCain hopes to do that by laying out his views on education, Social Security and health care in speeches before year’s end. “We have to connect the dots for female voters,” says John Weaver, McCain’s senior strategist. “That is obviously our second act.” The question will be whether the rough-and-ready maverick persona that makes McCain so appealing to men will make him too risky for women, no matter what his agenda. The inescapable truth is that in politics, as in many things, what makes an option appealing to one gender is often precisely what makes it unappealing to the other.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.

See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein