A century after winning voting rights, US women hold key to White House

Stephanie Rose is among the 96 million Americans who has already voted to choose the next President and Vice President. She has cast her vote early at Knoxville in Tennessee and declared on Twitter on Monday whom she has voted for – Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Tennessee was the 36th state of the US to ratify the 19th amendment to the United States Constitution. It did so on August 18, 1920, and thus paved the way for formal adoption of the amendment, which was passed by the US House of Representatives and the Senate in May and June the previous year and needed ratification by at least 36 states.

The 19th amendment to the US Constitution granted women across America the right to vote. It came seven decades after Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott held the historic Seneca Falls Convention in New York in July 1848 and launched a nationwide movement for women's suffrage.

For latest updates on US elections, click here

So, when Stephanie Rose and millions of others like her are casting votes in the presidential elections this year, they are celebrating the centenary of the voting rights for US women.

And, they are among the ones who possibly hold the key to the White House.

It was however not until 1980 that women emerged as a key factor in US presidential elections. That was the year when the term ‘gender gap’ was first coined to refer to the difference in the percentage of men and women voting for a particular candidate in an election. The Republican Party’s candidate Ronald Regan, who beat incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter, secured votes of 47% of the women, although 55% of the men supported him.

“That (1980) was also the first year in which the Republican Party removed its support for the Equal Rights Amendment. It had supported that in its platform since the 1940s, and it was the first time that the Republican Party took a strong pro-life (anti-abortion) position, which has been its position ever since,” Christina Wolbrecht, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame, said during a virtual briefing on presidential elections organized by the US State Department for the foreign journalists. “(The) Democrats, on the other hand, supported the Equal Rights Amendment and took a very strong pro-choice (pro-abortion) position on abortion.”

She also noted more women had been in the presidential electorate than men since 1964. It had happened mostly due to the fact that the US had more women of voting age because they had longer lifespans, explained Wolbrecht, who recently co-authored “A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage”.

But it was since 1980 that women participated in US presidential polls at a higher rate than men, and thus turned into a key deciding factor in electoral politics of the US.

The 2016 elections had for the first time a woman – Hillary Clinton – as a presidential candidate in the history of the US. She had as her rival Donald Trump, who was accused of making misogynistic comments. But, contrary to the expectation, the ‘gender gap’ in the votes of Trump, who finally beat Clinton, did not go up dramatically and remained within the historic normal of six to seven percentage points.

It was because suburban women, particularly the whites, had voted in larger numbers in favour of Trump in 2016. But the polls over the past few weeks indicated that the Republican Party’s candidate, who is seeking a second term in the White House, lost a significant chunk of his support base among them. The poll by the New York Times and Siena College found that Trump was trailing by 23 points behind his rival and Democratic Party’s candidate, Biden, among the suburban women in the swing states. The Pew Research estimated that Biden was ahead of Trump among the same demographic group by 19 points across the US. Biden’s lead over Trump among the Hispanic and African-American women was also found to be robust in pre-election polls.

No wonder, Trump is desperate to win the white suburban women back. “Suburban women, will you please like me? Please. I saved your damn neighbourhood, OK?” he urged in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, apparently referring to his administration’s bid to maintain law and order during “Black Lives Matter” protests.

He also sought to reach out to the suburban women claiming credit for getting their husbands “back to work” after the job-losses during shutdowns to prevent the Covid-19 pandemic.

So, will his decision to pick up Harris as running mate help Biden to secure more votes?

“In general, women do not vote for women candidates, certainly by the time we get to the general election when partisanship kicks in. So if you're a Republican woman, and you see that the Democrats are running a woman, it's extraordinarily unlikely that you're going to say, ‘Oh, well, I totally agree with these candidates on the issues and the identity, but I'll go vote for a woman just because I'm a woman’,” said Wolbrecht.