When Elizabeth Warren entered the Massachusetts Senate race last year, it was widely anticipated that her candidacy would be particularly popular with women in the state. While Democrats consistently benefit from large gender gaps in statewide races (Deval Patrick won re-election in 2010 largely because of a 20-plus point advantage among women), many expected Warren's candidacy to generate an even larger gender gap.
The UMass Poll released a survey of Massachusetts registered and likely voters on Tuesday (full disclosure: I am serving as Director of the UMass Poll). The survey focused extensively on the Senate race between Senator Scott Brown and Warren. One of the topline findings was that Warren holds a 9 point advantage among women -- 51 percent of women plan on voting for Warren compared to just 42% who plan on voting for Brown. But how large is that advantage compared to other recent elections in Massachusetts? As noted above, in 2010, a UMass exit poll found that Democratic Governor Deval Patrick won the support of 57 percent of women, and just 34 percent of women voted for Charlie Baker, his Republican Challenger. Given that context, Warren's advantage among women seems remarkably small.
When we drilled down into the data a bit more, what we found is that the preferences of women in this race vary widely depending on their income. The chart below demonstrates this pattern by plotting Warren's advantage/disadvantage over Brown for men and women in low (under $40,000), middle ($40,000 to $100,000), and upper ($100,000 and above) income groups. Warren holds an impressive 32 point advantage over Brown among low income women and an 11 point advantage among middle-income women. However, Warren is losing upper income women by 19 points, a larger margin than her deficit among upper income men.
Is Warren's performance among upper income women unique to her candidacy? There appears to be some evidence that it is. The plot below shows Obama's advantage over Romney in Massachusetts for different gender and income groups. Notably, Warren performs about the same as Obama among low income women, but she performs much worse than him among upper income women.
NOTE: Credit to Maryann Barakso for discovering the patterns discussed in this post.
Read this a few times if you need to.
Wealthy women are not personally threatened by attacks on reproductive freedom because they are laughably easy for us and our daughters to evade.
Furthermore, many of these wealthy women are wealthy house wives. They *** benefit from unequal pay because it means their spouses are paid more for doing the same work ***.
And this puts another layer of protection on the pregnancy front because if they do have a surprise there it is just an added expense, not an added expense PLUS a huge loss of income like it is for women who work for a living.
Nor do they have any worry about the associated medical expenses because they have good insurance that will cover it.
Look at all that stuff I just talked about. Money. Money. Money.
What part of that wasn't an economic issue? None. And every bit of it is a gender issue.
It is quite possible for a rich woman to support the GOP.
It is the moral and ethical equivalent of selling our poor sisters into slavery as we seek to barter their basic rights away for tax breaks. But it makes sense from a totally self centered point of view.
Hmmm....I guess that means that rich men--contrary to accepted wisdom--are more liberal and less anti-working-class than rich women. I suppose we should quit attacking the GOP as the nasty party of "mean, rich white men" and call it henceforth as the party of "mean, rich white women."
HA! Hilarious.
Deval Patrick WON because 8% of the "anti-Patrick" vote went to life-long Democrat Tim Cahill entered the race as a "conservative Independent" while another 8% went to write-ins and 1.42% went to the Green Party.
While these might not sound like they make the statistical difference it made a HUGE difference when all the debates featured D-Patrick, R-Charlie Baker AND political straws 1 and 2.
Tough to discern major policies differences when there are 2 nobodies on stage pining for attention.
It was a circus act of an election designed to confuse voters and boost an Obama surrogate.
Dems were still unable to fend off Brown even as the Boston Globe reported him trailing Coakley by 17 points the week before the election.
Indeed, the motto of the state should be 'know your place and stay there.' Warren violates that rule by coming from humble origins and ending up a Harvard prof.
While, for most of us, that puts her on the same side of the street as the rich; to those who think they own the world, its disturbing. She should be bagging their groceries, cleaning their home or helping them with their purchases, not talking to them as an equal. (my gosh, what's the world coming to?) Her existence in their world as an equal functions as a contradiction to their notion or normal. Consequently, that triggers an almost unconcsious abject horror from the privileged and they spend all their time trying to normalize the 'upstart' back into their 'place'.
And it doesn't matter how high you go in MA. If you were born on the wrong tracks, they have to put you down. And the 'liberals' are as bad as the conservatives, when it comes to that behavior. Apparently, not even a Harvard pedigree will spare you the wrath of the overprivileged..............
Not surprised. Rattle your jewelry, girls, if you disagree.................
Oh ... no ... wait a minute ...