Thread by @b_schaffner

I worked on a couple of projects for #AAPOR that focused on the increasingly strong relationship between sexism and partisan divisions and I thought I’d do a little thread to highlight some major points. Shout out to @scluks who co-authored one of the papers with me. 1/10

First, the work I’ve done in this area uses a subset of items from the hostile sexism battery. Basically, a person’s level of hostile sexism is determined by how much they agree or disagree with statements like these. 2/10

This plot shows the distribution of sexism by party and gender. Note that Republican men and women express very similar levels of sexism, but Democratic men are more sexist than Democratic women. 3/10

My work with @TatisheNteta and Matt MacWilliams showed that sexism was a strong predictor of voting for Trump in 2016. But it seemed like this was more of a Trump-specific phenomenon at the time rather than a general partisan divide. 4/10
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100…

For example, just after Trump’s inauguration, sexism strongly predicted support for Trump, but was less important in predicting support for other Republican leaders. And sexism was a stronger predictor of voting for Trump than voting for Republicans in House races. 5/10

But, of course, Trump’s “brand” is becoming the Republican Party’s brand, both b/c Trump is now the clear leader of the party, and also b/c of the Kavanaugh controversy & #MeToo. Sexist people were more supportive of Republicans after the Kavanaugh confirmation vote. 6/10

Thus, in 2018, sexism was a stronger predictor of the House vote than it was in 2016. Furthermore, sexism also predicted vote switching between 2016 and 2018. This cost Republicans more votes than it gained them in 2018. 7/10

And this is not about candidate gender. In fact, sexism was a strong predictor of voting for Republican House candidates in 2018, regardless of the gender of the candidates competing. 8/10

What does this mean for 2020? I suspect that sexism will once again be a strong predictor of vote choice for president regardless of who Democrats nominate. The parties promote increasingly divergent rhetoric on issues related to sexism, & voters are responding accordingly. 9/10

You can find the papers this thread is based on here: dropbox.com/s/lbzb7ttg7dii…
and here: dropbox.com/s/bdxvqe4o59vy…