Sexist rhetoric may have cost Trump at least as many votes as he gained from its use in the 2016 presidential election

This week, Americans are voting in the first major election since the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which removed women’s constitutional right to an abortion. Will that decision mobilize voters around gender issues in the midterm elections? Perhaps the 2016 presidential election provides some insight, since it was a race between a feminist, pro-choice woman and a sexist, anti-choice man. In that election, to what extent did American voters’ level of sexism, or non-sexism, affect their voting behavior? Research has shown that even after controlling for other factors, sexist attitudes increased voters’ likelihood of supporting Trump in the 2016 election. But in his 2021 article in Social Science Quarterly, author Eric Hanley’s research about the effect of gender attitudes on the voting behavior of whites in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections indicates something different. Trump‘s sexist rhetoric may have hurt him at the polls in 2016 because it mobilized non-/anti-sexist college-educated voters even more. Hanley used respondent data from the 2012 and the 2016 waves of the American National Election Study to examine the role sexism played as a motivating force for voters.

Fielded continuously since 1948, the American National Election Studies are designed to present data on Americans’ social backgrounds, enduring political predispositions, social and political values, perceptions and evaluations of groups and candidates, opinions on questions of public policy, and participation in political life. During presidential election years, respondents are interviewed during the two months preceding the November election and then re-interviewed during the two months following the election. Hanley made the effort to reevaluate the measures of sexism used in previous research based on ANES data in order to improve the scale he used to quantify respondents’ sexism. He found that the decision on the part of previous researchers to include certain measures of sexism without taking into account others available in the data “may have led them to miscalculate the overall impact of sexist orientation on the voting behavior of Americans in recent elections.”

He then conducted regression analyses to calculate the impact of sexism on presidential vote choice by year, by race, by gender, and by education. He found that in 2012, the gap separating voters who scored low on the sexism scale and those who scored high was 12.7 percentage points. But by 2016, this gap more than doubled in size. Hanley found that this widened sexism gap “resulted more from the flight of nonsexist voters away from Trump than from the attraction of sexist ones.” He also found that the effect of sexism was static for non-white voters, and the 2016 election activated sexism mainly among white voters. As for gender, the 2016 election “mobilized sexist whites to vote for Trump and nonsexist whites to vote against him, regardless of gender.” But the impact of sexism on the presidential vote choices of whites in 2016 did vary significantly by educational level. According to Hanley, “This was due in large part to a very sharp decline in the level of support Trump received from college-educated whites in 2016 relative to the support Romney had enjoyed in 2012.” According to Hanley, “Many observers have argued that the mobilization of sexist voters over the course of the 2016 campaign helped carry Trump to victory.” But Hanley’s results indicate it cost him at least as many votes as he gained.