By Erin Cassese (@ErinCassese) and Meredith Conroy (@sidney_b)

There is mounting speculation that the GOP has a “woman problem.” Prior to the midterms, there was concern that the GOP could not rely on the continued support of white women, particularly college-educated white women, given that just 45 percent of this group supported Trump in 2016, compared to 52 percent who supported Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, in 2012. Moreover, according a poll conducted by NBC News/Wall Street Journal in March of this year, “President Trump’s positive favorability rating among college-educated white women, which stood just 32 percent when he was inaugurated, is now down even further to an even more dismal 27 percent.”

Additionally, reactions to the Kavanaugh hearings and surveys about the #MeToo movement seemed to signal that GOP women were not in lock step with GOP men in their views on sexual harassment. For example, although neither GOP men nor women have a favorable view of the #MeToo movement, there is a 13 point gap: 15 percent of men who supported Trump hold a favorable view of “#MeToo,” compared to 28 percent of women who supported Trump. Given the political context of the 2018 midterms, with a record number of women running for office and the heightened salience of issues like sexual harassment, many expected that college-educated white women in particular, who slightly favored Clinton in 2016, would throw their support more strongly behind Democratic candidates.

All of these factors suggested that women voters would swing hard in the Democratic direction. But preliminary evidence suggests the change was more modest than anticipated. According to CNN’s exit polls, there was a 3-point decline in white women voters’ support for Republican candidates – 49 percent voted for the Republican house candidate in 2018 compared with 52 percent who voted for Trump in 2016. But a larger shift was evident among college-educated white women, 52 percent of whom supported Clinton in 2016 to compared to 59 percent who supported a Democratic House candidate in 2018. Therefore, educated white women’s support continues to grow within the Democratic Party.

However, political science scholarship finds that women are not a monolith, and that commentators and pundits tend to underestimate the power of partisanship, and overestimate psychological attachments to one’s gender, causing them to over-emphasize women’s attraction to Democratic candidates and causes. Research shows that women have different views on the meaning and importance of their gender, and thus gender attitudes do not have a uniform effect on their political thinking and behavior.

To get a sense of the diversity of political thinking among women voters and the extent of recent shifts away from the Republican Party, we compare responses from the 2016 American National Election Study survey to a likely-voter survey of about 8,600 Americans conducted by YouGov Blue. Both of these surveys include several questions in common, therefore lending themselves to comparison.

I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T Women

First, we assess support for Democratic House candidates in 2016 compared to 2018 by voter gender and party identification. For all partisan groups (Democrats and Republicans) both male and female voters’ support for their party increased between 2016 and 2018. This was even true of Independents who “lean” toward one party or the other. Between 2016 and 2018, independent leaners on both sides of the aisle came to more closely resemble partisans.

However, truly Independent men and women – those who don’t lean toward either party – diverge; men who identify an Independent were slightly less supportive of Democratic candidates between 2016 and 2018, while women who identify as Independent dramatically increased their support for Democratic candidates from 37 percent in 2016, to 56 percent in 2018. This difference between Independent white women in 2016 and 2018 is statistically significant. Therefore, this preliminary cut suggests that contrary to expectations, Independent women broke for Democrats in 2018, not GOP women. Ten percent of the DFP 2018 sample, and 10 percent of the 2016 ANES sample identified as pure Independents who don’t learn toward either party.