Liberals count on “suburban women” to carry Biden to a victory denied to Hillary Clinton four years ago. The theory is that many of the suburban women who voted for Trump last time have changed their minds and are pulling the lever against him this time.
That false prediction is a stepchild of the gender-gap theory of politics, which was all the rage in the media in the 1980s as they tried, unsuccessfully, to oust Ronald Reagan from the White House. Reagan was supported by men even more than by women, and supposedly that gap in support was going to be his downfall.
[…]Married couples typically vote for the same candidate in elections, and it would be silly for them to go to the trouble of voting just to cancel each other out. The strong support for Trump by men has the effect of pulling married women to his side despite all the media bias.
Studies show that women, as a group, are more influenced by the media and thus have been pulled away from supporting Trump by the slanted reporting against him. That has artificially depressed Trump’s approval rating throughout his presidency, particularly among women.
But when it finally comes time to vote, serious conversations begin between husband and wife. It becomes more like their joint decisions to buy a home, raise a child, and plan for the long-term future.
A response to a pollster is a decision that people make willy-nilly in reply to a surprise phone call. It can embody an unhappiness at that time, or an opportunity merely to complain.
[…]Feminists may hope that the suburban wives persuade their husbands how to vote, but that is not what happened in 2016 or prior elections. Instead, often husbands are more persuasive than the media in influencing their wives for whom to vote, leaving only the unmarried women with a gender gap voting against the Republican.
Trump nearly prevailed with married women in 2016, and there are more married women than the unmarried women who opposed him then and now. Today some explain Trump’s better polling among married women as being due to the issue of safety against crime, but that issue would matter as much to unmarried women.
Instead, it is the institution of marriage that enables Trump and other Republicans to continue winning despite the array of media and big money against them. Married men see through the liberal bias, and easily persuade their families to vote for Trump, too.
— Andy Schlafly, Oct. 20 WorldNetDaily column