SATURDAY QUESTION: Is Barack Obama the Sex and the City Candidate?
Later today we should have fresh numbers out of Gallup which include interviews with some of the 38 million people who watched Barack Obama’s speech on Thursday night. At that point we should see if the convention’s 8 point bounce for Obama holds, grows or fades. It will likely be early next week before we begin to see the effect of the Palin nomination on these numbers. Looking ahead, though, was there a background reason hiding in the numbers that made the choice of a woman for running mate even more attractive to John McCain? This study from Gallup may shed some light on it.
Among all registered voters Gallup has interviewed in August (through Aug. 28), McCain wins over Obama by a 6-point, 48% to 42% margin among men, while Obama wins among women by a 10-point, 49% to 39% margin. The swing in the margin of support for the two candidates between genders is thus 16 points.
What might be even more curious is how that gap in support among women ties into the chasm between married and unmarried voters in their relative support for Obama and McCain.
Among American registered voters who are married and whom Gallup interviewed Aug. 1-19, John McCain is leading Barack Obama by 13 points; among unmarried American voters, Obama has a 22-point margin.
The Gallup study attributes this largely to a party line split, claiming that, two thirds of Republicans are married, but “a majority of Democrats are unmarried.”
Can that be written off as coincidence? I’ll confess, I was fairly shocked when I read that statistic. Can we combine these two studies and conclude that Obama is finding a wedge against John McCain in unmarried women? Is Barack Obama actually the “Sex and the City“candidate? I invite you to find your own explanation for these polling trends as a Saturday morning exercise to entertain ourselves.
UPDATE: With a hat tip to George Sorwell in the comments, James Fallows weighs in on the subject of Palin, saying the nomination is more like Clarence Thomas than Dan Quayle. Very interesting.
In Palin’s case, this seems to be a choice that looks forward to Election Day, and not one day beyond that.