How much did female solidarity affect down-ballot races?
It's hard to quantify, but we know that Hillary Clinton drew a lot of women to the polls on Tuesday, despite losing to Barack Obama.
We also know that among low- to medium-information voters, one of the only things you can tell about a candidate from looking at the ballot is gender. (You cannot necessarily do the same with race.)
Looking at the dropoff in the down-ballot races, Dome noticed something of a natural experiment that might help quantify the effect of women voters.
The two partisan races with the biggest dropoff from the presidential race were insurance commissioner and labor commissioner. Coincidentally, one of those two races had no female candidates, while the other had two. (There were no women in the lieutenant governor's race as well.)
The dropoff was not as substantial in the races for state treasurer, state auditor and schools superintendent.
To pick the two that are most comparable, neither state auditor nor insurance commissioner are offices in which the average voter has a strong opinion. Both were two-person races without an incumbent. None of the candidates advertised heavily on television and all are relying on public financing.
But 1,253,251 people voted in the auditor's race, while only 1,223,609 voted in the insurance commissioner's race — a difference of 29,642 votes. That's a little less than 2 percent of the total Democratic voters.
Complicating factors: The incumbent auditor is a Republican who Democrats are eager to unseat. Insurance Commissioner Wayne Goodwin previously ran for statewide office and had a small TV ad buy. Ballot order may have affected voting rates.
Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the number of women in the labor commissioner's race.
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you can't always tell gender from name
"We also know that among low- to medium-information voters, one of the only things you can tell about a candidate from looking at the ballot is gender. (You cannot necessarily do the same with race.)"
Ha, when I was working at an early voting site in 2004 for the Wake County Board of Elections, one of my tasks on a rotating basis was to assist voters who were having trouble marking their ballots. One elderly lady had a list with her, said she was having trouble filling in the boxes, and asked me to mark in the choices. She volunteered to me that other than president, she was voting ONLY for women. (I did not ask her any questions, she was chatty so I listened.) One of the choices she had me mark was for a candidate whose first name was "Kris". That Kris is male.