Polls Apart

By Laurence I. Barrett

Republican optimists murmured two autumns ago that Dan Quayle's presence on the G.O.P. ticket might attract votes from women beguiled by his good looks. Wrong. The presumed sex bomb proved to be a dud on Election Day, according to NBC's exit poll. Now women give Quayle even less support than men do. A recent TIME survey found that only 20% of American women (vs. 30% of men) view Quayle as qualified to assume power if something happened to George Bush. The contrast is one of many demonstrating that a gender gap still yawns in U.S. politics.

Some analysts thought that the gap between male and female opinion would moderate with the passing of the macho Ronald Reagan. Not so, says political scientist Ethel Klein of Columbia University: "Women and men are now taking a different lens to politics." What many women see through their glass is a less hospitable vista than men perceive. Polls show, for instance, that women are consistently more bearish on the economy than men, often by a margin of a dozen points or more. Perhaps because they earn less than men and have less job security, they feel more vulnerable to hard times. Women are also more inclined to believe government action is needed to ward off economic threats and social problems. This makes them somewhat more likely than men to vote Democratic. In fact, one reason that the Reagan-Bush victories of the '80s failed to translate into a full party realignment is that in critical Senate contests female voters elected liberals.

Women are less keen about adventures overseas. When Bush moved troops to the Middle East this summer, 80% of American men surveyed favored a military attack on Iraq if it invaded Saudi Arabia; only 55% of women agreed. Nonetheless, Bush's standing among women improved in early fall. In a recent NBC poll, female approval of the President's job performance was just six points below the percentage for men.

) Do women voters favor female candidates? The evidence on that score is spotty. Issues seem to prevail over chromosomes when a conservative Republican woman runs against a liberal man. There is no debate on one statistic: women are voting in proportion to their actual numbers, and there are several million more of them than there are men. Thus candidates are under pressure to spy the difference between the lenses that men and women train on politics.