The female bias towards the Labor Party is being more than made up for by the male bias towards the Coalition
It does well to remember that at any given time there are likely to be two gender gaps, and what matters is which of them is the biggest.
James Campbell
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By now you will probably have heard that all is not as it might be for the government, with most polls putting it neck or neck or slightly behind the Coalition.
You will probably also have heard it’s gone backwards the most in the outer suburbs and regions, which is best explained by the big drop in most Australians’ standard of living since Labor was elected.
But while there’s been a lot of talk about the “where” and “why”, there hasn’t been so much talk about the “who”.
If you talk to pollsters, they all say the same thing: Albo’s biggest problem is with blokes, especially older blokes.
The other thing they say is while there’s been a steady movement towards Peter Dutton for a while, it really accelerated over winter.
You can see that in the movement in the preferred prime minister rating, which pollster Resolve breaks down into men and women.
Back in late April, 41 per cent of men rated Albo the better PM compared to 34 per cent who favoured Dutton, while the corresponding figures for women were 40 per cent and 30 per cent.
Fast forward to November and the share of women who prefer the PM had slipped to 36 per cent, while Dutton was up to 33 per cent.
A difference, but not a massive one.
But check out the men: since April the percentage of men favouring Albo has dropped three points to 38 per cent while Dutton fans have jumped a massive 12 percentage points.
We hear a lot about the gender gap in Australian politics, which is usually written as the quest to discover the elusive answer to the question “why-don’t-young-women-like-the-Liberal-Party?”
Which is fair enough: they don’t.
But it does well to remember that at any given time there are likely to be two gender gaps, and what matters is which of them is the biggest.
And at the moment it’s looking increasingly as though the female bias towards the Labor Party is being more than made up for by the male bias towards the Coalition.
Once you start looking, the evidence for this is everywhere.
Last month the Susan McKinnon Foundation released a weighty report on partisanship and polarisation, which found there was a six-point difference between the way men and women rate the performance of the Australian government.
Coincidentally, this was the same gap between the sexes for the net result to the question “is Peter Dutton ready for government?” in last month’s RedBridge poll.
That poll also contained evidence backing what all the pollsters I have spoken to say, which is that it’s largely blue-collar men who have a problem with Labor.
When they asked if they thought Albo’s government was focused on the right or wrong priorities, neither sex was much impressed, but the net favourability was 4 per cent worse among men.
The gap between different – gendered – segments of the workforce was much more stark, however.
Managers and professionals were only net -6 on Albo’s priorities.
On the other hand people who identified as blue collar – which you would assume are overwhelmingly men – were -40.
Interestingly, the people who identified as working in “sales, services and clerical” – which you can assume includes a fair chunk of the wives and partners of those blue-collar men – weren’t that keen on Albo’s priorities either, giving him a net rating of -20.
It goes without saying that the men and women whose answers are captured in these questions are more likely to live in the outer suburban and regional seats that Dutton has been concentrating on to the exclusion of the managerial and professional class who make up the voters in Teal land.
If the result of the next election comes down to the blokes, it will be yet another example of Australian politics mirroring developments in the US, where the recent victory of Donald Trump was achieved because his appeal to men – especially young men – outweighed whatever advantage Kamala Harris had among women.
What was interesting about that election was the Democrats clearly knew they had the same problem with the same sort of women likely to be employed in “sales, services and clerical” as Albo has, which is why in the last fortnight of the campaign Harris ran ads encouraging them to vote differently to their menfolk.
They flopped – when has seeking to drive a wedge between husbands and wives ever been a good idea? – but you can bet the Labor brains trust is working on the same problem: how to get to Dutton-curious women in the suburbs married to Liberal voters.
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Originally published as The female bias towards the Labor Party is being more than made up for by the male bias towards the Coalition
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