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The midterm elections are shaping up to have a giant gender gap

Just one-third of women say they would pick a Republican this fall.

Huge Crowds Rally At Women’s Marches Across The U.S.
Huge Crowds Rally At Women’s Marches Across The U.S.
People gather at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool before the Women’s March on January 20, 2018, in Washington, DC.
Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images
Li Zhou
Li Zhou is a former politics reporter at Vox, where she covers Congress and elections. Previously, she was a tech policy reporter at Politico and an editorial fellow at the Atlantic.

There is a massive gender gap showing up in polling for the midterm elections, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll: Almost 60 percent of women said they were leaning toward the Democratic candidate in their district, compared to 42 percent of men.

Meanwhile, just 33 percent of women favored the Republican candidate, versus 50 percent of men.

This skew reaffirms the trend captured by a Pew survey earlier this month, which found that women, especially young women, were overwhelmingly likely to go blue this fall. (Millennial women have taken a sharp turn to the left in recent years, with this trend accelerating right around the 2016 election.)

The Quinnipiac survey also found that nearly twice as many women as men see their vote in the midterm elections as a way to oppose Trump. Forty-three percent of women categorize their vote as making this statement, compared to 25 percent of men.

And more women than men would like to see the House kick off impeachment proceedings for Trump if the Democrats were to retake the lower chamber this November: 46 percent of women versus 29 percent of men.

Support for Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that guaranteed women’s constitutional right to an abortion, was a more consistent across gender lines. More than 60 percent of women and men said they support the decision in Roe v. Wade, echoing a trend that was recently observed in a poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Women candidates are proving to be winners for the Democratic Party this year, and this poll and others suggest that women are likely to be a growing share of the party’s voters as well.

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