Abby McCloskey, July 15, 2022, Politico Magazine

“With these deep flaws in both parties, is it any wonder that women are exhausted by politics in general?”
Abby McCloskey, founder of McCloskey Policy LLC

“I’m not the only millennial woman to feel out of step with the GOP. According to Pew Research polling in 2018, among millennial women, 70 percent are or lean Democrat, relative to 23 percent who lean or are Republican. This gap is huge relative to that of millennial men, who split 49 percent Democrat to 41 percent Republican, and dwarfs the partisanship of other generations of women. Importantly, this is not a baked-in gender gap: The partisan gap among millennial women has nearly tripled in the last two decades.

I’m an economic analyst, not a pollster. But reasons given for the general flight of women from the GOP abound. There are few Republican women in leadership — in Congress, think tanks or policy campaigns — relative to that of Democrats, but that’s been the case for some time. The tone and the crassness of many in the party’s leadership — “Legitimate rape”; “grab ‘em by the p----”; “blood coming out of her wherever” — has ticked up. The hardline party stance on immigration or health care or gun rights, which women voters tend to care about more than men, have been in the spotlight. Then there’s the fact that millennials came of age during 9/11 and the Great Recession and now Covid-19, and so might be more inclined to recognize the world is fragile and that government in theory could help.

But I can’t help but think that the GOP’s yawning gap among millennial women in particular has to do with their becoming mothers. The millennial generation is typically defined as being born between 1981 and 1996, meaning that these women are now in their mid-20s to 40 — prime years for starting families.”