September 9, 2022

When last Thursday night Joe Biden told America, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans” “threaten the very foundation of our republic,” he missed the mark.  The real threat comes from the unlikeliest of suspects: educated liberal females, or “ELFs” for short.

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These are the women who will proudly vote Democrat regardless of soaring inflation, rising gas prices, rampant crime in the streets, the unchecked flood of illegal aliens, and oppressive COVID policies that have irreparably damaged all children, the poor most notably.

If NBC’s polling from April is to be believed, this is the only demographic cohort more favorably inclined to Democrats in 2022 than in 2018.  Unable to sell these women on his accomplishments — there are none — Biden last week appealed to their paranoia.  What made this pitch strategic is his target audience’s proven susceptibility to fear-based propaganda.

At the core of the ELFs’ vulnerability is their ignorance, if not at the top, certainly among the masses.  This should not surprise.  Everywhere and always, men have performed better on political knowledge tests than women (just as conservatives routinely outperform liberals and independents).  Researchers exploring this particular gender gap long ago gave up on questioning whether this was true and have focused instead on why.

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Avoiding the obvious answer — namely, that men and women, being different, have different interests — researchers have spent millions of your tax dollars on the improbable and irrelevant.  Among the more popular hypotheses is that women are more risk-averse than men and thus, on tests, are less likely to “guess under conditions of uncertainty.”  For some reason, it is more acceptable to stereotype women as “risk-averse” than as “politics-adverse.”  In fact, women, writ large, are likely both.

A survey of 10,000 individuals across ten nations by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) offers a more sobering analysis.  What most surprised researcher James Curran of the University of London was that “gaps in political knowledge are wider in countries that have done the most to promote gender equality.”  Curran noted that women’s scores in the U.K., the U.S., and Canada were more than 30 percent lower on average than men’s, a significantly greater gender gap than in Greece, Italy, and Korea.

The ESRC data suggest that formal education may actually increase the knowledge gap between men and women.  There are reasons why this is so.  Historically, married women have tended to vote more conservatively than their unmarried peers.  Spousal influence plays a role in their voting, but so does the added awareness of real issues that comes with raising a family and owning a home.

Today, however, more than a third of college-educated women are childless.  Then, too, marriage rates among the educated continue to decline as they have over the past 40 years while the age of first marriage continues to increase.  In 2021, the average age for a female’s first marriage was 28.6, roughly nine years more than 60 years prior.

In the not too distant past, women attended college with the expectation of finding a spouse.  Today, they would have much better luck hanging out at a construction site.  As late as 1970, there were five men for every four women in America’s four-year colleges.  By the fall of 2021, there were almost two women for every man.

Once in college, the progressive grooming that began discreetly in high school now publicly and proudly moves to center stage.  A study of faculty voter registration at 40 leading U.S. universities showed a more than ten-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans with the numbers skewing higher in liberal arts and among young faculty.  In some fields, there are no Republicans at all.