Hillary’s Intragender Gap

Riffing off this poll and this piece by Dana, Matt asks why Clinton has such a huge majority among progressive women — enough to make her a solid primary favorite — which doesn’t carry over among more conservative women. This is an important question, because if Clinton can’t change this it could make her a suboptimal general election candidate leaving aside normative issues — the progressive women that support Clinton are unlikely to vote Republican. My guess is that women with the strongest feminist commitments have the strongest stake in seeing a long-overdue woman as President, and will be particularly aware of (and place an especially high priority on) Clinton’s record on gender issues, which are Clinton’s strongest progressive credentials. But her (largely unmerited) reputation as a staunch liberal in general will make this less appealing to more moderate women. I’m not sure if the data will bear this out, but that’s how I would try to make sense of the gap.