Did female Tea Party-affiliated Republicans do worse than male Tea Party-affiliated Republicans in this election?

November 3, 2010 9:49 AM

Did female Tea Party-affiliated Republicans do worse than male Tea Party-affiliated Republicans in yesterday's election?

Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell lost while Rand Paul and Marc Rubio won. This got me thinking about whether there was a gender difference in how candidates championed by the Tea Party movement fared. Has anyone done any statistical work to see if male Tea Party-affiliated candidates did better on average than female Tea Party-affiliated candidates? I'm not just interested in the Senate, but also the House.

posted by Kattullus to society & culture (10 answers total)

I don't know about the question you ask, but I question if the pool of candidates is large enough to form any statistical opinion to that question. Your margin of error would be too large
posted by ShootTheMoon at 9:59 AM on November 3, 2010 [2 favorites]

Christine O'Donnell was also running in a much, much more liberal state than Rand Paul; Rubio may have won regardless, but his margin of victory was definitely at least increased by a split in the not-Rubio vote between Meeks and Crist. Between the differences between states and the tiny sample size, it's probably not possible to draw any meaningful conclusions about gender-biased performance differences.
posted by Tomorrowful at 10:04 AM on November 3, 2010

That's a good point. I don't really know how many Republican House candidates have strong Tea Party ties.
posted by Kattullus at 10:05 AM on November 3, 2010

Fox News has a list of candidates claiming tea party support, but no results.
posted by nangar at 10:13 AM on November 3, 2010

I agree that it would be hard to gather enough of an N to be able to detect a small to moderate difference if one existed.

It would also be hard to find the right null. Do you mean that they did worse because they're women? Then you'd need to control for how liberal a jurisdiction they were running in and how cuckoo-bananas they are.

Lastly, your answer will probably differ depending on whether you only care about winning and losing, or also care about margin or vote share. At the extreme, the data could conceivably work out so that women teepers were more likely to lose, but also had a higher expected vote share then.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:48 AM on November 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

It's worth pointing out that Marc Rubio was actually a viable political candidate before he jumped on the Tea Party bandwagon. He's been a state legislator for ten years and was Speaker of the House for two. Basically, he was running for Senate anyway, and decided that the Tea Party could give him that little extra something. Doesn't look like he needed it, to be honest.

Rand Paul is a physician, which is something most people still view positively, and can cash in on his dad's fame. The Tea Party may have helped him here, but I'd bet that if a more mainstream Republican had run the race wouldn't even have been close.

Sharron Angle, on the other hand, though she has also been a state legislator for a decade, appears to have been something of a crank the entire time, "41-to-Angle" being a common result in the House voting records.

And Christine O'Donnell, isn't "something of a crank," she's a full-on crankcase. I mean, working for the ISI is one thing, but suing them because they fired you for working for outside groups on company time does not exactly mark you out as an intellect of the first caliber.

In short, when the Tea Party ran strong, electable candidates in states the Republicans were probably going to win anyway, they won. When they ran nut-jobs in states where the race was already going to be close, they lost. I don't think gender has anything to do with it.
posted by valkyryn at 10:54 AM on November 3, 2010 [3 favorites]

The Tea Party has some viable candidates and some candidates that I would consider unelectable no matter what party or platform they ran under. One guy here locally was so problematic that the State Republican party actually violated its own rules against favoring a candidate before a primary in order to try to make sure he didn't get the nomination. (They succeeded but the candidate they handpicked to run against the freshman Dem incumbent lost. It didn't hurt that the Democrat actually has done a decent job his first term.)

FWIW, I think that male fringe candidates have an edge as people tend to give them more of a benefit of the doubt whereas a hint of teh crazy will make it a lot harder for a female candidate (I speak here of the Republican side, don't know if it would translate to the other side of the aisle.)
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 11:02 AM on November 3, 2010

Nikki Haley from South Carolina won handily.
posted by electroboy at 12:35 PM on November 3, 2010

a hint of teh crazy will make it a lot harder for a female candidate

Sarah Palin's millions in speaking fees don't seem to bear that out.
posted by lumpenprole at 4:23 PM on November 3, 2010

Ah, but we like crazy in speakers. Not so much legislators or (heaven forbid) in the executive branch.

If Sarah was more, shall we say, ordinary looking we'd all still be saying "Sarah who?!" It's disgusting how many men of my acquaintance are looking at her THAT way.

In other words, you can be a charismatic dynamic Tea Party candidate, garner a lot of attention, but when the votes come in, they just aren't gonna do the job. Whereas a saner maybe slightly more boring candidate might just pull it off.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 6:00 PM on November 3, 2010