USA Today May 9, 2000, Page 19A

 

Men can play gender-gap game, too

By Don Campbell

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In 1996, the story was about ''soccer moms'' and how Democrat Bill Clinton made their pulses quicken. This election year, it's about ''waitress moms'' and whether Republican candidate George W. Bush can alleviate their concerns about education and gun violence in schools.

 

Yes, that old media perennial, the female ''gender gap'' story, is back.

 

But there has been precious little about ''soccer dads'' or ''truck-Driver dads'' -- or the male ''gender gap'' at all. Nor have you heard much discussion about the fact that, historically, the male gender gap in voting

is much greater than that of women.

 

First, a little background. The term ''gender gap'' was coined in a bar in Denver's Brown Palace Hotel one night in January 1981 by Jon Margolis, a political writer for the Chicago Tribune. He and two colleagues were joined by an Arkansas politician who'd just been defeated for re-election. All were attending a meeting of the Democratic National Committee.

 

The subject of the 1980 presidential election came up, and Margolis observed that voter exit polls the previous November had shown that loser Jimmy Carter captured almost half of the women's vote, while winner Ronald Reagan took the male vote by a lopsided margin. (Independent John Anderson's vote had split equally between the sexes.) Margolis then asked the Arkansas politician whether he thought Democrats henceforth might be able to exploit this ''gender gap.''

 

''It was a takeoff on the 'generation gap' of the '60s and '70s,'' Margolis says now. A couple of days later, he used the term in a story for the first time.

 

(Oh, the name of the Arkansas politician Bill Clinton.) There's something a little Freudian, don't you think, about Impeachable Bill being present at the birth of the term ''gender gap,'' but I don't plan to explore it. Monica was only-- what -- 6 at the time?)

 

Margolis is a superb journalist and a friend, but I sometimes wish his fertile mind had gone blank that night in Denver. It's not that the gender gap is an illusion; it's that the media are being more than a little disingenuous writing about it.

 

Here are the numbers: In the presidential elections of 1980 through 1988, Republican nominees carried the male vote by margins of 19, 25 and 16 percentage points. They lost it in 1992 by three points, but won it by one point in 1996. In 1980-88, Republicans also carried the female vote, by two,12 and one percentage points; in 1992 they lost it by eight points, and in1996, by 16 points. That adds up to 10 results, and the Republicans won

Seven of them. Back when I learned math, seven was more than twice as many as three.

 

The disparity, no doubt, would be greater were it not for Ross Perot's candidacy in 1992 and 1996. A sizable majority of Perot voters were male, and most so-called political experts say that Perot took more votes away from George Bush and Bob Dole than from Bill Clinton.

 

The trend continues this year. In a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll done in March,George W. Bush led Al Gore among male voters by 21 points, while Gore led Bush among women by six points. In a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll in April,

Bush had pulled even with Gore among women and led Gore among men by 17 percentage points. And yet -- still -- almost all of the stories are about how Bush isin trouble with female voters.

 

How to explain this? Well, part of it you can blame on the national News media. They love to tout any line from pollsters and feminists that makes the Republican establishment look bad. But male voters are also to blame: They have allowed themselves to be taken for granted. (Sure, there was a mild flurry in the 1994 congressional elections about the ''angry white male,''but how long did that last?) While the female vote is seen as volatile and always in play, the white male vote is considered to be in the bag for any Republican nominee who's not a total wimp.

 

Well, I think it's time that men learned to play the gender-gap game.

 

They can start by joining the League of Men Voters, an organization created by a mild-mannered Yellow Pages salesman in Omaha named Mike Aspen. It's a group that gives new meaning to the term ''fledgling.''

 

Aspen, who says he's not anti-female, wants to put men on an equal footing by closing what he calls the ''participation gap,'' another phenomenon you probably haven't read much about. The participation gap, according to Aspen, reflects the fact that while the number of eligible female voters exceeds the number of eligible male voters by 8% (mainly because they live longer), women now vote at a rate that exceeds male turnout by 15%.

 

''It's true,'' says Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. ''Women vote at a higher rate, and have since 1980.''

 

What Aspen needs is thousands of men across the country to set up voter-information and registration booths at places where guys congregate:sports bars, stock car races, golf courses, popular fishing holes.

 

But Aspen's effort misses the boat in one important respect. ''We have no agenda,'' he told me recently. ''There are no grievances here.''

 

That's a mistake, I think, because the key to getting politicians to pander to you is to organize around issues, whine a lot and play hard to get.

 

And there are lots of issues that affect men disproportionately. For

example,the high price of gasoline discriminates against 4-by-4s and other

oversizevehicles that real men prefer to drive. Higher and higher taxes on

beer aredistinctly a male burden, not to mention the rising cost of Viagra.

 

Give me a month and I'll think of another one.

 

Individual issues are less important, anyway, than having the right

attitude.Even if life these days is about as good as it gets, men should never

let apresidential candidate know they think that.

 

Grievances, Mr. Aspen, are the engine that drives American politics. If you're going to free men from their bonds of complacency, you've got to understand that.

 

 

Don Campbell, a former reporter, columnist and editor for Gannett and

USATODAY, lives in Paradise Valley, Ariz.