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Married moms in the suburbs. They've been called soccer moms. They've been called security moms. Pamela Wilk is a so-called soccer mom. Those so-called Walmart moms. She calls herself a hockey mom. I love those hockey moms. The hockey mom trying to connect with the soccer mom. Those are real-life brown bears, not political mama grizzlies.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and this is the second installment of our miniseries, Campaign Throwback. Across three episodes, we're taking a look back at campaign tropes from past elections and asking where they came from, whether they were actually true at the time, and if they still hold up today.
Last week, we asked whether James Carville's famous slogan, It's the economy, stupid, accurately describes the role the economy plays in elections. If you haven't heard it yet, go check it out. But today, we're turning our focus to another 1990s trope.
Soccer moms. During the 1996 presidential campaign, the idea of the soccer mom as the quintessential swing voter took hold. But was that based on anything other than political imagination?
The truth is that what we want for poor women, for middle-class women, for rich women is the same thing. We want people to be able to live out their own dreams. In 1996, Bill Clinton was running for a second term against Republican Bob Dole in an environment where gender politics had come to the fore. We want people to be able to succeed at home and at work.
He had won his first term in 1992, which was termed the Year of the Woman, after a record number of women ran for office and won that year, including the newly elected Senator Dianne Feinstein. The Year of the Woman, to me, isn't as much the fact that we're elected...
as it is that women in this nation have begun to participate in unprecedented numbers. California became the first state in the nation to be represented by two women in the Senate after electing Feinstein and Representative Barbara Boxer. Overall, the ranks of women in the U.S. Congress grew from just 32 out of the 535 members to 54. Not parity, but an increase of nearly 70%.
What was that incident again? The incident with regard to the Coke can that spelled out in my statement. Would you describe it once again for me, please? Anita Hill's 1991 congressional testimony that then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her when she worked as an advisor to him is considered the impetus for that record number of women running. The most embarrassing question is,
It was a televised hearing led by an all-male Judiciary Committee. That televised hearing made women across the country look to politics and really realize in a very vivid way that
how excluded their voices were at the top levels of U.S. politics. That's Kelly Dittmar, political scientist and the director of research at the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. And that did mobilize women to come out in all sorts of ways, not just in voting, but certainly in activism and advocacy.
State Senator at the time from Washington, Patty Murray, says she decided to run for the U.S. Senate while discussing her frustrations with the hearings at a neighborhood party. Carol Mosley Braun was sworn in as the first Black woman senator, and she joined the Judiciary Committee, the same one that had grilled Anita Hill. The majority of those women who won in that year were also Democratic candidates.
And at the top of the ballot, Bill Clinton won 370 electoral college votes. A landslide. Thank you.
Going into the next presidential election in 1996, there was a greater focus on women voters. Both Democrats and Republicans wanted to appeal to them. The soccer mom is a creation of political practitioners, strategists, pollsters, to give them an ideal type of who they can say they're strategizing and catering to.
It's not totally clear who came up with the idea or used it first in a political context. Some point to Mark Penn, an advisor and pollster for Clinton's 1996 campaign. But the idea permeated both political parties and the media. Pamela Wilk is a so-called soccer mom, white suburban women busy with kids and often jobs who could be the decisive voters in this election.
It allows strategists to say, hey, we're appealing to women and this is what women want. And they put that in this box of what the soccer moms want. But certainly it's a way, a social construction to try to simplify the message and make it more uniform to women more generally.
It's also perhaps a less crass way of referring to the kind of voter the campaigns likely had in mind, who, like the reporter suggested, is probably white, married, middle to upper middle class, and living in the suburbs with young kids.
While it seems that Clinton himself never used the term soccer mom, Dole used it a lot. That's Jeffrey Skelly, senior elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight. I think there was a belief that this group somehow was one that Dole could win over. Like, Dole was trailing in the polls. Dole was looking for a way to make...
inroads to better position himself against Clinton. We don't need a village full of social workers and bureaucrats to raise a child. We need parents, and we need to turn the schools back to the teachers and to the parents.
In March of 1996, as it was becoming clear that Kansas Senator Bob Dole would be the Republican nominee, Dole was lagging Clinton by about 10 points in the polls. Suburbs were still viewed as very much like a battleground, a place where things were closer to 50-50, whereas cities were Democratic-leaning and rural areas more Republican-leaning. So I think this was sort of the thought for the Dole campaign was, this is a group of voters—
Maybe they're winnable, and if we can shift them our way, we can win. Soccer moms were, in campaign speak, cross-pressured voters, people who find some aspects of the Democratic Party appealing and other aspects of the GOP appealing. And the Dole campaign hoped to win them over. Soccer mom, where? Soccer mom!
Here's Christina Walbrecht, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame and the author of A Century of Votes for Women. This idea that somehow there's many other groups in society that are always going to vote Republican or always vote Democratic. But somehow well-educated middle or upper middle class women in the suburbs with young children could be drawn in different ways. That maybe they want equality, so they're drawn in a Democratic way, but they also want to protect their children.
Between the increased focus on women voters coming out of the 1992 election and attempts to take down an increasingly popular incumbent, the idea of a soccer mom as the quintessential swing voter took on a life of its own.
ABC News even sent a reporter out to interview soccer moms on a soccer field in the fall of 96. How would you describe yourself? I would describe myself as Republican. And if you had to tell me who you're going to vote for today, what would you tell me? I would tell you I'm undecided. Does that surprise you? Yes, because I've never voted Democratic before. But you might. But I might.
A columnist for the Boston Globe termed 1996 the year of the soccer mom. The American Dialect Society voted soccer mom as its 1996 word of the year. And just like that, a new American political trope was born.
But after all the attention focused on quote-unquote soccer moms in 1996, were they actually a swing group? Or did they play a pivotal role in the 1996 election? There's really no accountability because it's not a real group. It's not one cohesive group. You can't go to a poll or a demographic analysis and say, well, these...
Two million voters are the soccer moms.
Because Soccer Moms is more of an idea than a concrete voting bloc, it's a difficult, maybe even silly question to try to answer with data. But we asked our obliging colleague, Jeffrey Skelly, to try to crunch the numbers nonetheless. If you sort of look at broader categories that voters like this would fall into, married women in 1996 narrowly voted for Clinton based on exit poll data. White women voted narrowly for Clinton.
So I think if you sort of take those two data points together, there's a thought that this group may have narrowly voted for Clinton. But were they, this group that may represent the soccer mom, a quintessential swing vote in 1996? After all, Clinton had just won white women by a 12-point margin against Bush in 92. I think the short answer is no.
Probably not. Suburban married moms with kids at home were never more than 6% of voters. So you're talking about a pretty small group of voters. Also, other analyses that I looked into essentially talk about the fact that this group was not any more swingy. In fact, it may have been even less swingy in some ways than any other group.
Dittmar comes to a similar conclusion. I don't think there's clear evidence in 1996 that quote-unquote soccer moms, and if we're going to be more specific to what we at least know, suburban white women, married women, made the difference overall.
The reality is, even though political parties, the media, and activist groups often like to say that one group or another decided an election, it's a difficult case to make empirically. Again, Christina Walbrecht. I am sure that there are groups of women, if you cut them a certain way, who seem to be moving between election and election. I'm willing to guess that there are also groups of men
Who, if we define them in certain ways by their region and their income and their occupational status or occupational area, etc., seem to move more than other groups between elections. So why then all this focus on soccer moms? According to Walbrecht, it's the result of gendered assumptions about women's political preferences.
This idea that somehow women's role as mothers guides their political thinking and that women are somehow less loyal partisans, more susceptible to emotion, less dependent as consistent sort of voters for one party or the other.
This idea dates back to at least the early 20th century, when women were advocating for the right to vote. There's always been this idea that women could be competed over and that women might advantage one party or another. Women were active in social purity efforts, of which temperance was just one. So party machines, for example, and liquor manufacturers were big opponents of women's suffrage.
Although polling data didn't really come into the picture until the 1940s, research suggests that for most of the 20th century, there was not, in fact, much of a difference in terms of how men and women voted.
But that didn't get in the way of a good narrative. As late as 1960, you can find dozens of articles about women swooning about John Kennedy and following him around like he's the Beatles. If you share my view that it's time the United States started moving again, then I ask your help. And yet, if there was any advantage, the data suggests that women were slightly more likely than men to vote for Richard Dixon in 1960.
Americans long split their votes according to things like geography, race, and religion. But gender itself was not a determining factor for the first 50 years or so of women's suffrage. It's really in 1980 that we first see the modern gender gap, which is that women are slightly more likely to vote Democratic than are men.
And with the emergence of that gap, misconceptions were again easy to come by. The conventional wisdom is often that women are driven to the polls by specifically women things. Almost immediately, political scientists and others began pointing out that even the gender gap that emerges in the 1980s is not particularly driven by feminist issues like abortion or the Equal Rights Amendment. Instead, according to Walbrecht,
it's that women were more supportive of social welfare spending. And in the 1980s, the two parties became more differentiated on that issue. I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
Walbrecht cautions here against getting too carried away with any narratives, though, like women simply being more compassionate voters than men. Many of the policies that women are more likely to support, like spending on public health, education, etc., are also favored by things like the Teamsters and other organized labor. But no one seems to think that the Teamsters are just full of compassion.
were inclined to see unions as voting in their own economic self-interest. And she says women were doing the same.
Many of the changes that are happening in the 70s and 80s give women lots of reasons to support social welfare programs. So rising divorce, more and more women entering the workforce, rising rates of single motherhood. By the time we get to the 1990s, long-existing stereotypes about women voters being more easily persuaded collided with a widening gender gap in American politics.
It all came together to create the soccer mom as a main character on the political stage. And it is true that the gender gap played an important role in the 1996 election. In 1992, if only men voted, Clinton still would have won the election by three points. In 96, under those same parameters, he would have lost the election to Bob Dole by a single point. Instead, he won.
thanks in no small part to a 17-point advantage amongst women. So yes, the gender gap certainly matters, but it was also men who actually swung from one party to the other. We'll be right back. Today's podcast is brought to you by Shopify. Ready to make the smartest choice for your business? Say hello to Shopify, the global commerce platform that makes selling a breeze.
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Back in the 90s, when the soccer mom trope first entered the political conversation, it was the product of both, yes, some observable trends, and also a healthy dose of imagination. So now, 30 years later, how does the idea figure into our understanding of politics? Again, politics.
Kelly Ditmar. I think we don't call it soccer mom as much, but we talk about moms in the suburbs. We also usually characterize them being less politically engaged or interested, but they want to protect their babies. And that's ultimately what's motivating them when it comes to the ballot box.
The idea that suburban women or moms are up for grabs in American politics is still a pretty strong one. The battle for Minnesota and other upper Midwestern states may ultimately boil down to suburban women on the margins. And like in the 1990s, it's still more complicated than it appears at first blush.
There is an underlying assumption that we're still talking about white women voters, when in reality, the changing demographics of the suburbs indicate otherwise. In 1990, people of color made up about 20% of the population of suburbs. Today, it's 45%.
The suburbs have also become more economically diverse. When you say the suburbs now, the parts of the country that are technically considered suburbs, that is the rings of these big cities, include everything from McMansion neighborhoods to much more modest,
homes that were the suburbs, the dream of the 1950s, but are now much more economically low income than in our imagined suburb in our minds. From 2000 to 2016, the number of poor Americans living in suburban areas grew by 51%. During that time, Americans' voting behavior along class lines also changed significantly.
When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s, one of the great truths about voting is that the more education and income you had, the more Republican you were. I can no longer say that because we've seen such a dramatic shift on that.
The suburbs are still politically purple areas. In fact, more so now than in the 90s, with cities getting bluer and rural areas getting redder. Today, suburbs are the political in-between. So I think one of the reasons women in the suburbs become such a focus is that the parties have very little hope.
of making much change in the other regions of the country. And so the suburbs are, in that sense, more mixed politically. That's not the same thing as being swing voters. It just is a description that the suburbs are not as clearly partisan in one direction or another at this time. While the gender gap does persist, other things besides being a woman or living in the suburbs are more important to how you might vote.
Again, here's Jeffrey Scali. Party identification, race, religion, and then education are these huge indicators of where someone might be politically. So how has the quote-unquote soccer mom changed since the 90s? The soccer mom who doesn't have a four-year college degree, probably more likely to be a Republican. A soccer mom with a college degree, slightly more likely to be a Democrat.
It's a trend that particularly took hold in the mid-2010s. White women without a college degree, they swing fairly dramatically to Donald Trump.
The other exact opposite thing is happening for white college-educated women. They were already pretty Democratic, and they swing away from Donald Trump in 2016. And we've really seen those differences fairly persistent since 2016. And that trend is also visible in the suburbs. The suburbs have both...
less and well-educated people in them these days. It's those dynamics that are really explaining shifts in voting more than suburban women are somehow unique. In fact, the way the soccer mom trope has evolved is in some ways illustrative of the kind of polarization we've seen nationwide since the 90s. I think there has been a shift in
to engage more directly in the culture wars. Unlike the quote-unquote soccer moms, this more conservative Moms for Liberty of, you know, more recent elections is about we're protecting our kids by protecting borders and protecting bathrooms.
In the aftermath of 9/11, there were security moms. Thinking about foreign policy and terror in terms of their own children. With Sarah Palin's entrance on the national stage, it was hockey moms. I think I'm looking at a whole lot of new hockey moms for McCain right here. There's Walmart moms. Well, they're women with kids under the age of 18 who've shopped in that mega chain at least once a month. Starbucks moms, Mama Grizzlies, Moms for Liberty, Moms Demand Action.
All of these have taken on a more partisan meaning as our broader society has polarized. If certain groups of suburban women have shifted left or right over the past 30 years, it's likely matching population-wide trends. People with a college degree have grown more Democratic. White people have grown more Republican. The population of Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans has grown from about 25% to around 40%.
It probably wasn't the case then, or now, that a cohort of soccer moms is uniquely deciding American elections. So who is?
There's not really a quintessential swing voter. I do think that there are groups of voters who are perhaps less likely to identify with the party. So, I don't know, younger Latino voters are less likely to identify as Democratic or Republican, which in theory could make them more gettable, perhaps.
Swing voters also tend to be people who swing in and out of the electorate. Just because you don't lean toward one party doesn't necessarily mean that you're absolutely gettable from one side or the other. It may be more of a turnout question. Walbrecht agreed. My sense is that swing voters, for the most part, are who they've always been. And there's a reason why they're so very difficult for campaigns to appeal to. These are people who pay less attention to
But from time to time, get excited about a particular candidate or a particular issue that brings them into voting in a particular election.
And it is possible that, according to that understanding of a swing voter, women may be uniquely motivated in the 2024 election. The particular issue being the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They have been pushing and stripping away at our rights little by little and teasing about what they were going to try to take away. The pressure or the sense of urgency is, maybe we're going to see, lessened for pro-life voters but has much accelerated for pro-choice voters.
And it's also worth saying that we know social psychologists have long taught us that losing something is particularly motivating. But that's a different, more nuanced story than the politically in-between soccer mom of the 90s. And it's important to keep in mind that women on average, like the rest of the electorate, prioritize first and foremost things like the economy and immigration.
It can be seductive to tell a story about one group of voters being particularly decisive in an election. It helps us in the media try to explain why things happened the way they did. It allows advocacy groups to frame themselves as more deserving of political attention. In reality, though, elections are almost never that straightforward. And the more nebulous the group, the less provable or disprovable these kinds of claims are.
But the narratives that we tell about our elections matter. They often end up taking root and shaping how politicians campaign or who they campaign to, and what they prioritize once they're in office. So at the very least, we should try to be more rigorous than... Soccer moms. Walmart moms. Security moms. Hockey moms. Mama bears.
My name is Galen Druk. This episode was produced by Jayla Everett and Cameron Chertavian. Additional production help from Amira Williams. Cooper Burton fact-checked and Shane McKeon mixed this episode. Editing help from Laura Mayer.
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