Critical Mass

At a certain point, it just has to go ka-boom.

Jay Newton-Small, Time:

If it seems like the structures that enable sexism are exploding, that’s because they scientifically are, according to the theory of critical mass. When women reached 20% in the Senate, they went after the Pentagon to reform the military’s sexual-assault protocol. When they reached 25% of Hollywood producers, they took down Harvey Weinstein and his casting-couch culture. And when they reached a third of the White House press corps, Fox’s Roger Ailes, NPR’s Michael Oreskes and other serial harassers in the media began to get called out. Somewhere in that zone, when women comprise 20% to 30% of an institution, things begin to change.

And from way back in June 2018, Ed Kilgore at The Daily Inetlligencer, NY Magazine:

In 2016, according to exit polls, women under the age of 30 voted for Hillary Clinton by a 63/31 margin. Men under 30 gave her a much more modest 46/42 edge. This 17-point gender gap in votes for Clinton was larger than the overall 13-point gender gap in the electorate as a whole.

A Pew survey in March showed a rapidly increasing gender gap in party identification among millennials (defined as those born between 1981 and 1996) as of the end of 2017, when men were Democrats or Democratic-leaners by a 49/41 margin, but women tended in that direction by an astonishing 70/23 margin.

And now in a new Pew generic congressional ballot question posed to a large sample of registered voters, women under the age of 35 tilt Democratic by a 68/24 margin, while men under the age of 35 prefer Republicans by a 50/47 margin. That’s a 21-point gender gap in the Democratic percentage, and a 26-point gender gap in the Republican percentage. Meanwhile, there’s a smaller gender gap among voters aged 35–49, and barely one at all among voters over 50.

Conventional wisdom is that if your candidate is behind by a differential of more than 5 points with Women Voters (vs Men), your guy loses.

Trump lost women by 13 points, but had an 11-point edge with men. Differential = 2 points = Trump "wins" (even tho' the outcome will always be in doubt because of Russian interference via American Social Media, if not outright precinct rigging, etc).

 Anyway - per Five-ThirtyEight:

This week, we got a poll showing that same 24-point gender gap in the only “national” election of 2018: the national popular vote for the U.S. House. A YouGov survey found that male voters preferred the Republican candidate by 9 percentage points, while female voters preferred the Democratic candidate by 15 points. It was a bit of an outlier, but not egregiously so: A RealClearPolitics-style average1 of generic-ballot polls taken in the past two weeks reveals a gender gap of 16 points, and the two highest-quality polls from that period — Quinnipiac and Marist — each showed a gap even bigger than 24 points. If YouGov, Quinnipiac or Marist is correct, then just like 2016 broke a gender-gap record for presidential races, 2018 will have the widest gender gap in congressional elections since at least 1992.2

Gender Differential = 6 points.

Imagine the Ka-Boom if that 6 point spread turns into 20.

But -

Don't get happy

Get together

Get busy

Get shit done