MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Vice President Harris depended on two groups of voters who did not come through for her as hoped in Tuesday's election - Latino voters and women.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We will discuss both groups next, beginning with Debbie Walsh, who directs the Center for American Women and Politics. Well, that's right on topic. Good morning.
DEBBIE WALSH: Good morning.
INSKEEP: I want to begin with something we heard this morning from our editor, Domenico Montanaro, who's been going through the exit polls. And granted, the exit polls are imprecise, to say the least, but it appears a majority of women voted for Kamala Harris, which is what you expect with a Democrat, but it actually seems to have been a little smaller proportion of women than have voted for other Democrats in the past. What do you make of that?
WALSH: Well, it's actually about the same as it was for Hillary Clinton, about 54%, but definitely a little bit less than it was for Joe Biden, which was 57%. But we've seen this gender gap and the difference between the way men and women vote since about 1980. And we saw about a 10-point gender gap, which we did see consistently through the polls. But there is a lot of variation among women. Women are not monolithic, and so you want to look at the different sort of slicing through the different demographic groups to really see and understand the women's vote.
INSKEEP: Oh. Oh, this is the thing that Domenico also pointed out in his reporting. College-educated women were way for Harris. Noncollege-educated women, much more for Trump.
WALSH: Absolutely. And that's really been the difference that we've been seeing among white women voters. So 57% of white college-educated women voted for Harris. Women, white women without a college degree, 35%. And, in fact, when you look at all of the different groups of voters - men, women, by race and ethnicity and college education level, the one group that actually improved for Kamala Harris is those white college-educated women. Joe Biden got 54% of that vote. Hillary Clinton got 51%. Kamala Harris got 57%.
INSKEEP: OK. I can see - I can hear in my mind right now the arguments that college-educated women made, which seemed just obvious to them. Let's elect a woman. And also negatives. Here's the other guy who's against abortion rights, the Access Hollywood tape on and on and on. Why do you think those arguments did not resonate or that something else resonated for women without a college degree?
WALSH: I think what happened that we are seeing across the board has to do in large part with economics and class and a sense that the economy was primary. Even though the abortion issue was there, and it really resonated for a lot of women and was clearly a motivator in the midterm elections, it appears that in this election cycle, this rejection of where things were with the economy, women who were feeling - as men were - that the economy wasn't working for them and that they were looking for change and the difficulty that Kamala Harris had making that case that she was change.
INSKEEP: Debbie Walsh directs the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Thanks so much for the time.
WALSH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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