Beyond the fringe?

 A few weeks ago the New York Times published a story on people who think that women should not have the right to vote, and more recently they featured it in an e-mail to subscribers.  The story says "if a decade ago the idea was just another extreme provocation, today it is gaining adherents beyond the fringe."  Most of the evidence is just assertions from the pastor of a church that opposes women's suffrage, It's not a big church:  "more than 100 parishioners attending every Sunday, with five to 10 new families joining every year."  The nature of the story says something about changes in the media:  in the print age, the New York Times might have published a story about this, but I think it would have presented it as involving a small group of people with eccentric beliefs.  But today, there's a focus on engagement, so there's a temptation to build it up to get a rise out of people (which seems to have worked--there are over 900 comments).  

I didn't expect to find any survey questions about whether women should have the right to vote, but I looked and found one.  In September 2019, an Ipsos survey asked people if they agreed or disagreed that "The 19th Amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote, should be repealed."  3% agreed:  breaking it down by party, that was 3% of Republicans, 4% of Democrats, and 4% of independents.  10% chose "neither agree nor disagree" which is more than I would have guessed.  Another intriguing point is that Republicans were most likely to "strongly disagree" (90%, vs 80%% among Democrats and 85% among independents.

Moving on to issues on which there are serious differences of opinion, in 2017 an AP-NORC survey asked if various organizations and groups had "too much, too little, or neither too much nor too little power and influence in Washington?"  One of the groups was women.  The figure shows percent too much minus too little by party:

For the groups above the diagonal line, Democrats are more likely to say that they have goo much power; for those below, Republicans are.  Women are substantially below the line, but even Republicans are more likely to say that they have too little power than too much.  Men are another one of the groups:  Democrats overwhelmingly say that they have too much influence, while Republicans are pretty evenly divided, slightly on the side of "too much."  So there are substantial partisan differences:  the gap for women is fourth largest out of 18 groups (behing LGBT people, minorities, and whites), and the gap for men is eight (just behind poor people and ahead of the media).  The smallest gaps are for political lobbyists, small business, people like you, and working people (who are also discussed in this post).  The general pattern isn't surprising, but it's notable that Democrats are a lot more likely to think that "scientific and policy experts" have too little power--that was the fifth largest partisan gap, just behind women.  Republicans leaned slightly towards "too much power."  I will look for comparable questions to see if we can say anything about changes in the partisan division on this point.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research[