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Gender, race, reproductive rights, immigration, the economy. What issues resonated with voters in the November election and how? We'll talk about that with two Iowa State University professors on this edition of Iowa Press.

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Funding for Iowa Press was provided by Friends, the Iowa PBS Foundation.

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For decades, Iowa Press has brought you political leaders and newsmakers from across Iowa and beyond. Celebrating more than 50 years on statewide Iowa PBS, this is the Friday, December 27th edition of Iowa Press. Here is Kay Henderson.

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[Henderson] Our guests have been at the Iowa Press table before to talk about women in politics. Now, after a general election in November and this month's announcement that Governor Kim Reynolds has chosen Chris Cournoyer to be Lieutenant Governor of Iowa. They are back to talk about women in politics. Let's introduce them. Karen Kedrowski is Director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. She is also a Professor of Political Science at ISU primarily researching gender and politics and civic engagement. Welcome back.

[Kedrowski] Thank you.

[Henderson] Joining our conversation, Kelly Winfrey. She is Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Iowa State University. She is also an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Education in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication. Her research focuses on gender and political campaign communication. Welcome back.

[Winfrey] Thanks for having us.

[Henderson] Joining the conversation is Brianne Pfannenstiel of the Des Moines Register and Erin Murphy of the Gazette in Cedar Rapids.

[Murphy] So, Kay mentioned Governor Reynolds' recent appointment of Senator Cournoyer as Lieutenant Governor. That is a first in Iowa's history to have two women in the top spots in the executive branch, also pretty rate nationally I understand. Kelly, run this by both of you, Kelly we'll start with you. Just how rare is that to have two women as the chief executives in the state?

[Winfrey] Pretty rare. We're one of three states that currently has a woman in both the gubernatorial and the lieutenant seat. And the other two states are also current. So, this is a new time in American history to have women in those offices. So, we join Massachusetts and Arkansas with having women in those top two positions. And I think Karen can speak to this too, but those were pretty recent wins as well.

[Kedrowski] Right, those other two duos were elected in 2022 and took office in 2023. So, the fact that we're only the third state and that this is a very recent development in American politics means that it is quite historic. So, Iowa should take some pride in that as well.

[Murphy] And let's take this and look ahead a little bit, Karen we'll stay with you here for a second. Governor Reynolds hasn't said yet whether she plans to run for re-election, but if she does her term ends and she would be on the ballot in 2026 presumably with Lieutenant Governor Cournoyer at the top of the ticket. What are your thoughts on looking ahead to that as having women in the governor and lieutenant governor office on the top of the ticket?

[Kedrowski] Yeah, I think it would definitely be a symbol that Americans are very accepting of women in the highest roles in politics now. And I would also say that they would be very likely to win because they are of the right party, that this is a republican dominated state and they would be running as the republican nominee. So, I would expect that that would be a successful ticket, a successful run. I will say that Iowa is pretty rare in that we do not have a term limit for governors. In most states they are term limited for one or even just two terms rather like the president is also term limited.

[Murphy] Kelly, I was going to ask, almost as I formed the question, I stopped myself in my head, I was going to ask if there was any research that would indicate how an all-woman ticket would fare. But you just told us that we're in the era of the first three so maybe we don't know what kind of impact that would have with voters?

[Winfrey] Well, we can look at other research on what people perceive about women candidates and I think it's important to look at the intersection of gender and party in this situation especially. What research has told us about how voters perceive women candidates is that republican women are often viewed as more moderate than republican men. And democratic women are often viewed as more liberal than democratic men. So, we kind of have the spectrum of democratic women being the most liberal and republican men being the most conservative. So, when you're looking to campaign and try to reach across the aisle or to reach those more moderate voters, republican women might be more successful, for example, than democratic women.

[Kedrowski] Right. We also know that voters tend to think that women are more trustworthy, less likely to be corrupted or engaged in any kind of scandals. So, voters are then more likely to trust women candidates and to see them as being ethical candidates moving ahead.

[Winfrey] Of their party.

[Kedrowski] Of their party, yes. Yes, of their party. So, that is another important factor in terms of that intersection of gender and politics.

[Pfannenstiel] Well, I'd like to ask about women running for positions in politics. We've talked with both of these women. They both said that they entered politics after being encouraged by other people to get involved. And we know historically research has shown that women need to be asked to get involved. But both of these women, they're a little bit older, they're in their 50s and 60s. Is that still true of younger women, Karen?

[Kedrowski] Yes, absolutely. And we hear over and over again that women who are running for public office will say, I never thought I would run for public office but -- either there is a problem in their community that they want to solve, something that they want to address and that is definitely part of Senator Cournoyer's story, or they have been asked repeatedly and recruited. And by contrast, many men who enter politics are what we call intrinsically ambitious. They just sort of think, I could do a good job, I'm interested in this, I would like to serve my community so I'm going to run for X. But it's a very different dynamic for women. Do you want to add anything? This is kind of your --

[Winfrey] I think you said it well. It's certainly true that women still view themselves as less qualified than men. So, the research that looks at the same qualifications men and women, women often view themselves as less qualified. And I think to Karen's point and I think anecdotally some of the things that we've seen with the work with our Ready to Run program and even with what Governor Reynolds was saying about Lieutenant Governor Cournoyer the other day, or last week, was that it is about getting things done, about problem solving. So, a lot of times when women run for office, they are running to solve a particular problem. And a lot of times those are more at local level offices, so things like school board, which is where Lieutenant Governor Cournoyer started.

[Henderson] Let us shift to the result of the 2024 election and what that tells us about women in politics in Iowa. The Iowa legislature, Kelly, what are the numbers? Did women make gains in seats or did they lose seats?

[Winfrey] I think we're about the same.

[Kedrowski] It's about the same.

[Winfrey] So, no significant swings in either direction. I think most notably is that republican women tend to do pretty well in the state, democratic women not as much.

[Henderson] And so, Karen, why is that?

[Kedrowski] Well, it's a republican dominated state and so as I've talked with people who are really interested in seeing more and more women get into politics, they're like, we need to get more women to run. And my response was, we need to get women to, the right women to run in the right districts. So, if you have a very, very solidly republican district and you're running a lot of democratic candidates they're going to lose simply because of the political realities. But it's a challenge because nationally we see that democratic women who have been elected to office outnumber republican women by about two to one and that gap is growing. And while the numbers of the women in the legislature have pretty much held their own after this election, what we see is that when we look over the span of time Iowa has been declining in its ranking among the 50 states from about 20th or 25th to now about 35th out of 50 because other states are gaining more women in their legislature faster than what is happening in Iowa. And partisan composition plays into that. The democrats prioritize diversity, they prioritize bringing in and running women candidates and candidates of color, it's part of their coalition whereas republicans prioritize other things, ideas, commitments to the party, loyalty to the leadership and things like that. So, gender or race are not really at the top of their lists. So, I think the outcome, that disparate partisan outcome is very much explainable that way.

[Winfrey] It's also a symptom of the gap in party affiliation. Women are much more likely to identify as democrats than republicans. So, you're going to get more democratic women to run because there are more kind of in the electorate that are already affiliated with the party.

[Murphy] So, is the Iowa democrats' task to get more women to run in the more competitive districts? Is that what you're alluding to Karen? There's more democratic women running they're kind of running in those sacrificial --

[Kedrowski] Right, but when we're looking at low information races, so state legislature, county supervisor, city councils, name recognition just really kind of overwhelms everything else. And some would even put U.S. Congress positions in that place too. I think actually because there are only four members of the House from Iowa and because our redistricting means that most of those districts are competitive, I would say there is relatively much more information than what you might find in other states among voters about U.S. House races. But overcoming that lack of voter interest and engagement at lower levels is really hard because people won't vote for names that they don't recognize.

[Murphy] So, going to the top of the ticket now in this past election, Kamala Harris, the democrat, was seeking to become the first female president, was unsuccessful against now President-elect Donald Trump. Kelly, we'll start with you, have you been able to see anything in the results, the data, the research that says whether gender played an impact in the outcome of the presidential election?

[Winfrey] Yeah, I'll say absolutely it did, but it's not the only thing that mattered. We've talked a lot about, kind of in the post mortem of this election about the economy being a driving issue and I think that is certainly true for a lot of folks. But what some of the research that I have done with this election cycle has found is that sexism has played an important part in this, ideas about masculinity and leadership have played an important part in how voters evaluated Harris and Trump as candidates and potential presidents. We've also found that racism, conspiracy theories like the replacement theory have influenced who people vote for. And I think in the case of Kamala Harris, particularly as a democratic or progressive woman of color, paid the price of some of those biases that we find influence vote choice, whereas someone like Donald Trump who really embodies this idea of traditional masculinity, he's kind of the tough guy, embodies that and gives a place for people to vote that are more in line with that. So, as we saw, he picked up votes from both Latino men and black men over 2020 and some of that I would argue based on my research has to do with the idea of masculinity in leadership.

[Murphy] I was going to ask, and I don't want to get too into the weeds here on folks, but how do you parse that out? And maybe you kind of started to touch on it there. How do you tell -- obviously I go into a ballot box and circle my boxes, who knows why I was making those choices? Could you explain to folks real quickly how you find that stuff?

[Winfrey] Yeah, so it's kind of the academic survey research. We had several surveys, I worked with a team of folks from several different institutions to look at a national representative sample, particularly around political party and with gender balance to see what factors influenced or were related to vote choices as well as related to use of the candidates. So, we'd ask questions like how much do you agree with this statement? Donald Trump is a strong leader. Donald Trump is likeable. Donald Trump is honest. And we'd look at those in relation to how people responded to questions about the role of men and women in society. And so, we could find, for example, that people who have a more traditional view of women's role in society were more likely to rate Donald Trump higher and Kamala Harris lower in those different qualities. So, it's really doing academic research. We can't know why people filled out a specific bubble in the ballot box, but we can at least kind of do that research before and after to see what might be driving those things.

[Pfannenstiel] I want to talk too about the issue of reproductive rights. Democrats obviously spend a lot of time and money focusing in on this messaging and in an attempt to appeal to a lot of women, certainly some men as well, but that ultimately didn't seem to connect in many places. So, what was the disconnect there and how did your research look at that, if at all?

[Winfrey] Yeah, it was one of the things I was most interested in because I personally thought that it would have a larger impact than it did. And what my research found was that for most women, while abortion and reproductive rights was an important issue, it wasn't more important than a lot of other issues. So, we asked questions, for example, how important would you say this issue is compared to others? More important, less important, about the same. And I found a lot of it was about the same. And we also saw big differences along party lines as well. And I think one piece of that is that not having access to abortion, for example, is a relatively new situation and hasn't personally affected a lot of people yet. And so, people who feel like their rights are being taken away or who feel that they might be at risk are more likely to vote in your own self-interest. But if that feels like something distant then you're not going to, it's not going to drive your vote choice to, say, how much money I'm spending today at the grocery store.

[Henderson] Karen, I'll ask you to weigh in on this, but how does likeability influence voting?

[Kedrowski] Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that it would be sort of subconsciously. And if a woman is not deemed to be likeable, then people are going to articulate in studies such as Kelly's other reasons not to vote for the person. But they are certainly not going to be inclined to support that. So, this was a real issue with Hillary Clinton. She had almost universal name recognition, 99%, but half of those people loathed her. And so, they wouldn't vote for her or they wouldn't necessarily express due to kind of what we call social acceptability bias, like I just don't like her or I don't want to vote for her because she's not very likeable, they'll say I'm not going to vote for her because she's too liberal, I'm not going to vote for her because I don't think she would be a strong leader or I'm going to vote for Trump instead because of X. But that certainly, it certainly was and is a factor and we see it in a lot of subtle ways like people on social media saying to women, you just need to smile more. Or why is she scowling? Or she's just yelling. We heard that a lot with Hillary Clinton. I think we heard it somewhat with Harris. And they also trivialized her a lot. It's like, can you really take her seriously because they thought of her as giggling and therefore being kind of an airhead and things like that, which definitely would be a strike against her in terms of this amorphous likeability thing.

[Winfrey] It gets at the just not that woman problem. We say generally yes, I would be willing to vote for a woman for president, just not Hillary Clinton, just not Kamala Harris, and there's always lots of reasons for that.

[Pfannenstiel] Are there differences in the way that this likeability issue plays out for democratic women versus republican women?

[Kedrowski] Boy that's a great question. I would say that many of the successful republican women that we have seen here in Iowa have played into masculine themes as a way of showing their toughness and probably in a subversive kind of way to counteract that likeability issue. So, Senator Ernst leans into her experience as a veteran. Brenna Bird with her tagline give them the bird was also kind of a combative play on words there. We also see that Mariannette Miller-Meeks, for example, talks a lot about her commitment to fiscal austerity and the republican agenda and so forth. So, I think that is one way that they try to counter that so that they're not seen as too feminine, too weak and that they would be just as tough as a man and then that kind of also counters the need to be likeable because if you're tough and playing into some of these kind of masculine tropes, then that makes you a more acceptable female candidate. What do you think?

[Winfrey] I would add, I think there's a lot of nuance there I think because republican woman also have to show that they believe in traditional values, which does put women in a more submissive role. So, while being strong enough to make the decision, they're also willing to do all the things, to be a mom and a policy maker and to find some of those roles acceptable, not that people don't think they're acceptable, but to embrace those traditional gender roles. And so, they have to balance that whereas democratic women because of the base that they are appealing to tend to appeal to more kind of feminist or equality-based values in gender. So, that is a turnoff to republicans because it's a rejection of traditional gender roles. Republican women tend to try to embrace and walk that line in a different way.

[Murphy] Speaking of masculinity, I was curious about the last week of the election we heard a lot about the Joe Rogan podcast that Donald Trump went on to reach a certain kind of demographic and that Kamala Harris didn't and plenty of people saying that was a misstep. I'm just curious to hear more from you, Kelly, on this idea of masculinity and that kind of projection and how much that resonates with voters and maybe even for male candidates as well? I don't know if you've done any research into that?

[Winfrey] Yeah, I think it's an area that has been neglected in some parts, not by academic researchers because there's folks doing masculinity studies, but in terms of our conversations about gender we tend to focus on women and feminism because women aren't as represented. But the flip side of that, and I think it's what we're seeing with some of the appeals to male voters in this past election, is that what is the place for men and men's roles in this equal society? So, we see, for example, in this election one of the things that really struck me was the differences between someone like Donald Trump and JD Vance and how they portray masculinity and the role of men in family and in public service as opposed to Tim Walz who was comfortable kind of taking a back seat to be the Vice President as well as his position on a lot of different issues. And I'd say the same thing was true of Doug Emhoff being potentially the First Gentleman should Harris win. So, we saw kind of these competing ideas of what men's role in society is or ought to be. And I think it's important that we as a culture, and some of this happens in education, but just as a public conversation of what are men's roles in these different world views? And I think that is one of the places where democrats have struggled a little bit is what is the role for, particularly for white men, in this world that we're trying to create? And if they don't feel like they have a place in it they're not going to vote for you and that is going to be a big challenge that I think we have to reckon with.

[Pfannenstiel] Kind of following up on this idea of targeted media and the podcast phenomenon that we saw in this election cycle, we saw the Joe Rogan podcast, we saw Call Her Daddy podcast. How are men and women consuming political media differently? And how did you see the campaigns kind of target them, Kelly?

[Winfrey] I think in this case in particular people go to what is comfortable. So, they tend to flock to content that fits with their world view and helps them understand their place. So, if we think about why people use different media, it's usually because it relates to them in some way. So, you're going to see men and women, there might be differences, conservatives and democrats. We know that from decades of research about traditional news media. I think what is different now is there is so many more outlets that can be very niche and reach audiences that are smaller and more targeted in their messaging. So, one of the things that we looked at was where are people getting misinformation or disinformation from? And it's a lot of different places and across the political spectrum from podcasts to social media and so on. And I think that is a challenge because we're not operating off of a shared set of facts and reality. But that's where I think it's also important to have these conversations kind of just in atmospheres like this, so that it reaches a general audience and we can all kind of get on the same page about what we're thinking.

[Henderson] Karen, we have about a minute left. I want you to update viewers on the Equal Rights Amendment.

[Kedrowski] Well, it is dead again I think is the best way to put it. So, over the last eight or ten years there has been a real concerted effort to bring the Equal Rights Amendment back based on the theory that the Constitution does not place time limits on the ratification of an amendment. And in the Equal Rights Amendment's case the time limit was only in the accompanying resolution, not in the amendment itself. So, there were several efforts, including one to simply say that provision doesn't matter. And three more states ratified by 2020 and the Trump administration put out guidance to the national archivists saying, don't accept this, the time limit has passed, the moment for the ERA is gone. Then there was a lot of lobbying pressure on President Biden at the beginning of his presidency and now again at the end of his presidency for him to direct the national archivist to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution and rather ignore the resolution with the deadlines. He chose this week not to do that, to the great disappointment of those who are ERA advocates. But I think it was in terms of legality the safe move to make because the Department of Justice and a couple of judges and so forth have all ruled that the moment for the ERA has passed and that if the ERA should be ratified it needs to start over again. Alternatively, Congress could pass a resolution simply repealing the time limit, in which case the Equal Rights Amendment could be added to the Constitution. But I don't think that is going to be likely in a republican dominated Congress.

[Henderson] So, speaking of time limits, we have reached ours for this conversation today. Thanks to both of you for being here.

[Winfrey] Thank you.

[Kedrowski] Thank you, it was great fun.

[Henderson] You may watch episodes of Iowa Press at iowapbs.org. For everyone here at Iowa PBS, Happy New Year.

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Funding for Iowa Press was provided by Friends, the Iowa PBS Foundation.

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The Associated General Contractors of Iowa, the public's partner in building Iowa's highway, bridge and municipal utility infrastructure.

Elite Casino Resorts a family run business rooted in Iowa. We believe our employees are part of our family and we strive to improve their quality of life and the quality of lives within the communities we serve.

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Across Iowa, hundreds of neighborhood banks strive to serve their communities, provide jobs and help local businesses. Iowa banks are proud to back the life you build. Learn more at iowabankers.com.

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