Women made up a little more than half of the primary voters in New Hampshire Tuesday night, and their votes conform to the current 2016 election narrative.
For Democrats, more women than men voted Tuesday night, with 55 percent of primary voters being women and 45 percent being men. For Republicans, the percentage was closer. Forty-eight percent of Republican voters were women and 52 percent were men.
Had the final results of the primary mirrored the women’s vote, the Republican side would look a little different. Donald Trump would still have won (32 percent of women voted for him), Ohio Gov. John Kasich still would have come in second (16 percent of women voted for him), but the rest of the top 5 finishers would have placed differently.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush each received 13 percent of the Republican women’s vote, while Texas Sen. Ted Cruz received 11 percent. This would have moved Cruz to fifth place and bumped Rubio up to third or fourth. Bush may have stayed in fourth or moved up to third.
The differences in gender breakdown were even more stark on the Democratic side, and continue to spell doom for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has based much of her campaign on the fact that she’s a woman.
New Hampshire women went for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by an 11-point margin, 55 percent to Clinton’s 44 percent. Men also broke for the senator, 66 percent to 32 percent.
As in Iowa, Clinton did better with older women, who favored the former first lady by a nearly 2-1 margin. Also as in Iowa and elsewhere in the country, younger women voted overwhelmingly for Sanders.
Women under 45 voted in large numbers for Sanders, and millennial women under 30 voted for Sanders by a nearly 4-1 margin.
Now, if Sanders can get those young voters to continue to come out to primaries, and then in the general election, he could create a repeat of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, when young people voted in record numbers.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
