When Republicans nominate a woman for governor, their vote share drops 6.5 points.

Do parties lose votes when they choose a woman to run for governor? Most past studies grouped all political parties and time periods together and concluded that a candidate's gender makes no difference. The researchers rechecked this by collecting voting records across counties over several decades. They compared what happened to party votes in a state after it switched from a male nominee to a female nominee. They uncovered a big difference between parties. Since 2016, Republican transitions to a female nominee saw their county vote share drop by 6.5 percentage points. Meanwhile, Democratic nominees did not experience this kind of drop. Survey questions and ballot tests match the idea of voter discrimination, but they cannot prove it.

Why it matters

This matters because it reveals that the widely reported 'no effect' of candidate gender hides a sharp partisan divide. For Republicans, nominating a woman for governor since 2016 costs about 6.5 percentage points at the county level — a large penalty in a close race. For Democrats, no such penalty exists, suggesting that voter bias is not gender-neutral but interacts with party identity.

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