From the Washington Post:

Like it or not, studies suggest that Clinton may not be wrong on white women voting like their husbands

The Fix Analysis

By Eugene Scott March 13 at 10:40 AM

According to Hillary Clinton, many white women voted against her because the men in their lives told them to. During a discussion at the India Today Conclave on Saturday, Clinton was asked why she thought most white women voted for Trump, even after the “Access Hollywood” tape and claims of sexual misconduct weeks before the election.

“[Democrats] do not do well with white men, and we don’t do well with married, white women. And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should,” she said. …

But there are studies that show that how white women vote, especially those who are married, is highly influenced by the politics of their husbands.

Oregon State University assistant professor Kelsy Kretschmer co-wrote a study examining women’s voting patterns. “We know white men are more conservative, so when you’re married to a white man you get a lot more pressure to vote consistent with that ideology,” she told the Guardian last year.

In the study published in Political Research Quarterly, Kretschmer and her co-authors wrote: “Women consistently earn less money and hold less power, which fosters women’s economic dependency on men. Thus, it is within married women’s interests to support policies and politicians who protect their husbands and improve their status.”

This and other studies also show that other factors influence why white women vote for conservative politicians. White women are much more likely to be married than women of other demographic groups. And married women are more likely to support traditional values, both culturally and economically.

A study from the Institute for Social and Economic Research reported that wives in general vote in ways that support their husband’s economic interests. And most men voted for Trump in 2016 with many citing his economic policies as a major factor as to why.

And Julie Kohler, who holds a Ph.D. in family social science, wrote that a vote for the Republican party is often deemed as the most logical one for married women — especially when factoring in race and faith.

“Systemic influences like marriage and evangelical Christianity interact with white supremacy to influence white women’s political behavior, through the explicit ideologies they propagate and the more insidious ways they reflect and perpetuate other structural inequalities,” the senior vice president for the Democracy Alliance, a progressive donor network wrote in the Nation.

But economics also play a huge factor, something Clinton and others criticizing pro-Trump women’s votes don’t often acknowledge.

“The gender pay gap, for example, has the practical effect of privileging men’s careers—particularly white men’s—over women’s and yoking white women’s economic interests to their husbands’. So for some married white women, a vote for the Republican candidate may appear to be the self-interested choice,” Kohler added.

As I wrote in 2013:

Happy White Married People Vote Republican, So Why Doesn’t The GOP Work On Making White People Happy?