Our left-leaning legacy media regularly fall all over themselves to tell us that conservative political parties have a ‘woman problem’. What they’re saying is that not enough women vote right or conservative. That’s the allegation. And the not so subtle implication is that these journalists – ones we know from the public data as regards donations to political parties in the US are well over 90 per cent lefties themselves, probably a higher chunk in Australia – think that conservative parties need to move left. To cater to these disaffected female voters. You sometimes get the same sort of argument about how conservative parties have a ‘youth problem’.

So what should we make of these sort of claims? Not much is my view. Start with the obvious rejoinder. If right-leaning political parties have a ‘woman problem’ does that mean that the left-leaning ones have a ‘man problem’? Consider the 2024 US presidential election. Men voted for Donald Trump by roughly 11 points (43 per cent Harris to 54 per cent Trump), a big jump from 2020 when Trump barely won the male vote.  Meanwhile women in 2024 voted for Kamala Harris, true, but only by about 6 points (51 per cent Harris to 45 per cent Trump), down from 2020 when Biden won women by 10 points.

Notice that the Democrats on these numbers have a bigger ‘man problem’ than the Republicans (or at least Donald Trump’s version) have a ‘woman problem’. And that a right-leaning male preference was clear across all age groups. If we follow the legacy media’s love of looking at everything through the neo-Marxist lens of identity politics – the core notion that immutable characteristics you’re born with determine all, or most, of what you do or should think – then left-wing parties have a mighty big problem with men. At least that’s the case in the US. In fact, the Democrats realised that because they wanted to pick a man as Kamala’s vice presidential candidate – and obviously a white one given this worldview, to balance the ticket as it were. He had to be a mid-westerner because the swing states are what mattered. The base of the Democrat party wouldn’t let Kamala pick Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro because – let’s be honest – he was Jewish. So they went with what they thought was a manly man.  An ex-high school football coach. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The problem with that choice was that Walz struck almost no man, and certainly no Midwestern man, as a manly man. One commentator summed Walz up as what a team of lesbian advisors would think was a man’s man.  Walz was, needless to say, no help to the Democrat ticket and a significantly worse choice than Shapiro would have been.

Here’s another response to the media’s ‘you conservatives have a woman problem’ hyperventilations. It is to point out that disaggregating the data paints a far more nuanced picture. It turns out that Trump won the married women vote, and by almost 5 points. It is unmarried, single women who voted for Harris.  They did so by a huge margin of over thirty points. If right-leaning conservative parties and candidates have a women problem then it’s an unmarried women problem. In fact, if you go way back to when women won the franchise you can find quite a few conservative men at the time who worried that women would vote left. These pontificators were wrong. One of the most solidly conservative groups this last century has been married women. A big difference today, and it’s pretty recent, is the increased numbers of unmarried women. It is these voters, by more than two to one, who shun conservative candidates and parties.

Now you can read all sorts of speculations for why that might be including that the big spending, big government outcomes of left-leaning parties provide some of the security a husband might. Or that today’s tertiary education is so blatantly woke, left-wing, and mired in grievance studies, identity politics and fearmongering climate catastrophism that fewer women are getting married (leaving open whether the direction of causation is that this tertiary sector-inculcated worldview makes marriage less desirable to these types of women or makes them less attractive to men). Whatever, it’s all just speculation. What isn’t speculation is why any conservative political party should move leftwards just because some 70 per cent of single women, a massive skew, are voting for left-wing parties.  Because they shouldn’t. Or at least there is no more reason for conservative parties to move left than there is for left-wing parties to move right – to capture some of the male voters who have deserted them. Remember, with today’s woeful, biased legacy media it’s always conservatives who are told to change and become more like lefties (aka more like the journalists or TV talking heads making the claim).

Notwithstanding every woeful thing we’ve just seen from Peter Dutton and his advisors, your job as a political party is to have values, stick to them (unlike what we saw from the Coalition during the thuggish Covid years), and then go out and try to convince voters. That means convince people who don’t already agree with you. The job is not to poll and focus group (to create a new verb) and find out where 50.0001 per cent of voters happen to sit right now and then just give them what they want. The job is to take the 70 per cent who initially favoured the Voice and explain to them why dividing Australians by race and supercharging the powers of our already uber-activist judges is a really bad idea. Ditto why net zero is impoverishing us all. Ditto why having the world’s highest per capita immigration is giving us falls in GDP per capita, giving us huge housing shortages, and undermining our social cohesion. You start with your values and seek to convince – you don’t turn a political party inside-out and make it devoid of any principles or values to cater to single women or any other identity-based group.  No matter how poorly or well a party does there will always be groups it loses. Trump gained with all men, with Jews, with Hispanics, with Asians. But he lost single women and rich whites with multiple degrees. So?  Are conservatives supposed to tie themselves in knots to capture the woke, DEI-obsessed uber-credentialed (who now vote Teal, as it happens)? Alas, all of this is seemingly beyond the wit of today’s geniuses who run the Liberal Party.

By the way, as for conservatives having a ‘youth problem’ that may reflect the data here in Australia with our incoherent, value-free Liberal party’s offerings. But Pierre Poilievre in Canada and Donald Trump actually did incredibly well with the under-30 voters. (It is white over-65s who are comparatively most likely to succumb to Trump derangement.) Give the young ones hope by telling them the follies of net zero, DEI, mass immigration, transgender lunacies.  And most of all be openly patriotic, not hair-shirted about your great country. Deep down all young people want that.

Long story short? Don’t listen to our discredited legacy media, Libs. Stop shaping your policies around what the ABC wants.  Surely the stupidity of that is clear by now?  (I speak facetiously, of course, given the current party room.)