Keirsey Research Poll: The Temperament and Gender Gap Is Bad News For Mitt Romney

The Gender and Temperament Gaps we saw in our April poll are consistent. President Obama still commands a large lead over Governor Romney among women, Idealists, and Rationals. In fact, the only segment of the US voting population that favors Romney is Guardian men. The two candidates are evenly balanced among Artisan men.

We initially randomly surveyed 1000 adult US registered voters who are planning on voting in November between May 28 and June 1. The sample population was balanced according to US 2010 Census data by age group, gender, and geographic region. Our data showed such a wide gap between the two candidates that we ran the poll again during the week of June 5-10. The results of both polls were consistent. These results vary substantially from most current polls that show Obama and Romney virtually tied. But, we stand on our numbers – for our thoughts on why this gap exists, see our previous article:  The Last Accurate Poll?

The poll results are presented below in 2 graph forms – bar graphs showing the results of the June 5-10 poll, and line charts showing the tracking from the first poll (May 28-June 1) to the second. We will continue to run our poll on a monthly basis (or ad hoc interim polls if events warrant), so the tracking graphs will show changes as we get closer to the election.

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Question 1: If the election were to be held tomorrow, for whom would you vote?
Participants were given 4 choices to this question: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Undecided, and Neither. As noted above Romney holds a narrow lead (44% – 42%) among Guardian males, and is tied with Obama (43% each) among Artisan men. He fares poorly to horribly among the other 6

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groups, with his best showing with Guardian women where is is behind 46% – 34%. Overall, the chart to the right shows the splits by overall gender. The tracking chart shows that these numbers were steady from the last week of May through the second week of June.

Question 2: Do you personally like President Obama?

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There were three answer choices: Yes, No, and Neither Like nor Dislike. President Obama is personally popular with women – 54% like him versus only 24% that say they dislike him. He more popular than unpopular with men, although only 45% men like him and 30% dislike him. Overall his “likeability” went up slightly from the first to the second poll (from 47% to 49%), and his “dislikeability” fell slightly.

Question 3: Do you personally like Governor Romney?

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The good news for Governor Romney is that that largest group (48%) has not yet made up their mind. The bad news is that for those who have made up their minds, more than twice as many dislike than like him. Men dislike him slighy less than do women, but there’s no dressing this statistic up – these are pretty negative numbers. Our observation – while both Romney and Obama are Rationals, Obama’s

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experience as a community organizer taught him how to be more personable. Romney, as an investment banker, hasn’t developed that ability. He tends to make “rational” sounding statements that are disconnected from the emotions of voters, making it hard for people to visualize him as someone they might have a conversation with. [note: “rational sounding statements” refers to the way he communicates, and does not imply he either makes more or less sense than other politicians. Rather, most people (the 90%+ that are not NT’s), usually don’t readily connect with NT-speak.]

Question 4: Do you approve of President Obama’s job performance at this time?

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Clearly, if Governor Romney is to make up the ground between himself and President Obama by November, this chart shows his opportunity. Overall, more people disapprove of Obama’s performance than approve, although again the results are quite skewed between men and women. President Obama actually trended upward on this question in the tracking chart, so it would seem that he is clearly aware of this gap and won’t be idle in addressing it himself.

Question 5: What is your political party affiliation?

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This question is included primarily to ensure we don’t get skewed results based on either republicans or democrats (or independents, etc) not being interested in taking the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. The results, happily, show that people of all political persuasions are interested in learning more about themselves. (We already knew this, considering the wide diversity of political opinions at Keirsey, where we all are devotees of “Please Understand Me”).

The bottom line is if the election were to be held tomorrow, President Obama would win a landslide popular vote. With the arcane rules of the electoral college, the election itself may indeed be closer, but overall, Rational (NT) Governor Romney has yet to connect with the American public in a way that previous winners have done, while fellow Rataional President Obama has made this connection. Our advice to Governor Romney: take some lessons on how to act more like an Artisan.

10 thoughts on “Keirsey Research Poll: The Temperament and Gender Gap Is Bad News For Mitt Romney”

  1. Romney is NT? Are you sure… 🙂 I wish someone would study the relationship between temperament and politics over time.

  2. He is certainly not an Idealist nor an Artisan. The investment banking business, in which Romney made his millions, is dominated by NTJ’s. I do believe this is the most likely type for Gov. Romney, although as Dave Keirsey has pointed out, politicians tend to make it hard to pin themselves down. I think (being an NT myself) that Rationals are more likely than the other temperaments to make statements that seem very “rational” to themselves, but that strike a sour chord with the cooperatives (SJs and NFs). Romney’s explanation of the dog on top of the car, and his statement yesterday regarding reducing the number of cops, firefighters and teachers are two that come to mind…

    Dr. Keirsey and Ray Choiniere wrote “Presidential Temperament: The Unfolding of Character in the Forty Presidents of the United States” that looks closely at the subject. http://www.amazon.com/dp/096069546X/

  3. //Our advice to Governor Romney: take some lessons on how to act more like an Artisan//—or try, how about the republicans stop trying to take women back into medieval times and controlling their bodies. It maybe only a small representation of the party that is so sexist, so entrenched misogynistic, but it’s voice carries very loudly over ocean and globally. And Romney has done absolutely nothing to take this attitude and quell it. His silence on this has been deafening. I wouldn’t vote for him either. People may well be disappointed with Obama’s performance re/ economy, (it’s always easy to find a scapegoat), at least he is in the 21st century when it comes to how he treats, speaks about females. We are human.

    Romney and the republicans (yes, democrats are not perfect) have a huge problem, and it is one that they have created, permeated their party themselves, only themselves to blame. The Guardian women here in Australia that I associate with cannot stand Romney, the republicans at all, they come across as weird, controlling power hungry, sexist men.

    Ask me what i really think of them.

  4. …and having said that, we have our own Inspector Guardian nutter politician to contend with, Tony Abbott, that wants his daughters to preserve their virginity to give as gifts to their ‘would-be’ husbands. Seriously, that and portraying our female PM as a ‘witch’.

  5. ..and I am not so sure Romney a Rational, I am still leaning toward Guardian, he is same old, same old…(even with his nurture), I am thinking Inspector Guardian, but a chance on Mastermind…not concrete on him.

  6. Pam, asking someone to put power before principle just because you don’t like their principles is not necessarily an appropriate thing to ask them. In any case it is not clear that those who in fact do so get more votes.

    Oh, and whether or not something is “Medieval” is irrelevant to whether or not it is a good thing. Double entry bookkeeping, English Common Law, and chess are also Medieval. Chronology is a description not an insult.

    1. It is relevant to me, (and many other females and males for that matter) that misogyny exists in that person, at that level in politics. You are playing a stupid game about ‘power’-attempting to influence basic human rights ‘to one gender only’. You have no credibility. Where are your policies, (referring to Tony Abbott)…i judge him not only on his ridiculous out of time ideals about women, but he has no plan, no future for Australia. It seems many Australians agree with that summary as well, his personal popularity is low, lower than our Prime Minister. Australia has tolerated leaders having affairs, being drunkards, but if they have good leadership skill and vision for the country they can be elected. Abbott has no vision, no personality, and is hellbent on power for powers sake, if you think in the 21st century western females, as a majority will tolerate sexism, and removal (no matter how much they attempt to disguise and distance themselves) of hard earnt female gender rights accomplishments, think again. Romney and his band of republican silly men acting like gender police wont get anywhere. The statistics tell the story, something stinks in conservative politics and it aint economic driven. It may well only reflect a small portion of the political group, but again, the majority’s silence is deafning. I use medieval because it does smack of witch hunts and female control. It is something from dark ages. And yes, your damn right it upsets me. Misogyny has no place in society, politics, armed services, education, sport, society for that matter->fullstop. Obviously everyone does not articulate it/ this, as I do, but the message is still the same. In regard to Obama I notice him a leader who busts his ass trying to reform and make policy under very difficult times and situation, he gives me impression he does care about global issues, his country and it’s people, the achievement of health reform (for what it was worth) is something no other USA leader has been able to achieve, (and my goodness something needed doing badly!) Romney can’t even stand up to his party’s misogyny, where are his balls?

  7. But the point brought up was that you referred to something you dislike as “Medieval”. THAT is irrelevant to judging whether something is good or bad and training yourself to chronological provincialism encourages you to reject others views because they are raised in a different culture then your own and thus limits you. It is a form of prejudice, and while it does not hurt those you are prejudiced against, it does hurt you.

  8. And in fact I do not think that changing positions to quickly and obviously is a vote-getter. The claims “changing platforms is the right thing to do” and “changing platforms gains votes” are two different claims. You seemed to be making the second claim, unless I was mistaken and I was answering that specifically. I made no comments on the first.

    As for me playing a “game about power”, while I duly acknowledge your gift of political telepathy, I have no intention of doing any such thing, and in fact the question of whether I am would not affect my analysis as people who play games about power can sometimes be correct.

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