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LANSING, Mich. -- Although their numbers are still small, female governors stand out as better than their male counterparts at drawing crossover voters, dealing with the opposition party and winning re-election.
This emerging statistical picture suggests intriguing prospects that will be tested in November's elections, when a record five of the eight female governors in the USA are running for new terms.
Non-partisan analysts favor four of the five to win, even though all four are in states that were carried by the other party in the 2004 presidential race.
Among governors whose terms are up this year, women are twice as likely as men to be favored to win re-election.
And among all 50 governors, women are three times as likely as men to be running states dominated by the other party.
"You have to ask if there's a female M.O. (modus operandi) that acts to depolarize our politics, to dilute the ideological polarization between the parties that exists throughout the country," says political scientist Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
Kathleen Dolan, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of Voting for Women in the United States, questions whether women govern in fundamentally different ways than men: "I do not see women coming from Venus and men from Mars."
Still, she says, the public does view female candidates differently. "Voters see women as more bipartisan, they see them as more able to work across the aisle, they see them as more honest," she says. "It's possible that in very polarized electorates a woman candidate might receive a benefit of a doubt from voters."
The stakes are high. Governors forge statewide political organizations that can be key in other races and sometimes develop innovative policies in such areas as health and education. State capitals are a training ground for presidents: Four of the past five presidents served as governors.
Among female governors, Linda Lingle of Hawaii and Jodi Rell of Connecticut, both Republicans, and Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, both Democrats, are favored to win by the non-partisan Cook Political Report and Congressional Quarterly. The only tossup race: Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, a Democrat who is being challenged by Republican businessman Dick DeVos.
That means 80% of the female governors eligible to run this year are favored to win new terms. In contrast, 11 of the 26 male governors eligible to run are favored to win by the Cook report; that's 42%. Congressional Quarterly rates nine, or 35%, as favored.
Among all governors, five of the eight women -- or nearly two-thirds -- are in states dominated by the other party, compared with nine of the 42 men, or one-fifth.
Jeanne Shaheen, director of Harvard's Institute of Politics and a former three-term governor of New Hampshire, says female leaders tend to be "more consensus-building, more interested in getting input from other people and less interested in taking credit." She adds: "Women don't often have the need to be macho, to put it very bluntly, and therefore we have less trouble reaching out to somebody who might have been an opponent."
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