I’ve been bitching for a while that all the studies about voting trends for race and gender treat the two purely as disadvantages.  It’s been subtle – a question like “Would you vote for a woman for President?” doesn’t seem inherently biased.  But it is.  When you only measure those who respond negatively to something, you’re treating it as a handicap rather than trying to determine whether it could be a benefit.

Anyway, the Washington Post’s most recent poll actually ran with my suggestion of asking these questions in a “more or less likely” form, and got some unsurprising (to me) results:

By contrast, 13 percent of voters said the would be less likely to support a woman and 6 percent said they would be less likely to support a black — numbers about equally offset by the percentages of people who said they would be more likely to support candidates with those attributes.

Also, at least part of the anti-female vote is coming from people who specifically identify the question with Hillary Clinton, which means the raw number could be even less.  The fact is that, for a qualified candidate, gender and race are no impediments to winning the Presidency.