By Daniel Cox & Melissa Deckman @ FiveThirtyEight.com, July 5

The 2018 midterm elections are shaping up to be a watershed year for women and politics. Not only are a record number of women running for political office in 2018, but many of them are running campaigns that tout the underrepresentation of women in an effort to galvanize the women’s vote. MJ Hegar, an Air Force veteran and young mother running for Congress in Texas as a Democrat, said that “women are sick of” male elected leaders promising to protect women’s rights [....]

Will such a strategy prove effective? Historically, women overall have never shown a preference for voting for other women merely because of their gender. Political scientists have long shown that party and incumbency matter far more in the voting calculus of female voters (and male voters, for that matter). But younger women could change that during this election. A recent Suffolk/USA Today poll found that nearly one-third of young women — those age 18 to 34 — would prefer voting for a woman over a man, compared with 19 percent of women overall.

At first glance, these polling results are somewhat surprising, given that young women appeared more apathetic about Hillary Clinton’s historic candidacy [.....]