that is very notable to me is it really still is very polarized in that women on the republican side are by and large not reacting the same way. >> right. >> the women on the democratic side are. so it's still something where on almost every issue you can say okay, there is a gender gap, there is a racial gap. there is a gap but it's always going to be second to the polarization. but obviously that's still really informing the way people are responding to this race. >> cornell. >> on the polarization of it, one of the things that is also interesting, and we saw this in 2006 as well that the republican identification is shrinking. >> yeah. >> and where it's shrinking is women are beginning to leave the republican party. so those are republicans are really in the republican party. >> so they're no longer identifying. so they then move to independent so that accounts for some of the lockstep you see in that republican polling. cornell belcher and ariel levy-edwards, thank you for joining us. "the rachel maddow show" starts right now.