Women Are Lining Up Behind Obama

The Real Gender Gap Exists In Specific Groups Of Female Voters Concerning The Economy And National Security.

by Bruce Stokes

Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2008


Barack Obama has many things to worry about in the fall campaign. The women's vote is not one of them.

The idea that female votes are up for grabs in the election "strains credulity," contends Margie Omero, head of Momentum Analysis, a Democratic consulting group. Obama's support among women is on the high end of the gender gap traditionally enjoyed by Democratic presidential candidates. And recent media hype about Obama's "problem" with female supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton is not substantiated by polling data.

"It is all too easy to find the 100 women who will protest at the convention and they become the story," said Gina Glantz, who ran Bill Bradley's 2000 presidential campaign, "rather than to talk about the underlying numbers of women voters who in droves will vote for Obama."

Obama holds a double-digit lead over John McCain among women voters, 51 percent to 38 percent in Pew surveys. That advantage is widening and mirrors the results of other polls. The female electorate gives Obama greater support than it did either John Kerry or Al Gore at this stage in the 2004 and 2000 campaigns. Nor does race seem to be an issue for white women voters. They are more likely than white men to support Obama.

Older women are another matter. They favor McCain over Obama by 7 percentage points. Both Gore and Kerry led President Bush among these voters at comparable times in the last two presidential election cycles.

Democratic women political activists contend that Obama's female support will only grow, once women get the message on McCain's opposition to abortion and his votes against family planning. "People don't know yet that John McCain is just bad for women," Glantz said. "Talking about these differences is clearly a pathway to generating intensity among women voters."

But changing the female electorate's perception of McCain may be easier said than done. "McCain has a pretty strong biography," warned Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center. "And I don't think that is going to change."

Married, working, middle-class women pose another problem for Obama. "These swing women voters have tremendous economic anxiety right now," said Ellen Malcolm, president of EMILY's List. And Obama will need to address their kitchen table concerns about the cost of gasoline, health care, and food.

Women activists also acknowledge they learned something from the 2004 campaign: Female voters care about national security. "Women are going to the watercooler and talking about what just happened in Georgia," said Judith Lichtman, a former senior adviser to the Clinton campaign. "They are not unmindful of the way the world impacts on them."

Foreign-policy concerns are the second-most important issue for women this election year, according to a new poll of female registered voters done for EMILY's List by the Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group. That makes national security more important than traditional women's concerns, such as children's issues, equal pay, and reproductive health care. Moreover, when asked what trait they seek in a president, just as many women say they want someone who conveys a sense of safety and security as say they are looking for someone who gives them a sense of hope and optimism.

So, Obama has the women's vote now. And he is likely to have it in November. But there are pockets of female voters and clusters of issues where he is vulnerable among women. And he has four days in Denver to try to close that gap.

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