Dana reports on Republican women trying to hang on to the "security mom" demographic -- an odd choice considering that unlike in 2004, today's white, suburban mothers are largely antiwar.
Married white women are an especially key swing demographic. They used to be dependably Republican, supporting President Bush by 11 points in 2004. But in the 2006 midterm elections, they were only 2 percentage points more likely to vote Republican than Democratic, reflecting frustration with the war and worries about economic instability. Hillary Clinton's pollster, Mark Penn, predicts that his candidate can cherry pick 24 percent of these Republican women voters with an "emotional appeal" to female solidarity.In the face of this rather bleak electoral outlook, it's no surprise that the panelists seemed more concerned with one particular woman -- Hillary Clinton -- than with the hypothetical American woman voter. While agreeing that Clinton would usher in a decadent age of "socialized medicine" and "over 50 percent" tax rates, they were also united in calling her a formidable candidate -- someone who Levinson termed "an extremely intelligent woman who should answer questions on a policy level," not by resorting to girl-power platitudes.
Read the rest (and comment) here. --The Editors
