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ANALYSIS: US candidates try to woo ‘mom-vote’

Whether they’re called soccer moms, security moms or hockey moms, women are likely to play a key role in deciding the outcome of next month’s US presidential election and are being wooed by the candidates.

In the last presidential election, 8.8 million more women voted than men and this time around, with record numbers of women registering to vote in the Nov. 4 contest between Republican Senator John McCain and Democrat Senator Barack Obama, women voters are expected to outpace men by more than 9 million.

And many of them are expected to vote for Obama.

“All of the national polls conducted since the first [presidential] debate report Senator Barack Obama in the lead ... almost all show women supporting Obama at a higher level than men,” a report issued on Friday by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University in New Jersey said.

GENDER GAP

Since 1992, more women have voted Democrat than Republican in presidential elections, and even when a majority of women backed Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, the women’s vote for him trailed the men’s by several percentage points.

That phenomenon is called the gender gap and it exists because “women and men clearly preference their issues differently, and those different preferences have aligned recently along partisan lines,” said Allyson Lowe, head of the Pennsylvania Center for Women, Politics and Public Policy at Chatham University in Pittsburgh.

Women are more likely than men to support a larger role for government, and the Democratic Party offers that, CAWP director Debbie Walsh said.

“Women are more economically vulnerable than men, more often in a day-to-day struggle ... and because of that, they see themselves as needing a social safety net with programs like social security, Medicaid, family leave,” she said.

Pundits have speculated that McCain chose pro-life, “hockey mom” of five Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate to woo women, in particular those who were disappointed when Obama passed over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in favor of Senator Joseph Biden to fill the Democratic Party’s vice presidential slot.

But women, like men, vote on the issues, and key to winning the women’s vote is identifying which issues matter to them.

In 2000, a group of women who were labeled “soccer moms” by pollsters and who voted based on family value issues helped to ensure US President George W. Bush’s first victory, Lowe said.

“Some of those women voted Bush again in 2004 but got relabeled ‘security moms’ because they told the pollsters they were more worried about the safety of their families and the security of the nation than about education and healthcare,” she said.

“Same women, new label. They voted for Bush both times, but for different reasons,” said Lowe, as she wondered if the soccer-turned-security moms would morph into pro-life, family-oriented hockey moms next month — and vote Republican.

Recent studies suggest they won’t, as they point to housing and healthcare as the top two issues on the minds of women who identify with neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party. An overwhelming majority of women voters who spoke to Agence France Presse — 85 percent — said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were the key issue they want the next president to address, while around three-quarters mentioned the economy and half cited healthcare. None — not even those who said they intend to vote Republican — said their vote had been won by the Palin pick.

Dianne Winiarz, 45, a registered independent who works as at a large bank in Massachusetts, said she would vote for the Republican ticket, even though she found McCain’s choice of running mate “curious” and was “not thrilled” with either party’s candidates.

“This will be the first time I vote Republican in a presidential election,” she said. “I have always voted Democrat but Obama is too far to the left for me.”

PAPAGIANNOPOULOS

Tina Papagiannopoulos, a 37-year-old lawyer from Maryland also registered as independent, said she would vote for Obama because “he is right on the money with respect to what is causing our country’s problems and how to fix them.”

Christine, a 47-year-old stay-at-home mother in Colorado with three soccer-playing children, will also be voting for Obama.

“McCain wants to stay the course in Iraq, and while I don’t support a sudden and full pull-out of American troops, we need an exit strategy,” said Christine, an independent voter who asked not to be fully named.

“Also, I’m pro-choice. Women have aborted pregnancies for centuries and will continue to do so. There needs to be a safe option, as opposed to back-alley abortions,” she said.
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