Mind The Gender Gap

(The Nation)  This column was written by Katrina vanden Heuvel.

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Twenty-five years after the gender gap first appeared as a factor in American politics, it's worth reflecting on whether as some in the GOP said after last November's election the gap has shrunk to the vanishing point.

Let's be clear: The gender gap didn't disappear in 2004, but it diminished significantly. John Kerry narrowly won the women's vote last year when he defeated Bush by a margin of 51 percent to 48 percent. Contrast this to the 2000 presidential election, in which Al Gore ended up with an 11-point margin over Bush among women voters.

Which begs the question: Is the gender gap a thing of the past? The short answer is a resounding "no."

Two recent polls show that women voters are, if anything, turning away from the GOP -- and that the Democrats have an opportunity to expand the gender gap and win back those women voters and more in the 2006 mid-term elections and beyond.

The first poll, a Democratic survey that was done by Lake Snell Perry Mermin & Associates Inc. this spring, revealed, as reported in the Washington Post, that "the public's agenda has shifted from homeland security and terrorism to domestic concerns such as jobs and the economy." In 2004, Bush used fear to score points with voters. But, while Karl Rove and Bush are still stoking the fears that Democrats can't be trusted to prevent terrorism, their message is no longer resonating in quite the same way. The London bombings may bring about a short-term shift in women's attitudes, but strong signs suggest that doubts about Bush's security policies are growing.

"Women, if left to their own devices, are going to tend and trend Democratic," the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway explained to the Washington Post's Brian Faler. "...Women are still congenitally Democratic, and I'm the Republican pollster saying that."

The second survey, "Women at the Center of Political Change," was conducted in May by EMILY's List Women's Monitor. As one of the most comprehensive post-election looks at the attitudes and motivations of female voters, the poll showed that in the past six months alone the GOP has lost a lot of ground with women voters.

Fifty-five percent of women said they believed that the country was heading in the wrong direction -- and they held the GOP responsible as the party in power. And just as the Lake poll discovered, women cited as their chief concerns domestic priorities like Social Security and health care.

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