It was a much discussed feature of the campaign for months: will President Obama’s accusations of a Republican “War on Women” widen the gender gap that had been a feature of American elections since 1980?
Gallup says the Obama strategy was successful.
The gender gap in the 2012 presidential election was the largest since Gallup began tracking the metric in 1952, according to data released by the polling firm on Friday.
President Obama won women by 12 percentage points, while Mitt Romney won men by 8. That’s a 20-point gender gap, edging out the 1984 election when Ronald Reagan defeated Democrat Walter Mondale in a landslide.
Reagan won both men and women in that election, but carried men by 28 points and women by only 10 – a disparity of 18 points.
2012 was the fifth straight election to feature a double-digit gender gap.
Still, Romney performed better among women than Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) did in 2008. Obama had a 14-point advantage among female voters over his GOP counterpart that year. Romney also outperformed McCain among men in this election – in 2008 Obama and McCain split the male vote.
The politics of gender played a significant role throughout the 2012 election, as Romney looked to cut into Obama’s advantage among female voters by framing the economy as a women’s issue.
The strategy worked for a while, as polls showed women flocking to the GOP challenger after his strong first debate performance. But Romney was unable to hold on to those gains in the final weeks of the campaign, and the Obama campaign relentlessly portrayed the GOP candidate as a throwback to the 1950s in his views on women’s reproductive and pay equity issues.
It didn’t help Romney that two Republican Senate candidates tripped themselves up by getting in trouble with voters over comments about rape and pregnancy. But ultimately, it was the president’s relentless scare tactics — aided by female surrogates who wildly exaggerated Romney’s positions on the issues — that worked to undermine the GOP candidate’s message to women.
A billion dollars goes a long way toward creating whatever reality in the voter’s mind that will lead to victory. The attacks by President Obama that misrepresented or lied about Republican positions apparently worked to perfection.
Nuke. The. Nineteenth. Amendment. Women are stupid.
Turn the tables. Shove their own extremists down their throats. John Holdren advocated forced abortions. What could be more anti-women than that? Until the republicans learn to play dirty like the democrats do, nothing will change. Alinsky 101, pick a target, freeze it, personalize it. That is exactly what they did with Akin. I had never even heard of the guy before they splattered his dumb comments all over the place. They painted Romney with the Akin brush, doesn’t matter that Romney is a moderate, they set the narrative because nobody fought back.
Apparently Bill Maher was right: “The American people aren’t very bright.” He might have added, “…particularly (younger) women.”
Married women, by and large seem to support policies and positions that help rather than hurt, their husbands.
Single women, who see government as their stand-in spouse/daddy, are wont to do the same.
One of the great failures of the Romney/Ryan campaign was not beating Obama over the head and shoulders for his dismantlement of the school voucher program while he sends his own children to the private Sidwell Friends School, rather than consign them with the rest of the riff-raff’s spawn to the DC school system.
Such an attack would decisively hit all the right targets and really piss off mothers,(both married and single).
Every GOP ad from here on out should ALWAYS show a happy nuclear family consisting of a (male) father, a (female) mother, and their (presentable) children.
One of the core values that we are selling is the sanctity of the traditional family and the values that it represents and reinforces.
That’s swell…show the benefits of what we believe in.
Let Sandra Fluke smarmily whine about having to buy her own latex products, compared to the optics of a happy family waving at the camera from the church doorway.
Who would be more appealing?
Yet another reason to break up the Republic if needs be. Demagoguery is now triumphant, and we who are not Progressives will never recieve a fair hearing under the current system. No. I have no desires to be part of such a nation.
If the women wish unquestioned and untrammeled control of the country, they may have it, but not with my participation.
I also look forward to society telling men they must continue to work hard, while women will take prestigious college spots, work in industry a few years, drop out, go enjoy watch the kids grow up for a few years, then come back with pay equal to or greater than the man who has loyally been there the entire time for the company.
Democrats do not give a damn about men unless they belong in unions, are black, or Hispanic.
At my alma mater the former student government offices have been taken over by the women’s center. I have seen numerous girl-only STEM encouragement groups on campus. Meanwhile…it took being a complete jerk to get any acknowledgment of Veteran’s Day, and even then there really is no *official* school actvity honoring or recognizing the need for the martial values–bravery, courage, fortitude, resilience, self-reliance, etc. Nothing at all.
What will get focused on is the Republican gap with women, not the Democrat gap with men. Or, for that matter, the establishment’s gap with men. We are not women without vaginas and never will be. To war.
What this shows is how gullible women are. Reminds me of my (then) wife years ago. She had perfectly good bottles of cleaning supplies available to her but the latest-greatest on TV was the one she had to have. And she spent on that stuff. Years later she confessed to me that all that new crap did no better than what she already had – took her many years to come to that conclusion. When she was younger she would most definitely have voted for the democrat – now she votes mostly republican. And she’ll use all of a cleaning product before restocking. As they get older they get harder to fool.
The party of stupid is lousy at combating the lies and deception coming from the left and it has nothing to do with the MSM. After all – any time Romney had anything to say the MSM would happily stick a camera and mic in his face and let him have at it. Trouble with Mitt is he wouldn’t say sh*t if he had a mouthful. Apparently nice guys do finish last.
Gives a whole new dimension to the phrase “dumb broad”
“Even though Romney won a majority of white women’s votes (56 percent), a gender gap was clearly apparent among white voters. Forty-two percent of white women, compared with 35 percent of white men, voted for Obama. Unlike white women, majorities of both black women and Latinas voted for Obama. However, as with the
vote among whites, a gender gap was apparent for both blacks (96 percent of women versus 87 percent of men voted for Obama) and Latinos (76 percent of women versus 65 percent of men voted for Obama).”
Based on those numbers, it looks like Obama sold himself as the Husband in Chief to single moms. Looks like Obama has won himself one hell of a harem. Talk about polygamy. Obama has millions of wives.
I wonder how those minority percentages translate into real numbers, given the high rate of male felons.
I recommend cats.