Until your post I never looked at the OP. TIA likes to shuffle things around until the Democrat winds up ahead. He has never accepted that the preference shifted post 9/11, with women moving toward Bush and the GOP. So all the nonsense comparing 2000 to 2004 with an insistence Gore voters did not shift to Bush four years later is base ignorance. There is no other way to describe it. It would be every bit as asinine as not recognizing there has been a shift back this year, a restored gender gap, albeit one that may be fragile since it is apparently anti-Bush and anti-Iraq more than a fundamental turn in our favor.
I'm swamped with football so I'll just paste a long section from Anna Greenberg.
http://www.wvwv.org/mediaroom/view_news.cfm?id=65Moving Beyond the Gender Gap
"The shrinking of the Democratic margin among women voters was the most important, and perhaps the least noticed, development of the 2004 election. In the two previous presidential campaigns, the Democratic candidate triumphed among women voters by 16 percentage points (Bill Clinton) and 11 points (Al Gore). In contrast, John Kerry won women voters by a mere 3 points, 51 to 48 percent. Not only did the Democratic candidate garner less support among women than in the past, but the overall size of the gender gap narrowed as Bush maintained a solid 11-point margin among men. The small gender gap is consistent with the results of the 2002 congressional elections, when Democrats and Republicans essentially broke even among women, in contrast to 1998 and 2000 when congressional Democrats won women voters by 6 and 8 points, respectively.
This development is not a happy one for progressives, because it signals the chipping away of the foundation that attached women to the Democratic Party. In the past, economic issues helped cement socially conservative, white, blue-collar women to the Democratic Party, while social issues such as support for a woman's right to choose kept more progressive, often college-educated women in the Democratic camp. As Democrats failed to compete on economic issues in the last two election cycles, they lost socially conservative downscale women largely on cultural and security issues. In the absence of an economic alternative, security and morality crowded out the issues where Democrats compete most strongly.
But this did not happen overnight; beginning in 1994, Democrats experienced a drop-off of white, social-conservative women supporters as politics became increasingly polarized around cultural issues. Of course, the growing salience of cultural issues began much earlier, as early as the 1960s when the women's movement and the backlash to societal changes mobilized actors and organizations on the left and the right, but the 1994 elections represent a low moment from which the Democrats have never recovered. The 1996 election with a strong economy, a weak Republican opponent, and a Democratic incumbent with a compelling values narrative was a temporary respite from these trends, but it was just a respite.
To address the issue of women's declining support for the Democratic Party, progressives need to cease thinking of women as a monolithic voting bloc and understand that the differences among them are fundamental and polarizing. Women cannot be approached politically as a unified set of actors with similar interests; rather, they need to be targeted as distinct groups of voters with different political preferences and agendas. Moving forward, progressives need to consider where they can increase support among like-minded women voters, where they can move persuadable women voters to the progressive side of the ledger, and how they can diminish their losses among other women. Specifically, Democrats should consider the distinct voting patterns of the following groups of women:
* Unmarried women. Unmarried women are among the most progressive voters in the electorate. They are economic populists who are socially liberal and support Democrats by wide margins. Yet, they underparticipate in politics relative to their married counterparts. In 2004, organizations such as Women's Voices, Women's Vote successfully helped increase their share of the vote in the electorate, but there is considerable room for growth.
* Older women. Older women are the quintessential swing voters. They have been splitting their vote nearly evenly between the par ties for almost a decade, and their support ebbs and flows depending on how the parties speak to them. In 2004, Kerry lost an opportunity to win older women, which probably cost him the election, by failing to speak to their very serious concerns about their long-term economic security.
* White, socially conservative women. Democrats lose white bluecollar women and white married women by large margins; in fact, these women could almost be considered Republican base voters. Yet, there are important openings with these conservative voters. They have concerns about their families that can be addressed by progressives, such as the prevalence of violence and sexual content on television, video games, and the Internet. They are pragmatic and want to protect their children, by making sure they have access to comprehensive sex education in school, and their parents, through stem cell research into chronic medical conditions. Progressives should be able stop the hemorrhage among these women by reframing what it means to care about children and families.
These strategies do not require progressives and Democrats to shift to the center on issues like support for reproductive rights, support for "traditional marriage," or the advancement of women's rights. On the contrary, there is no evidence that shifting to the center will bring in socially conservative women, who understand very well that the Democratic Party supports a woman's right to choose. Instead, Democrats need to offer a strong economic agenda for women that cuts across all of these groups, addressing concerns about health care that are fundamental to unmarried and older women and not an anathema to conservative women. Most importantly, Democrats must reframe the cultural debate, which progressives cannot win in its current incarnation."
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