Detroit Free Press
11-11-07
Will voters get in touch with feminine side?
Experts say balloting hard to predict
BY STEVEN THOMMA
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- Even from a distance, you can tell it's a Hillary Clinton
campaign rally. It's clear well before you see the bumper stickers on the cars or
hear the speeches inside.
You can tell by the women, young and old, lined up early. Often outnumbering
men by margins of 2 to 1, they come to see the first woman with a real chance of
being a major party's nominee for president -- and a real chance of being elected.
They talk about health care and the war. But they're also drawn by an emotional,
woman-to-woman bond summed up by one fan at an early Clinton rally in Iowa: "I
feel it in the heart."
Eight weeks before the voting starts, Clinton is the favorite to win the Democratic
nomination. And the prospect of her taking it and the Oval Office from what she
calls the boys' club of presidential politics raises the question: Will Clinton's
gender help her, hurt her or make no difference?
One possibility: a new gender gap -- with a surge of women, some of them
Republican, voting for her on one side, and a bloc of men lying to pollsters about
their readiness to vote for a female candidate, then voting against her in the
privacy of the voting booth.
Even with some history as a guide -- there was an increase of women voting for
female Senate and House of Representatives candidates in 1992's so-called
Year of the Woman, for example -- the stakes are higher and the votes much
more difficult to predict when the presidency is at stake.
"We have no benchmark. We have no way to know," said Kathleen Dolan, a
political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who's written
extensively on female candidates and voters.
So far, polls suggest that women are supporting Clinton more than her rivals.
Iowa will be first test
In Iowa, the first state to vote in January, the U.S. senator from New York now
gets the support of 33% of women and 22.5% of men, according to a survey of
likely Democratic caucus attendees by the University of Iowa.
Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois gets 26.5% of women and 26.7% of men. Former
Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina gets 16.8% of women and 25% of men.
Clinton aides think her support from women could grow in a general election
against a male Republican candidate.
Women represent as much as 54% of the vote. Clinton pollster Mark Penn said
that 94% of young women are more likely to vote if a woman is on the ballot. As
many as 20 million unmarried women sat out the 2004 election.
He also told reporters that the "emotional element" of a female president could
draw as many as one out of four Republican women to vote for Clinton, a
crossover that would give her a better shot at winning such swing states as
Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Virginia.
Independent analysts also see some potential crossover appeal.
"There is a possibility that Clinton could attract moderate Republican and
independent women," said Dianne Bystrom, director of the Catt Center for
Women and Politics at Iowa State University. "I'm not sure the numbers will
be as high as Clinton thinks, but there could be some crossover."
'No way to know'
Yet for any gender advantage Clinton might have, there remains the question of
how many Americans will vote for a woman.
Large majorities tell pollsters that they'd have no problem voting for a woman.
But minority politicians have faced the same landscape, only to find that their
support dropped on Election Day, with some people having voted differently than
what they'd said.
"There is some piece of the population that will work exactly like that, people who
will say I'm supporting her or will support a woman, and then will vote the other
way," said Dolan at the University of Wisconsin.
"That's just one of the pieces that make this really hard. Until people get into the
polling place, there's no way to know how it's going to play out.