Obama’s traditional bastion, women, fast becoming ’shrinking piece of Democratic pie’: poll
By ANIWednesday, October 20, 2010
WASHINGTON - With barely a few weeks to go for the mid-term polls, US President Barack Obama’s Democratic party is trying to win back groups that have traditionally supported Democrats, especially women, but even this section has reportedly been showing signs of favouring Republican candidates.
According to the Washington Post, unlike the other core groups like young people and black voters, women who are undecided, rather than merely unmotivated, are Obama’s most urgent targets.
In the House races, where women have sided with Democrats by an average of nine points since 1976, they are now about evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. That is a sharp drop- from four years ago, when women chose Democrats by a large 12-point margin and put them in the majority, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.
“Women are not a shrinking piece of the electorate. They’re a shrinking piece of the Democratic pie,” the paper quoted Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, as saying.
“They do not think the administration’s economic policies are working for their families, and worry about the priorities of this administration, and wonder if they get it,” he added.
To counterattack the trend, Democrats have reportedly released a number of gender-based negative ads in recent weeks attacking male Republican House candidates for bad behaviour, underscoring Republican candidates’ opposition to legalized abortion and other women’s health issues. In the Kentucky Senate race, it has also aired an ad that asks, among other things: “Why did Rand Paul once tie a woman up?”
On Thursday, Obama would reportedly hold an official event in Seattle targeting women on economic issues, before campaigning with Senator Patty Murray, who has had an advantage among women voters since first being elected in 1992 as a “mom in tennis shoes.”
Meanwhile, Democrats have said that the gender gap in their favour is not disappearing but simply becoming less, the paper said. (ANI)
