Can it really be true that Mitt Romney leads Barack Obama among women? This is what The New York Times (and CBS) said in their latest poll –Romney 46, Obama 44. The Obama team and liberal blogs immediately went to work crapping on the poll.
The methodology was weird –they called back respondents from an earlier poll. But what if…? Obama can afford a lot of things to go wrong against Romney, but one thing he absolutely cannot afford is to have no gender gap.
Joseph Curl of The Washington Times is the latest to speculate on the Hillary Clinton-Joe Biden switcheroo. Bring your machete so you can hack your way through the snark. But once you do, you’ll find a reasonably persuasive argument underneath it.
Clinton’s positive numbers are off the charts. Biden’s are so-so –both approval and disapproval sit in the 40s. Biden’s putative asset, that he helps a bit with white working-class and Catholic voters, is even truer of Clinton, the famous drinker of shots in those proletarian Pennsylvania bars.
And women—forget about it. An Obama-Clinton ticket would pulverize any Romney ticket on the distaff side (is that insulting? I’m just trying to avoid repeating the word “women” too much). It wouldn’t matter if he put Carrie Underwood on his ticket.
I know, I know. It’s silly. I can right now picture the friends reading this who will write me to say, “Mike, that’s silly.” It probably is.
But here are a few points for your consideration that aren’t silly at all.
The gender gap goes back to the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush among women by eight points (Clinton 45 per cent, Bush 37, Perot 17). Four years later, Clinton topped Bob Dole among women by 16 points. Al Gore beat Dubya [Bush Jnr.] by 11 points.
John Kerry won women by just three points, and then in 2008, Obama punched it back up to 13, carrying women by 56 to 43 per cent. That’s an average 10-point margin. Given that women constitute a majority of the vote, 52 to 54 per cent, that’s a big deal.
If, say, 67 million women vote this fall, that’s 6.7 million more votes for Obama among women. It would more than make up for any deficit among men. Obama actually won among men last time, 49 to 48 per cent, but it seems doubtful that he would this time.
What if Obama suddenly can’t count on that cushion? The odds are that he can. There’s a recent PPP poll of North Carolina, and in it, Obama leads Romney among women by … wouldn’t you know it, exactly 10 points. So maybe that Times poll is just crazy.
?2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC
Compiled By Michael Tomasky