The Importance of Women Voters, and the Stupidity of Ignoring Them
Sun Apr 27, 2008 at 08:21:07 AM PDT
This was originally a comment on David Sirota's diary at Open Left. It was so long I decided to make it a diary......I am hoping that this will be treated with the some consideration. I did have some trepidatio posting this...but we'll see
Also I think it is important to transform the negative energy about anger that whites aren't voting for him into a positive understanding that women are just as proud and energized by the first serious women candidate for president. And no matter which one wins the nomination...it is important not to turn those who voted for their candidate but not the other candidate into bigots....however hard it is to resist.
That's not a good general election strategy. People (except for guilty white liberals) okay most people, who will vote in the general election, but have not voted in the primary, will not respond positively to being characterized as bigots if they have concerns about a candidate. Categorizing an undecided white voter...male or female....as a racist if they have hesitatancy about Barack Obama is not a way to get their vote... only their resentment.
Women voted for Clinton, not against Obama
Women voted for Clinton....and in the Penn. primary white women were 48% of the electorate.
Too many commentators don't acknowledge the historic nature of her candidacy....and just like after Iowa, blacks are voting for Obama, women, and at this juncture white women, are voting for Hillary Clinton.
The turnout in Pa was 2.3 million voters, 3 times 2004, Obama supporters thought it would be 1.4. But the excitement is not just coming from his side but also from her side. Hillary Clinton just like Obama is generating lots of new voters, new women voters, esp. single women, a very large segment of the electorate who are Democratic but rarely vote. David makes the case the Clinton people have to worry about black voters in the general....not voting for McCain but not showing up. I think the same is very true for this segment of the women's vote...They won't show up. Except I will say that white women are 48% of the electorate and black voters are just 12% of the electorate. That's a greater number of voters that will potentially stay home. Not that they hate the other candidate so much, but well as my mother used to say "I'm not excited".
The article below makes the case that gender was what matterd in Penn not race.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.c...
Election 2008
Obama loss may not be about race, but gender
By JONATHAN TILOVE
Newhouse News Service
WASHINGTON - There has been much reporting and commentary in the aftermath of the Pennsylvania primary about Sen. Barack Obama's failure to "close the deal" with white voters.
But an analysis of Pennsylvania results indicates that Obama's trouble may not be so much with whites - working class or otherwise - but with white women. And their overwhelming preference for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton may have less to do with any resistance to the prospect of a first black president, and more to do with their powerful desire to see the equally history-making election of a first female president.
"If you really look at the numbers, it's clear that this is a gender impact," said David Bositis, a senior research associate at the nonpartisan Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. Obama's perceived weakness with the white working class, Bositis said, is largely an artifact of Clinton's powerful appeal to women, who comprise the greater number of working-class voters in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
"The media seems to want to read race into a lot of things that are going on when it may actually have little to do with it," Bositis said.
White women, according to exit polls, made up 46 percent of those voting Tuesday, and Clinton carried them 68 percent to 32 percent.
By contrast, she carried white men by 57 percent to 43 percent, and they made up 33 percent of those voting.
Moreover, exit polls found, 14 percent of the Pennsylvania electorate were women who said the candidates' gender was important in deciding how to vote. Clinton won that group by 77 percent to 23 percent. Bositis said that means those voters accounted for 7.6 percentage points of her overall advantage over Obama, or 82 percent of her total victory margin of 9.3 points.
snip
"I think a lot of people who've been thinking about this race in Pennsylvania have been so attentive to the obvious excitement of the Obama candidacy, we may have underestimated to some degree the excitement of Sen. Clinton's supporters," Hagen said. "It is an historic candidacy, after all."
snip
And Clinton's support among women also may have been stoked by dismissive treatment in the news media of her candidacy, and calls for her to quit.
"Certainly the media coverage has gotten some hackles up," Gandy of the NOW said.
Or, as Ann Lewis, a senior campaign adviser to Clinton, put it: "There is a real anger among women at what people see as a pattern of trivialization of Hillary, of making jokes at her expense and minimizing her seriousness. And every time they see something like that, boy it reminds them of the times in their own lives when they've faced the same thing."
It is not just that the media trivializes the importance of the black vote, some media people trivialize the importance of the female vote. This community should try to understand the positive reasons people vote for her...because if you want Barack Obama to both be the nominee and the winner in November it is incumbent on you to treat her voters with respect.
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