This new
Gallup poll on swing state voters is filled with bad news for Mitt Romney. The worst of it is that, despite the obsessive insistence by the Romney campaign that women don't care about their reproductive rights, turns out
abortion is the top issue for women voters in swing states. By a lot.
But that's not Mitt's only problem. Oh no. Because equal rights and pay and opportunity matter to women too.
In a recent interview with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, Romney insisted that the top issues of concern to women "relate to education and jobs." Oh, and the deficit.
But as you can see, while he's right that women care about jobs, they care about abortion more. And as for education? That's not nearly as important to them as equal pay. And as for the deficit ... well, that's not even on the radar.
The Romney campaign has worked very hard to persuade lady voters that they don't care about their rights. Countless Romney surrogates, from Chief Adviser on Lady Things Ann Romney to South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, have said women don't care about birth control or protecting Roe v. Wade. Romney's former lieutenant governor and current lady surrogate Kerry Healey said contraception access is a "hypothetical" and "peripheral" issue for women. Women's inequality in the workplace has received even less attention—until Tuesday's presidential debate, when Romney tried to prove his concern about women in the workplace by telling a made-up story about requesting "binders full of women" to hire.
Romney also insisted that what women really care about is having flex time so they can rush home to cook dinner for their children. That's far more important than equal pay, apparently. After all, the campaign was first asked about Romney's position on equal pay six months ago, and he still doesn't have an answer. Funny, flex time to cook more doesn't make that list of top concerns for women voters, does it?
The Romney campaign—in fact, the entire Republican Party—has tried to dismiss women's concerns, because they are on the wrong side of every issue that matters to women. Too bad for them, women aren't as dumb as Republicans think they are and can't be told what to care about. Abortion, birth control, health care, equal pay—these things matter to women. And no amount of mansplaining or condescension or casual dismissal is going to make women stop caring about their own rights. And that's very, very bad news for Republicans.
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