Reince Priebus's pollsters-of-the-ladies speak.
Three of the pollsters the Republican Party has out looking into how it can lose the women's vote a little less badly in 2014 have taken to CNN's website to explain their findings, and apparently Nicole McCleskey, Linda DiVall and Kellyanne Conway have concluded—with
enthusiastic backing from their employer, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus—that what women want is dishonesty. It's hard to come up with another explanation for
stuff like this:
We know that Democrats like to reduce women down to single-issue voters. They like to talk about "the women's vote" as if it's a monolith.
Uh, guys? It's not Democrats who have a problem with women voters, so maybe don't go donning the mantle of the expert just yet. And exactly what is that single issue that Democrats are supposedly so obsessed with? Because if it's abortion, we might note that Republicans are the one who keep, y'know, pushing state laws to restrict it. If Republicans weren't so relentlessly attacking women on that front, Democrats wouldn't be focusing on it much at all (for better or worse).
So what does our polling show? First, women's priorities run the gamut, but the most important issues involve jobs and household finances.
Second, the vast majority of women are upset with the status quo and express feelings that range from anger to apathy. No one, however, is satisfied.
To put that into a political context, that's bad news for the party that holds the White House. Democrats should be especially concerned, because their only discernible appeal to women voters has been "Republicans don't like you."
So apparently these Republican women pollsters of women think the women they are polling are too stupid to know that the government is not entirely controlled by the president, and that Congress has something to do with it. Because while, according to polling
not done for the Republican Party, President Obama's numbers among women aren't great, the Republican Party's numbers among women are
in the toilet.
Also, this is what your big study-women project comes up with, that women care about jobs and household finances? And this is supposed to be bad news for Democrats? The party that is pushing to raise the minimum wage, expand overtime pay eligibility, strengthen workplace protections for pregnant women, and, let's not forget, pass the Paycheck Fairness Act? You mean job and household finance issues like that?
Of course, it all boils down to Obamacare for these pollsters—they are, after all, working for the Republican Party—and, as we previously discussed, somehow their polls find that women are much more opposed to Obamacare than other polls, ones not done for the Republican Party, have found. All the rest of the sneering from the pollsters and Priebus about how Republicans have meaningful alternatives and Democrats have no message but "Republicans don't like women" is cover, trying to keep the press interested in the shiny "ooh, Republicans are listening to women" story while in reality they're simply taking women as an excuse to keep fixating on Obamacare. Republicans likely will do better with women voters in 2014 than they did in 2012. It's going to be a richer, whiter, older midterm electorate. But what it won't be is because Republicans actually provided meaningful answers on jobs and household finance issues women care about.