What do women voters want? In a word: jobs.

Swing women voters put the economy and jobs at the top of their list of concerns, a new report shows. Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney has been closing the gender gap.

|
Lucas Jackson/Reuters/File
Jobseekers stand in line to attend the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. career fair held by the New York State department of Labor in New York in April.

We just finished reading a new report on swing female voters, which is based on a series of focus groups conducted earlier this month in Las Vegas and Philadelphia by the GOP polling firm Fabrizio McLaughlin & Associates and sponsored by the Young Guns Network, a group affiliated with House majority leader Eric Cantor. All the women in these groups either had voted in 2010 for a Republican candidate for governor or had not voted at all, but were now leaning toward President Obama or were undecided.

(We're not sure why the sampling of swing voters didn't also include women who had voted for a Democrat in 2010 but were now leaning toward Mitt Romney – though we'd imagine those women are harder to find, given that 2010 was a terrible year for Democrats, and Mr. Romney currently trails Mr. Obama among women by a considerable, though shrinking, margin.)   

Obviously, focus groups, being by definition small, aren't representative of voting populations as a whole. But they can still be enlightening, since they offer a level of insight that polling can't provide into what real voters are thinking.

The two biggest takeaways from this report: Female swing voters, not surprisingly, care waaaay more about the economy and jobs than any other issue, including so-called "women's issues." And many are not well-informed when it comes to politics and government. (Example: Some participants named Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin as current members of Congress.)

To some extent, the report seems to reinforce a point New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman made recently when he called Obama "the worst president I've ever seen when it comes to explaining his achievements, putting them in context, connecting with people on a gut level through repetition and thereby defining how the public views an issue."

Many of the women interviewed had negative views of Obama's health-care reform law – while also acknowledging that they didn't know what was in it. Indeed, the primary complaint about the law seemed to be that it was too big and confusing. Many also said they didn't know much about current tax policies, though when asked if the wealthy should pay more, they were divided. 

And a "decent sized minority" of those interviewed had no idea what the "war on women" was. 

Tthe women's most common reaction to Romney seemed to be that he was not particularly well-liked by Republican officials, both for being a "flip flopper" and for not being conservative enough. But that perception could actually benefit Romney, since these female swing voters (some of them registered Republicans) also view Republicans in Congress as too narrow on social issues and as "out of touch" with the general population.

These views may help explain why a new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows Romney making considerable headway among women voters, gaining 13 percentage points in popularity in the past month, while Obama lost seven points. Obama still leads Romney among women as a whole in the poll by 11 points. But that's down from his margin in 2008, when he won the female vote by 13 points. The president will need a strong edge among women again to win reelection. At the moment, at least, it looks as if he could do a better job of explaining his policies to them. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to What do women voters want? In a word: jobs.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2012/0531/What-do-women-voters-want-In-a-word-jobs
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe