A Call Out to Women
WASHINGTON, Oct. 28-Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, says that women are “tired of being a political football” and that her organization urges young ladies to “vote as if your life depends on it.”
Page Gardner of Women’s Voices, Women Vote wants politicians to know that the idea of a “security mom” is a farce.
And other women’s organizations, each with its own message and own way of saying it, have been canvassing the nation in the last days leading up to the election to make sure that women’s voices are heard. And, of course, to make sure that women vote.
“This will not be the biggest election of our lives, but it may be the biggest in our lives to date,” Crystal Lander, campus program director of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Get Out Her Vote campaign said Tuesday.
She pointed to hot-button issues that could be guided, or decided, by whoever wins the nation’s vote on Nov. 2: reproductive rights, civil rights, national security, global trade and economic policies.
“This next president will be able to make so many key decisions that we will have to deal with for the next 30 or 40 years,” she said. “These are all issues that we feel resonate very strongly.and these are not things that are easily changeable.”
Lander’s group has visited over 250 college campuses nationwide, and worked with an additional 159 campus groups, to urge female students to register, vote and become more aware of the issues that are at stake in every election. She estimated that the founbdation has gotten over 20,000 women to pledge to register, or register to vote, thus far.
“The key thing is, women vote differently than men, and when women vote, they can change the elections,” she said, explaining Smeal’s football analogy. “When they realize we are key-all of a sudden everyone is scrambling for us. But we’ve been there the whole time.”
Susan Carroll, a senior scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, confirmed that statistics show a gender gap in the way Americans have voted over the past two decades. In presidential exit polls since 1980, higher percentages of women have typically supported Democratic candidates than have men, according to the center.
In 2000, for example, women’s support of George W. Bush was 10 percentage points less than that of men . And in 1980, women’s support of Jimmy Carter was 8 percentage points greater than that of men.
Even when favoring the same candidate as men, women have done so by different margins.
In 1988, for instance, 50 percent of women voted for George H.W. Bush, while 49 percent voted for Michael Dukakis, according to exit polls. For men, on the other hand, 57 percent voted for Bush, while only 41 percent voted for Dukakis.
Carroll said her guess was that in upcoming election, percentage points would be more closely aligned. “I think the key issues for women are much the same as what the key issues for men are,” she said.
She would not make predictions on their actual votes, however. “I think the election really hinges on which of those issues are in the forefront of voters’ minds when they go to the polling booth,” she said.
Carroll said the strength of the women’s vote should not be underestimated, noting that women have had a higher voter turnout rate than men since the 1980s-and she expects more of the same for the upcoming election.
“There has been an unprecedented mobilization this year of voters in general, but specifically of women,” she said. “I expect the number of women who are voting this year to go up for sure.”
And many of the organizations that have led these mobilization efforts are warning politicians and pollsters not to underestimate the voting power of newly registered individuals, particularly women, this year.
Gardner, of Women’s Voices, Women Vote, said her organization has focused on unmarried women, who in the past had made up “the largest group of non-participants” in the elections.
Her organization found that in the 2000 elections only 52 percent of eligible unmarried women voted, compared to 68 percent of eligible married women. Since then, it has led a campaign of mass phone calls and mailings in 16 states that have had particularly large gaps between married and unmarried women voters.
She estimates that the organization has registered more than 130,000 unmarried women, and because of this, she discouraged any attempts to try and pin down the female electorate to any particular political stance. Gardner said the “security mom”-the middle-class married woman whose fear of terrorism drives their voting-is “not a phenomena.”
She said the characterization leaves out the growing number of unmarried women who, according to their polling, see terrorism as one of their lesser worries and view issues like healthcare and job growth as larger concerns.
Marie Wilson, president of the White House Project, spoke last week on her group’s Vote, Run, Lead initiative, which has focused on registering voters from previously underrepresented groups in key states including Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, and Washington. She warned that many of these newly registered individuals might not be reflected in the polls.
“A lot of the polls really are done with either people who are registered to vote, people who are prospective voters or expected voters, because that’s how they [figure] out who to call,” she said. “I don’t think they are calling the housing projects and the Twin Cities . I don’t think they are calling people on Native American reservations. I don’t think they are calling folks who are in transitional housing or who are in deaf housing.”
And what about the women from Massachusetts? With most of the national organizations focusing on hotly contested states, the solidly blue Bay State is being left out of the loop. But Risa Nyman, executive director of the League of Women Voters’ Massachusetts chapter, said she doubts this will deter women in the state from voting.
“This is the first election since the debacle of the election in 2000, and since 9/11,” she said. “I think there is going to be a big turnout in Massachusetts, even though we are not a swing state.”
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