Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Married Moms And Other Female Voter Groups



Via dohiyi mir I found this piece of news about women voters:

Poll results and interviews with political analysts indicate the GOP has lost ground with a voting group that helped the party keep hold of Congress and the White House in 2002 and 2004. Married moms have become a volatile swing group just as Democrats need to gain 15 GOP-held House seats and six in the Senate to win control of Capitol Hill.

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll this month found that support is now evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans among married women with children in the house. Republicans won this voting group by 18 percentage points in 2002 and Bush won it by 14 percentage points in 2004.

Remember the soccer moms? And the security moms? Perhaps because of these quasi-insulting tags for women voters we finally got the Nascar dads, too. I dislike these kinds of labels, because they suggest that people in the group vote the way they do because the description in the label, even when it clearly makes no sense. And I dislike the fact that other women don't seem to deserve even a silly label though they also vote.

What truly lies beneath my irritability on this topic is that it's all more of the same-old-same-old: Looking at women voters as an afterthought or only when a group looks to hover on the margin between the parties, but not bothering to actually find out what women of all types want when they vote. Usually, but not always, what women want from their political representatives is not that different from what men want, and I'd be astonished if someone could show me that there were no safety dads in the 2004 elections. Astonished. Or that men don't coach their children's soccer teams or go and watch the games, too, probably as often as the women do. But it's the women who are called after "soccer" or "safety" or "married moms". What about "married dads"? Who do they vote for and why? Oh, but "married dads" are just voters, you know.

Ok. This was a rant. I needed to rant today.