Romney's 'Women Problem'
By WILLIAM MCGURN, April 2, 2012
A USA Today poll shows Romney trails among swing-state female voters. Is this because he opposes mandatory coverage of birth control in health insurance?
It's over.
Mitt Romney has lost the 2012 election, and he's lost it because women are deserting the GOP over its opposition to ObamaCare's contraceptive coverage mandate. That's been the press drumbeat for the last few weeks. Now the argument appears to be backed up by a new USA Today/Gallup poll of swing-state voters. It shows Barack Obama out front for the first time since the poll started last November—largely because of the 2-1 advantage he enjoys over Mr. Romney among women under age 50.
Leave it to the liberal Salon website to sum up the conventional wisdom: "This is very likely a result of the prominence that contraception and women's issues have assumed in the public debate since February, when Republicans revolted against the Obama administration's efforts to make birth control a mandatory component of health insurance coverage."
One problem with this explanation: The same USA Today poll reports that 63% of those surveyed say they don't even know what Mitt Romney's position on government and birth control is. For that matter, 46% say they don't know President Obama's position either.
We don't know how these numbers break down among subgroups such as unmarried women, because USA Today has not released the cross tabs. What we do know, however, suggests it is premature to conclude the Republican Party's handling of the contraception mandate has cost Mr. Romney the women's vote. Especially when women in this same poll rank government policies on birth control last on their list of electoral priorities—behind health care, gas prices, unemployment, the national debt, etc.
We also know that many of the broadest conclusions about Mr. Romney's appeal among women from this new USA Today poll have been ripped out of any context. David Paul Kuhn is chief political correspondent for RealClearPolitics and author of "The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma." In an interview on Monday he told me the argument that Mr. Romney has lost women's support over the course of the contraception debate is contradicted by the timing.
"If the heated contraceptive debate was shifting the female vote, I would expect it to have burned Republicans with women back in February, when the debate was at its climax," Mr. Kuhn says. If you look at polls pre- and post-debate, Mr. Romney's support among women is steady in a half dozen major surveys, he adds.
Then there's the assumption that all women think the same. Steve Wagner of public opinion research firm QEV Analytics has taken a private poll, also of swing-state voters, specifically on the mandate, for the Catholic Association, a nonprofit. When he broke down the numbers for women under 50, he told me that he found two striking results.
The first is that nearly half of women under 50 attend religious services weekly. The second is that a majority oppose in principle what the administration is doing.
When asked, for example, whether the federal government has the right to force morally objectionable coverage on religious institutions, 52% of these women say "No." An even larger percentage, 59%, say that insurance companies should handle contraceptives the way they do other drugs (instead of having to provide them free). All of which suggests that Republicans who advance a religious liberty argument when asked about the contraception mandate will find a receptive audience.
That's not to say that President Obama is wrong to look to women for new votes—especially single women. Notwithstanding the jokes about the "I Got a Crush on Obama" video that went viral during the last campaign, the Obama Girl apparently spoke for many. In 2008, Mr. Obama won women handily—and captured 70% of the single female vote.
That makes unmarried women one of the most solidly Democratic voting blocs. Given that an estimated 20 million unmarried women did not vote in the last presidential election, it also makes them a natural target for Democratic mobilization.
The question is whether free birth control will do it, especially when the USA Today poll shows it to be such a low priority. We forget today, but in the 2010 national elections women showed they cared plenty about issues such as ObamaCare and the stimulus when they went for Republicans 49% to 48%. With the economy now showing signs of getting better, that may be a harder sell in 2012, but it's a sale Mr. Romney has to make.
The good news for Mr. Romney is that his failure to elicit enthusiasm among women likely has little to do with the way he or his party have handled contraception.
The bad news for Mr. Romney is that his inability to generate much excitement among women appears related to a general inability to generate much excitement among anyone.
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