GOP social conservatives cost their party plenty

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Recent polls have found damage to the Republican brand and its candidates from a detour into cultural-war fights about contraception and proper sexual behavior for women.

Several recent polls have shown that Obama's approval rating has jumped among women since December, from 43 percent to 53 percent.

In a national Pew Research Center poll, for instance, Obama was carrying female voters by a lopsided 59 percent to 38 percent over Romney and Santorum.

A gender gap has been present in every presidential election since 1980, with a greater proportion of women than men preferring the Democrat; the difference has averaged about 7 percentage points.

Women are a crucial voting bloc for Obama, particularly in suburban areas of cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Denver and Cleveland. His re-election strategy is predicated on energizing and winning female voters.

Obama would not be in the White House today if he had not beaten Republican Sen. John McCain by 13 points among women four years ago. Women preferred Obama over John McCain 56 percent to 43 percent.




http://www.kansascity.com/2012/03/10/3482308/drift-away-from-gop-by-women-voters.html
 
“We all agreed that this seemed like a throwback to 40 years ago,” said a retired teacher from Iowa City who describes herself as an evangelical Christian and “old school” Republican of the moderate mold.


Until just two weeks ago, she had favored Mitt Romney for president.


Not anymore. She said she might vote for President Obama now.


“I didn’t realize I had a strong viewpoint on this until these conversations”. As for the Republican presidential candidates, she added: “If they’re going to decide on women’s reproductive issues, I’m not going to vote for any of them. Women’s reproduction is our own business.”


In Iowa, one of the crucial battlegrounds in the coming presidential election, and in other states, dozens of interviews in recent weeks have found that moderate Republican and independent women — one of the most important electoral swing groups — are disenchanted by the Republican focus on social issues like contraception and abortion in an election that, until recently, had been mostly dominated by the economy.


And in what appears to be an abrupt shift, some Republican-leaning women said they might switch sides and vote for Mr. Obama — if they turn out to vote at all.


The sudden return of the “culture wars” over the rights of women and their place in society has resulted, the women said, in a distinct change in mood in the past several weeks. That shift adds yet another element of uncertainty to a race that has been defined by unpredictability, at least for Republicans.


To what extent women feel alienated remains unclear: most interviews for this article were conducted from a randomly generated list of voters who had been surveyed in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll. But the latest comments from the Republican candidates and in the right-wing media, aimed at energizing the party’s conservative base, have been enraging to some women.


After talk show host Rush Limbaugh denounced a Georgetown University law student as a “slut” and a “prostitute” for her advocacy of insurance coverage of contraception, some women were critical.


“Everybody is so busy telling us how we should act in the bedroom, they’re letting the country fall through the cracks,” said a retired public school worker in Seattle who voted for McCain over Obama in the 2008 election. Of the Republican candidates this year, she added, “They’re nothing but hatemongers trying to control everyone, saying, ‘Live as I live.’ ”


She continued, “If Republicans would stop all this ridiculous talk about contraception, I’d consider voting in November.”


From 1992 to 2008, Democrats won the overall women’s vote in every presidential election.


But in the 2010 midterm election, women swung to the Republicans. Now there are signs of another shift: in a New York Times/CBS News poll last month, the president finished ahead of Romney among all women by 57 percent to 37 percent. He held much the same advantage over Santorum.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/u...men-tell-of-disenchantment-with-gop.html?_r=1
 
These fools don't realize the extent they are trying to put religion in. So if Muslims outnumbered them we'd be Iran?
 
The Dude said:
They tell what the populous is thinking, repubs better hard turn to the center.
Click to expand...

They can't. They painted themselves into a corner. This is the last gasp of the theocracy crowd.
This is a rerun of the WHIG Party suicide. Things will get better after the election when progressives will be running the show.
 
Jennifer DeJournett, president and co-founder of Voices of Conservative Women, a non-profit organization that gets women involved in politics, said the Republican party must appeal to women voters if they hope to win the election in November.


"I think everybody knows that women's votes are key to winning, they out-vote men," said DeJournett. "As far as the social issues, the left has been very effective at using women and using women's issues to do that."


During the last election cycle, that was certainly the case. In 2008, women cast close to 10 million more votes than men, and these women favored Obama over McCain by a 13-point margin.


Recent polling shows that women voters feel alienated by the GOP candidates' stance on women's issues, particularly in regard to contraceptive access.


"The right keeps walking into it. Rush Limbaugh's comments were not helpful. Any reasonable person would say that," DeJournett said.




http://www.pri.org/stories/politics-society/government/gop-candidates-struggle-to-appeal-to-women-voters-gop-candidates-struggle-to-appeal-to-women-voters-gop-candidates-struggle-to-appeal-to-women-voters-8818.html
 
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