Sep 22 2008
Poll Stunner! McCain-Palin Close 34 Point Gap On Women’s Issues
OK this is the biggest poll shocker I have seen since the Palin selection for VP:
Since picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has obliterated what had been a 34-percentage-point deficit in a poll of likely women voters on the question of which candidate has a “better understanding of women and what is important†to them.
The two are now effectively tied, with McCain’s 44 to 42 percentage lead within the margin of error of the most recent poll conducted by pollsters Kellyanne Conway and Celinda Lake for Lifetime Television. In Lifetime’s July poll, women preferred Barack Obama on the same question by nearly three-to-one— 52 to 18 percent.
Emphasis mine. To go from a 34 point deficit to a 2 point lead in the span of 2 months is incredible. I still think the national polls are out of whack because of the models they use to extrapolate the samples into a representation of the national picture. If the voter models are off, so are the bottom line numbers. I also doubt all polls that have a 40% Dem- 30% Rep distribution, it just isn’t going to happen this year. My bet is the end numbers will we be 33%-35% each – a basic tie in turnout.
In 2006 the GOP repelled the moderate middle through their purity wars on RINOs, etc. This year the right is galvanizing behind McCain-Palin (the moderate and conservative wings bonded together in common cause again), so I don’t buy these one-sided turnout models.
And I think women are going to send a shock wave through the body politic for the next 16 years with Palin at the lead. Look at the numbers for Hillary supporters:
About one in four women who supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the primaries now said McCain and Palin have a better grasp of women’s needs than Obama and his running mate.
25% of Hillary supporters going to McCain-Plain, a number Obama cannot hope to win with. Women have their champion, and the more the elitist women try and smear Palin, the more your everday American women (and mothers) will rally to her side. You cannot smear Palin without the mud hitting average Americans and pissing them off.
Disparity with MSM polls:
http://news.aol.com/political-machine/straw-poll
McCain 62 – Obama 38, 250,000 votes
Obama wins Vermont.
Sneer if ya wish…
AJ,
A friend of mine smells fear from the Democrats about losing the House. He thinks that the Democratic leadership in general are giving every indication of disastrous internal poll results.
The link that you posted from the Politico.com about white women abandoning Obama support that.
Note as well the converse of the Marc Ambinder Atlantic blog post stating that 76% of Obama’s media buys are for negative ads compared to 59% of McCains’.
This means that less than a quarter of Obama’s media buys are positive for him.
My e-mail buddy reads this fact as evidence that the Obama Campaign and the DNC don’t think they can sell him to the voters. I.e., the Obama campaign gave up trying to make swing voters feel comforable with Barack Obama because they’ve concluded they can’t.
In other words, they are putting everything into making the election about McCain rather than about Obama.
The hard negative Obama campaign strategy will kill swing voter — and first time youth voter — turn out making this a party base turn out election.
This is something that the Obama camp thinks he has a chance of winning due to the Democrat’s huge investment in GOTV efforts.
My e-mail buddy calls the official new Obama end game campaign strategy “a variant on Goebbel’s Big Lie technique.” I think this strategy has two parts.
Part one is they’re claiming that whatever McCain says is a lie and dishonarable, with the MSM endlessly repeating that to make it true, even when McCain simply quotes from the Washington Post’s report about yesterday’s weather. The recent Howard Kurtz column calling a McCain ad false that relying on a Wash Post story for it’s facts is a good example. See: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGExMGZkNmE1ZjM3MGMyZDU0NjJmYmQyOGIwYjc4Y2M=
Part two (which I think true, but my e-mail buddy has no opinion on) is the smear campaign aimed at Gov. Palin.
The astroturf video smear Jawa Report picked up (see also: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/09/021573.php)and the “Palin Family Incest” smear inbeded by Al Frankin in that Saturday Night Live skit are examples of the second half of Obama’s campaign strategy.
The Democrats in general seem to be resorting to Hail Mary passes in the third quarter.
You only do that if the other side has a lead on the score board with good “run offense” that is moving the football three and half yards in a cloud of dust every time it has the ball.
My buddy may be wrong, but it doesn’t look that way to me.
At http://fuanglada.wordpress.com/ I have a Aug 30 post… called …
http://fuanglada.wordpress.com/2008/08/30/feminists-and-clinton-women-this-is-your-new-job/
[tongue in cheek] making the point to Hillary women that the way to get THeir gal, [Senator Clinton] into the White House is to vote for Senator McCain this time around… 🙂
AJ
Given the polls cited in your post, I can only conclude the % of Ds and Rs and Is must be incorrectly construed in favor of Obama. This might also explain Trent’s friends perspective. Of course, if your poll is inaccurate…..
AJ,
I have a theory abour “Palin Derangement Syndrome” you may want to bounce off of DJ:
Gov. Palin’s decision to have her son Trig is very important for cultural reasons.
Pre-Birth screening tests are becoming a major, but unspoken, ‘rite of passage’ in western culture that no one outside of the American Pro-Life movement speaks of. In America, almost every parent gets a Downs Syndrome screening test and 90% abort Downs positive babies. My wife and I both faced this “rite of passage” recently (our Daughter Karen was born in early April 2008) and we told the doctors we were not going to bother with the test. If it was positive, we would have had the child anyway. So why worry until Karen arrived. We would just deal with it then.
The basis of the “Pro-choice” political riff against Pro-lifers is that they care for unborn fetuses, but not for babies when they arrive. And that this was a case of angry (Republican) White men keeping women down.
Gov. Palin effectively puts a stake through that argument by putting a caring, loving, feminist (but Republican) face on “Walking the Walk” of the Pro-life creed as well as “Talking the Talk.” Her very life choices are life affirming and show that a successful professional woman from a working class background can have a family, a career and face down the darkest tests of maternity.
This represents a massive “cultural cruise missile” amidships of the “Pro-Choice” cultural brand that “lowers the barriers to entry” of pro-choice women for buying into the Republican political brand.
Jay Nordlinger has an interesting compilation post up over at the NRO site that seems to comfirm my thoughts that a significant element in Palin Derangement Syndrome is guilt over abortion.
See the following from that link:(http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ZWQ2NzA1Mzg0NGNlZjE3NDE5MzE4OWIwOTMwMDI2MTQ=)
I have written a fair amount about Palin-hate and abortion — and this letter caught my eye: “I’ve been sitting and working this morning at a gathering place on the Rice University campus. Sitting at a table a few feet away, two women are chatting. The conversation turns to Sarah Palin. They both hate her. She will do away with abortion, with birth control, she is a creationist, a book-banner. But they keep coming back to abortion.â€
At the end of his letter, this correspondent says, “[All this] is enough to make me despair. And to think that the America of my imagination is no longer the real America. Maybe it never was.â€
A woman received an e-mail whose Subject line was “Brilliant Strategy.†And this is what the e-mail said (there’s a follow-up, so stay tuned):
Dear Friends:
We may have thought we wanted a woman on a national political ticket, but the joke has really been on us, hasn’t it? Are you as sick in your stomach as I am at the thought of Sarah Palin as Vice President of the United States?
Since Palin gave her speech accepting the Republican nomination for the Vice Presidency, Barack Obama’s campaign has raised over $10 million. Some of you may already be supporting the Obama campaign financially; others of you may still be recovering from the primaries. None of you, however, can be happy with Palin’s selection, especially given on her positions on women’s issues.
So, if you feel you can’t support the Obama campaign financially, may I suggest the following fiendishly brilliant alternative? Make a donation to Planned Parenthood. In Sarah Palin’s name. A Planned Parenthood donation is tax deductible, while a political donation isn’t.
And here’s the good part: When you make a donation to PP in her name, they’ll send her a card telling her that the donation has been made in her honor.
And this is what our correspondent wrote (to me):
Imagine getting this e-mail. Imagine telling women to make a donation to Planned Parenthood in Sarah’s name so that she’ll get a card. Her crime, of course, is that she has chosen life, that she is self-made, and that she has a beautiful family. And she’s happy.
As a woman who was a liberal on Long Island before 9/11 made me rethink things and Mark Steyn’s America Alone hammered it home, I’ll tell you what is spurring some of the most intense hatred from the sisterhood: Sarah makes them remember their own choices, i.e., their abortions, their commitment to self over family, to self over country, to self over God.
But the first one, well, that’s the kicker — we liberal gals were so blasé about abortions back in the day. Now we look at Sarah and think, “What if?†So . . . college would have been deferred a few years, and we ended up divorced from our first husbands anyway, so maybe a shotgun marriage that resulted in our true firstborn wouldn’t have been so bad, and are we really so happy now?â€
[…] get’s even more bizarre if you look at poll internals. I noted one poll showing McCain-Palin moving 36% points with women! That is 1/3rd of all women moving to support McCain-Palin, on top of the support McCain had […]