Romney and women and polls
The meme du jour is that women are flocking to Obama, based on a new USA Today/Gallup poll in the swing states showing Romney’s support among women there has dropped precipitously.
Polls at this point are almost ludicrously unimportant, except to show two things: (1) shifting trends of the moment; and (2) how the media and pollsters operate.
I can’t find any link to the actual stats for the poll; just the article on it (if you can provide a link I’d appreciate it). But reading between the lines I note a couple of things. The first is that there’s no breakdown of results swing state by swing state, so we don’t know if the changes mentioned are across the board in all the swing states or a skewed by just a couple. Nor do we know if some states were over- or uner-represented, and if so which ones.
The second is this, and it’s a whopper:
While women typically are more likely to identify themselves as Democrats than men are, that difference widens to a chasm in the USA TODAY poll. By 41%-24%, women call themselves Democrats; men by 27%-25% say they’re Republicans.
So here we have a poll in which, among women, self-professed Democrats outnumber Republicans by 17 points (we can imagine that the other 35% of the women are Independents). In that same poll, Obama is outdoing Romney by 14 points. Hmmm. Sounds like Romney is pulling in some of the Democratic women and at least half of the Independents, and Obama isn’t getting any of the Republican women.
And how does this breakdown of women by party affiliation compare to that of previous USAToday/Gallup polls on the same subject? Darned if I can find the answer, and I’ve tried (maybe you can).
Oh, and one other thing: the article does mention that the number of people questioned in the poll was 933 registered voters, and the number of swing states involved was 12. That works out to approximately 78 people sampled per state, and my guess is that about half of them would be men. So this big female shift is based on a poll that sampled an average of 39 women per state???
Excellent breakdown, I wonder how more polls are conducted with the same skill and dedication to finding the truth. I wonder how many women will now accept that this is how they are suppose to feel and go ahead and join the supposed crowd?
There is some things that should be mentioned more. Romney, although almost certainly the Republican nominee is not so yet, he suffers from a lack of familiarity to most voters and he is running within a few percentage points against a candidate with vast resources and name recognition.
That all adds up to a very strong start from where I sit.
Distraction. Ignore.
We are simpatico on one aspect of this election: “Polls at this point are almost ludicrously unimportant”. 🙂
I ignore all social science results, with the possible exception of ones that support conservatives.
The reasoning for this apparently risible policy is that social “science” basically exists to provide leftists’ proposals with a meretricious patina of scientific support. Hence the only results worth even considering to take seriously are those that constitute an admission against interest.
Ahh Neo, why do you destroy the beautiful fantasy by resorting to valid statistical arguments?
Reminds me of a talk given a few years back at my school by a fellow from Yale whose work was the current rage in social science. Can’t recall the catchy name, but it had to do with how a student of color “felt” in terms of bias in the classroom. His sample was a total of 8 students. I made the mistake of pointing out in the Q&A session that his sample had no statistical validity, and was promplty yelled at for being racist, and told I didn’t understand the feelings of students.
More on topic: the poll states an uncertainty of +- 4%, which I assume is one standard deviation. So 2 sigma would be +_8%. It lists Obama ahead of Romney by 51-42, but the statitistic shows by a 2 sigma level of 93% that it’s a dead heat. Even at 1 sigma, they could be within 2% of each other.
Hi Neo, David Kuhn in RealClearPolitics points out that in the year 2000 the polls showed George Bush with only 37% of the women’s vote but in the election he received 43% of the women’s vote. He also notes that Republicans have been winning the majority of white women’s votes since 1964! So I think Mitt Romney should work on a strategy to help win more votes from minorty women too. A focus on creating the conditions for small and medium size businesses to grow in all communities along with the the jobs this would create has been the governor’s message all along. He’ll need to make sure his message is heard in minority communities too.
I respectfully disagree with Bob Schroeder as to strategy.
I would not waste my time trying to pry (most!) people of color from their cheirshed masters. They’ll still go Democrat, even if the standard-bearer there were not one of their own (another reason to not waste time this way). This is especially so in light of the LDS (Mormon) Church’s peculiar history regarding people of color.
I do think it’s a good opportunity to treat people as people, without slicing and dicing by race, religion, or gender, and the chips will fall accordingly. If that many people actually prefer The One, so be it. We (anti-Obama libertarian-slash-conservative types) will have done all we possibly could. In the latter event, goodbye USA.
It’s suburban white moms and blue collar working men (what few there are left) who are the swing votes- let the battle prep begin!
I suspect women may warm to Romney as they get to know Ann and get some insight into their relationship. Romney’s reaction to her MS was probably what every woman in a bad situation would want. There is probably also some clicheed thinking that a stay-at-home mom is not only barefoot and pregnent but also dumb. Ann can dispel this notion rather easily. Add to that the fact that she did not want live-in household help, preferring to keep their homelife pretty normal. I can even imagine the luxury California house becoming a plus if it is becomes known that they both wanted a place where the whole family (5 kids, spouses, 16 grandkids) could come and spend time together as a family. It’s a rather nice contrast to some of our politicians who have used their wealth for prostitutes and mistresses.
Romney talks about the importance of his family in a rather understated way. He will let people get to know them slowly so they don’t seem like campaign props. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that John Edwards was making his hard sell on supporting Elizabeth. Far better for voters, especially women, to gradually get the feeling that they can trust Romney to take care of the country like he has cared for his family.
The polls and punditry are BS at this point. Maybe Romney was strategically brilliant in allowing people to get tired of flavors of the month (which usually turned out to be some kind of raw red meat) to lose their appeal and for people to want a return to home-cooked meat, potatoes, and vegies, with some ice cream for dessert. Our next president is going to have to make people want to eat their peas, not preach to them about it.