President Barack Obama is leaving no stone unturned in his effort to attract female voters to his side, but it’s not proving particularly effective.
Obama is making such a big effort because he needs a double-digit victory among women to win re-election, according to
Politico. The female vote is particularly important in swing states. The president leads presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney in most polls of women, but the gap is shrinking.
Among the steps the Obama team has taken are criticism of Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters tournament, for its male-only membership policy; a video offering support for Planned Parenthood; denouncement of a Democratic strategist’s criticism of Ann Romney; and a
65-page report detailing all the supposedly pro-women policies that the administration has implemented.
As for the polls, two recent surveys — a CBS News/New York Times poll and a Pew Research Center poll — show Obama’s lead over Romney shrinking among women. The CBS News/New York Times survey, released Wednesday, showed Obama’s advantage at 6 percentage points, down from 11 points last month.
And worse yet for Obama, a poll released by The Hill Monday showed that 46 percent of likely female voters think Romney understands their issues better than Obama, while 41 percent think Obama better understands them.
“Women are pocketbook issue voters,” Romney’s spokeswoman Andrea Saul told Politico. “Gov. Romney is reaching out to women everyday by talking about the economy, gas prices, unemployment and the household budget squeeze that Americans face.”
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