Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has erased much of President Barack Obama’s lead among women, various polls show.
A CNN-ORC poll released last week showed that women favor Obama over Romney only by a margin of 3 percentage points – 49 to 46 percent,
The Hill reports. That compares to a 12 percentage point lead for Obama in early May and an 18 point lead in April, according to USA Today/Gallup polls.
The female vote, which played a key role in Obama’s 2008 victory, will again be crucial in a race that is currently running neck-and-neck. Romney’s rising status among women is a source of great encouragement for his campaign.
The polls indicate that Democratic attempts to portray Romney and fellow Republicans as waging a war against women are failing.
“The number one issue among women is the sorry state of the economy and the fragile state of our jobs,” GOP strategist and pollster Whit Ayres told The Hill. “Mitt Romney has done an increasingly better job of paving a contrasting vision to Obama of a brighter economic future.”
Romney has benefited from gains in support among the GOP base as his primary challengers have left the race. “I think it’s likely that conservative women who may have been supporting [Rick] Santorum, or other candidates, have now come over to the Romney camp,” Michelle Diggles, senior policy advisor for the centrist think tank Third Way, told The Hill.
“There’s a big age gap among female voters, with Obama winning younger women. So my hunch is that a lot of older conservative and Republican women have coalesced around Gov. Romney recently.”
© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.