The Battle For Women

I just got an email from Page Gardner of Women's Voices Women Vote with some polling results:

Gallup recognizes the importance of the marriage gap, and has been polling on the preferences for the General Election and reporting the results by marital status and gender since early June. Be sure to check the WVWV website each week to see the latest results. This week, 57% of unmarried women favor Barack Obama, and 33% support John McCain. Of married women, 54% favor John McCain, and 39% support Barack Obama -- giving Barack Obama an overall 39 point marriage gap.

And yet unmarried women lag behind their married counterparts in registering and voting. Organizations like WVWV are trying to balance that (they have registered over 700,000 voters so far this year) but it's going to take a message as well as registration efforts.

That's why the Obama campaign is amping up their women's outreach.

While Palin makes a historic appeal to women to break the glass ceiling, the Obama campaign will have an equal pay ad airing this week reminding voters of policy differences with the McCain-Palin ticket that vastly impact females.

"More and more families depend on the income earned by working women, so you'd think we'd be united in our determination to help eliminate the unfair pay gap and pay women what they deserve for the work they do. But even now in 2008 Senator McCain has stood in the way of legislation to help close the pay gap... only from the man who repeatedly says the fundamentals of our economy are strong," said Moira Mack, spokeswoman for the Obama campaign.

On Monday, the Obama campaign released a list of major female backers--some there from the start of his campaign, but more important, names of women prominent in the Clinton presidential campaign and some visible females who are just now making a public endorsement. Obama spoke to the group Monday in a conference call, first reported in the Huffington Post.

On Tuesday, Ellie Smeal of the Feminist Majority and Kim Gandy of NOW--the National Organization for Women-- hold a press conference at the National Press Club to make their endorsement of Obama public. These Democratic-allied groups had been in the Clinton camp.

On Wednesday, Michelle Obama and Lilly Ledbetter, a leader in the battle of equal pay for equal work, take part in a roundtable in Richmond, Va. and headline a Virginia Women for Obama voter registration rally.

It continued today with Michelle Obama in North Carolina. You can read about this women's week of action here. The NOW endorsement is unusual, they haven't endorsed in a Presidential race since 1984.

And most crucial, Obama is not hiding his stance on a hot-button culture war issue, but making sure the differences between him and his opponent are clear.

WASHINGTON - Republican John McCain, an abortion rights opponent with a conservative Senate record on the issue, seems content with the public's perception that he's more moderate on the subject.

Democrat Barack Obama, who supports abortion rights, is only too happy to remind voters where McCain stands, but he tries to make his case without attracting too much attention [...]

Obama's radio ad, running in Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and elsewhere, features nurse practitioner Valerie Baron telling voters: "John McCain's out of touch with women today. McCain wants to take away our right to choose."

Glossy fliers with the same messages fill the mailboxes of women in Florida, Virginia and other states.

Countering that effort, McCain rolled out his own radio ad suggesting he's not as far right on abortion as Obama makes him seem — though he never mentions that procedure.

Instead, McCain's commercial focused on stem cell research and said he will invest more money in research to prevent disease and find medical breakthroughs to "help free families from the fear and devastation of illness."

Not only is that not likely to work, given that McCain has publicly expressed his "25 year consistent pro-life record," it may end up hurting him with his far-right base. Obama has been consistent as well - he wants to help reduce unwanted pregnancies, but he will not deprive women of their medical options and make them unsafe.

One candidate picked a female running mate to appeal to women. The other picked the right issues. I think the latter is the correct move.