Kerry’s Once Sizable Lead With Female Voters Slips

Women’s rights activists have grown increasingly anxious that Sen. John F. Kerry is failing to shore up a key constituency after recent polls showed that female voters are backing him by just a small margin.

With Republican presidential candidates generally performing well among male voters in recent elections, Democratic presidential contenders need a strong showing among female voters to be competitive. But the recent surveys have found Kerry up by as little as four percentage points over President Bush.

In 2000, by comparison, Democrat Al Gore beat Bush by 11 points among female voters -- which was precisely Bush’s margin over Gore among male voters.

The worried women’s rights leaders say that Kerry’s campaign has all but ignored female voters in its organizing and in its message. In recent days, campaign officials have acknowledged that they need to bolster Kerry’s standing with women.

Several of the women activists said that as Kerry has tried to move to the political center and to project strength on national security, he had given short shrift to issues such as equal benefits and abortion rights.

“The women’s vote should not be taken for granted,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women. “He runs the risk of the entire campaign if he does not succeed in getting the message out to women that he is the candidate who will make sure they have decent jobs and fair benefits.”

Gandy and others said the Massachusetts senator had given Bush an opening to appeal to female voters with his “W is for Women” campaign, which featured First Lady Laura Bush as her husband’s top surrogate.

The president’s reelection effort has worked to create a grass-roots network of female supporters, giving them material about Bush’s agenda to distribute at “W is for Women” house parties.

On Friday, the president’s campaign trip to Charlotte, N.C., was focused on gaining support from women. Before a largely female audience, he promoted his tax cuts as beneficial to female-owned businesses, and argued that the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq had improved conditions for women in those countries.

Many women’s rights activists express astonishment that Kerry has not sought to capitalize on his longtime support for abortion rights or assailed the Bush administration’s policies on women’s issues, including a ban on U.S. aid to international family planning organizations that discuss abortion.

“The fact is that George Bush is the commander in chief of a war on choice,” said Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “Kerry needs to smoke Bush out and he also needs to advance his own agenda.”

But Kerry has shied away from promoting his support for abortion rights, apparently out of concern for alienating swing voters. At times, he has emphasized his personal opposition to the procedure.

According to several activists, some of Kerry’s aides have lobbied to get the campaign to focus more directly on women’s issues. But they said the candidate’s largely male group of advisors dismissed those entreaties, confident in his lock on the women’s vote.

That attitude may be changing. On Friday, during a meeting at Kerry’s Washington headquarters, top aides pledged to beef up their outreach to women, participants said.

On Monday, Kerry plans to spotlight his record on abortion rights and support for equal benefits at a New York luncheon hosted by Redbook magazine.

Ann Lewis, who heads the women’s voting effort at the Democratic National Committee, said Kerry’s standing among women dropped mainly because of the assaults on his military record in August.

But she said the campaign was determined to rebuild his margin, and had begun hiring organizers to go after female voters in battleground states. The DNC has been targeting single women voters with its “Take Five” program, an effort to get women to bring their friends to the polls.

Lewis insisted that Kerry had been reaching out to women, noting his recent focus on healthcare. But she conceded that much of his effort had been drowned out by the attention paid to his service in Vietnam.

“We are now going in the right direction,” she said. “We just need to make sure we ... pick up the pace a bit.”

Some activists said the campaign had been promising them more action for months.

“There are no words that will reassure us,” Gandy said. “They need to put campaign muscle behind recognizing and turning out the women’s vote.”

In July, the campaign appointed California farm worker activist Dolores Huerta as chairwoman of Women for Kerry. But in an interview, Huerta said she had been frustrated by the lack of resources to organize programs.

“I was very concerned because I did feel -- everyone kind of felt -- that women’s issues should be part and parcel of this whole campaign,” she said.

But Huerta, who has campaigned in a half dozen closely contested states for Kerry in the last two weeks, said she was optimistic that the campaign was gearing up. “I think we’ve been able convince everybody that the women’s campaign is important,” she said.

For months, many Democrats have seen single women as a potential key to a Kerry victory. When they vote, they tend to support Democrats. But in 2000, more than 21 million single women did not cast ballots.

On Saturday, America Votes, a coalition of Democratic constituency groups, held more than 200 events in 16 battleground states to register women and train volunteers to get them to the polls.

Even without recruiting new female voters, political pollsters agree that Kerry needs to win the women’s vote with a large margin to offset the president’s advantage among men. But according to a Pew Center Research poll taken from Sept. 11 to Sept. 14, Kerry held a five percentage point lead among female voters, down from 10 points in August.

Similarly, a Gallup poll released last week showed Kerry beating Bush among women 50% to 46% -- down from a 15-point lead in June. Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, said Kerry should be more aggressively competing with Bush for the women’s vote.

“He has to have them to win,” she said. “The gender gap is not a luxury, it’s a necessity to win” for a Democrat.

Women’s issues, she added, “should have higher visibility” in Kerry’s campaign.

A Los Angeles Times poll taken in August indicated that Kerry’s greatest challenge in expanding his support among woman was with those older than 45 -- who broke evenly between the two candidates -- and married women, who backed Bush by 11 percentage points.

In follow-up interviews with women who were polled, several said they did not think Kerry was speaking to issues relevant to their lives.

Margaret Robertson, 82, frets about her healthcare costs and said she had to rely on friends in Canada to get some of her prescription medicines because her insurance wouldn’t pay for them.

But Robertson, an independent who lives in Lake Isabella, Calif., said that Kerry “hasn’t really said definitely what he’s going to do about all that.” For now, she’s leaning toward backing Bush because “he’s doing the best he can.”

Virginia Akins, a retired schoolteacher in Bonne Terre, Mo., said she disagreed with the president’s policies on the environment and education. Despite that, she still plans to vote for Bush because she said she was turned off by Kerry’s assaults on the incumbent.

“I don’t like the attack attitude he has,” said Akins, 63, an independent voter who grew up in a Democratic family. “I think he acts very hateful.”

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Gender gap

Male and female voters have differed sharply on their presidential picks in several recent elections. Here’s a look at how men and women have voted in the last four contests and the overall percentage that the top candidates won in those races.

*--* 1988 Women Men Total Michael S. Dukakis (Democrat) 50% 40% 45.6% George H. W. Bush (Republican) 49% 58% 53.4% 1992 Bill Clinton (D) 46% 41% 43.0% George H. W. Bush (R) 37% 38% 37.4% Ross Perot (Reform Party) 16% 20% 18.9% 1996 Bill Clinton (D) 54% 44% 49.2% Bob Dole (R) 37% 44% 40.7% 2000 Al Gore (D) 54% 42% 48.4% George W. Bush (R) 43% 53% 47.9% Ralph Nader (Green Party) 2% 3% 2.7%

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Winners in shaded areas

Sources: Los Angeles Times and CNN exit polls; America Votes: a Handbook of American Election Statistics

Los Angeles Times