The Worried Women Bloc Prefers Clinton

By BOB SIPCHEN

April 29, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In 1994, credit (or blame) for the Republican takeover of Congress went to a voting bloc widely characterized as Angry White Men.

The bloc to watch in 1996 might be termed Worried Women. But watch closely. They aren’t behaving the way you might expect.

A recent nationwide Los Angeles Times Poll found that among registered voters, more women than men--70% to 53%--think that the country is “seriously off on the wrong track.” More than men, women think America is in worse shape than it was when President Clinton took office.

But these same women are far more likely than men to say that they would reelect Clinton. This is a departure from voters’ tradition of holding a president responsible when America is deemed to have strayed off course--and a clear factor explaining Clinton’s overall lead of 18 percentage points over GOP candidate Bob Dole in The Times Poll.

Adrian Downing of Owings Mills, Md., said that worry sweeps over her each night as she, her husband and two daughters watch the news. She plans to vote for Clinton.

“It probably sounds weird that I think the country is taking a turn for the worse and I will still vote for the person who’s in power,” the 37-year-old part-time dental assistant said. “[But] there just aren’t any other candidates out there.”

According to The Times Poll, 62% of the 1,149 voters questioned said the nation is on the wrong track. But while men who gave this answer support Dole over Clinton, 49% to 39%, women who feel the same back Clinton by 55% to 37%.

Follow-up calls to some of the women polled by The Times suggest that they tend to straddle the ideological gender gap, weaving together traditionally liberal and conservative views.

To ask these women why they are concerned about the country, in fact, is to pop the lid on a Pandora’s box of anxieties about everything from economics to morality, with fear for the future of families as a unifying theme.

For instance, Barbara Debrick, a second-grade teacher at a Lutheran school in San Angelo, Texas, sounds like a speech writer for former Vice President Dan Quayle: “I think the importance of family has decreased a lot. There are too many children growing up without the influence of a father, and a father is very important.”

Families are unraveling in part, said Debrick, 47, because the economy has pushed both parents into the work force. But she also thinks a general moral decline is to blame and that some form of voluntary prayer in the schools wouldn’t hurt.

Beyond that, her catalog of concerns includes televised sex and violence, welfare abuse, illegal immigration, crime and drugs.

Does that mean she’s going to vote for Dole, who has catered to social conservatives?

“I do not like the man,” she said. “I used to live in Kansas. He did not impress me then. He still doesn’t impress me.”

Besides, she doesn’t believe that the national problems she is most concerned about are necessarily the president’s fault.

“I believe it goes hand in hand with the Congress. . . ,” she said. “I think Clinton’s doing as good a job as he possibly can.”

Mike Dabadie, a pollster for the GOP consulting firm Wirthlin Worldwide, is aware of this demographic niche.

“I’m not particularly surprised that women voters think the country is off track and still say they are voting for Clinton,” he said.

The pattern can probably be attributed to disaffection with the GOP Congress’ hard-edged initiatives, coupled with “pessimism about the decline of moral values and breakdown of the family,” he said. The Times Poll results support Dabadie’s comments. Among those who see the country heading the wrong way, men approve of the Republican congressional agenda, 43% to 40%, while women disapprove, 39% to 35%.

Also among those voters, men overwhelmingly say they believe that Republicans are best able to deal with the nation’s moral problems, while women give the nod to Democrats.

Dabadie concedes that Republicans are not going to win blanket support from female voters. But he thinks that some subcategories are ripe to be wooed.

“Democrats do better with working women, single women. We do better with females who are non-working and females who are married and have children,” he said. “Our research shows that once you introduce the fact that there is a child in the home, compared to a home without a child, it is much more likely that that home is ideologically going to be conservative.”

GOP consultant Eddie Mahe argued it is premature to expect women worried about the country’s direction to have crystallized their presidential preference.

Many of these women, he said, “might be described as the busiest group of people in this country. Working mothers don’t have time in April to be thinking about who they’ll be voting for president in November. . . .”

Even as the election nears, though, this diverse group may prove hard to target for the GOP.

In some ways, for example, Celia Cruz, a 23-year-old graduate student in chemical engineering at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, echoes the views of Louise Byrd, 71, a retired electronics inspector who lives in Imperial Beach, Calif. Both say the country is on the wrong track and that one reason is that children lack discipline and parents refuse to take responsibility for teaching them good values.

But while Byrd sees the answer in religion--”I feel that too many people are with the devil”--and plans to vote for Clinton at least in part because he’s a churchgoer, Cruz takes a more worldly view.

“I am conservative in many ways,” Cruz said, but she sees conservative economic ideas as contributing to the nation’s decline, so her liberal social leanings will probably drive her vote.

“I still see the United States as the land of opportunity. I can come here, work hard, get my PhD. . . . But there are people in this country who are born without opportunity at all.”

And Republicans, she said, seem to have written those people off.

“On a lot of issues, what they stand for turns me off,” she said, “and I don’t think they’re going to turn me on anytime soon.”

Madeline Stoner, an associate professor at USC’s School of Social Work, said she encountered the spectrum of concerns these women voice last year while co-editing with Betty Friedan the publication “Rethinking Feminist Concerns.”

“This is all very new,” Stoner said. The women in question have “a feeling of tremendous disappointment with the nation,” but they are not the “traditional progressive feminists” whose support Clinton galvanized in 1992.

Rather, many of these women find that their economic and societal worries are complicated by their connections to the Angry White Men who are their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers.

“Women are working in families where they’re holding down two jobs and their husbands are holding down two jobs,” Stoner said. “Everything is precarious. . . .”

At the same time, Stoner said she thinks that these women carry a disproportionate share of the angst about cultural decline. “We’ve been the teachers, the nurturers, worked in the Sunday schools. We are worried about the morality and spirituality of our children and our children’s futures. . . .”

But despite the GOP’s embrace of “family values,” Stoner is not surprised that these women are more likely to support Clinton.

“He gets up and talks on that bully pulpit like he’s a minister,” she said. “He talks about school prayer, politics of meaning, school uniforms. . . . He pushed the buttons that touch our lives. . . . Robert Dole doesn’t do any of that.”

Janice Ring, a 47-year-old homemaker in Centralia, Ill., agreed with that assessment.

Clinton, she said, “is trying to get on the right track, but he has a lot of people [in Congress] who are not backing him.”

But ultimately, she said, “I think that the Democrats and Republicans are both to blame.”

Or, because so many social problems seem linked to family problems and to how children are raised, maybe neither party can be expected to steer the country back on course, Ring said, echoing several of the women interviewed.

“It’s become such a fast-paced world that parents don’t even take time to sit down with kids and have meals. They don’t have family gathering time like we did when I was growing up.

“In all fairness,” she said, “I think both of them--Clinton and Dole--would like to change that.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Disenchanted, but Still for Clinton

Despite declaring that things in the country seem to be heading in the wrong direction, many voters, especially women, still support President Clinton’s reelection bid.

* Do you think things in this country are generally going in the right direction or are seriously off on the wrong track?

All voters

Don’t know: 9%

Wrong track: 62%

Right direction: 29%

Men

Don’t know: 11%

Wrong track: 53%

Right direction: 36%

Women

Don’t know: 8%

Wrong track: 70%