politics

Security Moms — Here Today, Gone Today

September 24, 2004

Ooops. Forget “security moms.” Hot on Tuesday; stale by week’s end. (Shelf life of a scone.)

While many in the campaign press obsessed the last few days on this new group of swing voters – soccer moms turned Bush supporters because they believe he is the stronger leader against terrorism — a closer look at polling data reveals they may be about as influential as some other unlikely “swing voters” discovered by a novelty-hungry press during this campaign.

Noam Scheiber, writing for The New Republic (registration required), says the security mom stories have one thing in common: “They’re based on almost no empirical evidence.”

As with most urban myths, the idea that terror-related anxiety would drive women into the Republican column is eminently plausible: You’d expect the maternal instinct to make women more concerned about security in the high-risk, post-September 11 environment. And, indeed, though women have routinely favored Democrats over Republicans by double-digit margins during the last 25 years, the early post-9/11 era did show some erosion of the so-called gender gap….

But that was short-lived, writes Scheiber.

Just after the Democratic Convention, a Gallup poll put Bush up seven among men, down six among women, for a gender gap of 13. (The poll showed the overall race tied at 48 percent.) In the Gallup poll conducted September 13-15, Bush was up 16 among men and up 2 among women, for a gender gap of 14. (Bush was up 52-44 overall.) A Time poll released on August 6 showed a gender gap of 25 points; the September 10 version of the poll showed a similarly large (22-point) gap. In both cases, women and men had shifted from Kerry to Bush by roughly the same margin. Other polls actually show a significantly expanding gender gap since August–meaning it’s men, not women, who’ve been finding Bush’s security message particularly compelling.

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Scheiber breaks down polling data on gender and argues that women react more strongly to major events, such as the terrorist attack on a Russian school. But they ultimately shift back to the center in terms of political views. If, as some polls indicated, women shifted to Bush after the attack, they are now returning to the Kerry side of the ledger. Polling data confirms that as well, he says.

Although it was Time magazine that introduced the world to “security moms” back in June 2003, writes Scheiber, Time’s own pollster Mark Schulman says: “We’ve been looking at security moms on and off. We honestly could not find much empirical evidence to support it.” (Too bad Schulman didn’t clue in the New York Times’ editors who put an ephemeral security moms story smack on page one earlier this week.)

The only flaw we can find in Scheiber’s conclusion is that he based it on…polls, which we here at Campaign Desk have learned to take about as seriously as we take whatever flavor-of-the-month is named the next crucial group of “swing voters.”

Still, the idea that security moms as a hinge vote group was hopelessly overblown has the ring of truth to it. So, we say, so long, ladies — hasta la vista, adios and auf wiedersehn — we feel like we hardly knew ye. (Nor, we hasten to add, did the throngs of reporters who kept reinventing you off and on all year.)

–Susan Q. Stranahan

Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.