The XX Factor: What women really think.

Slice and Dice, and Then Dice Some More

I really appreciate Bill Bishop's well-argued point in Slate today that there is no women's vote, or even white women's vote, at stake in this election. The idea is that the categories are too broad to be meaningful; even two women of the same race and class who went to the same high school or college may have too little in common to be targeted effectively by the same advertising message. Instead, campaigns should slice and dice by lifestyle—VW-driving moms who don't own TVs, city-dwelling twentysomethings who drink diet soda religiously. We each deserve our own personally tailored message!

OK, I get it, and I bow to the marketing gods of fine dicing—with two caveats. First, I rue the tedious quest for the next great swing voting bloc (soccer moms, hockey moms, offended military wives). Bishop is really arguing against this, because based on his thesis there is no identifiable swing group big enough to get your hands around, at least nationally speaking. But if we forget to dice finely enough, we end up back in the land of the Red Lobster exurbs. Second, I wonder if Bishop's argument about class holds entirely true, at least if you factor in geography. Do white women who make less than $50,000 a year and live in southern Ohio, say, really fracture into lots of little voting pieces? Do white women who make more than $100,000 a year and live in Miami?

Is This the Message: Kick Me, Beat Me, Tie Me Up!?

This Doesn't Make Me Want to Vote

Why are pro-voting ads so frequently creepy? When seemingly oblivious celebrities express their views on the candidates themselves, the results can be entertaining or mildly insightful. But for some reason all of the stars' charm and charisma gets lost when they start standing up for our electoral system. These ads for Declare Yourself, which feature a gagged and sobbing Jessica Alba, Christina Aguilera, and Andre 3000 among others, are particularly frightening to look at. By the ads' logic, if I don't vote I'm essentially submitting myself to a brutal vigilante silencing technique, like having my mouth stapled or bolted shut.

Declare Yourself isn't alone in its tendency to threaten and alienate its audience despite better intentions. The "Vote or Die" campaign that began in 2000 promotes its own violent message, particularly when organizer P. Diddy gets aggressive or weirdly personal about the issues. Aguilera is actually a double offender in the scary ad game, having already taped this eerie display (those eyes! that smile!) for Rock the Vote last May. Not that Madonna's original Rock the Vote ads or Gwyneth Paltrow's stilted plug for absentee ballots were any more appropriate or appealing.

It's obviously important to get the MTV set involved in this election, and perhaps there's nothing better than a good shock to get this point across. The Declare Yourself ads' literal "use it or lose it" message is certainly attention-grabbing, but do these violent images really make people want to vote? They just scare the heck out of me.

Faulkner Was Right, and 2000 Isn't Over

Faulkner was right, and that's what makes HBO's Recount so hard to sit through: It isn't that we know how it's going to end. It's that it hasn't ended, and isn't past, for our asthmatic planet or our military families or our still wholly unreformed electoral process.

On the electoral front, Dahlia, your point about sagging voter confidence being self-fulfilling is dead right. But do we boost that confidence by telling African-American Ohioans who waited for hours in the rain to vote in 2004—because Franklin County redistributed voting machines from inner-city polling places where they were in short supply to rural areas where there were too many—that their concerns are "idiotic'' or that voter suppression is all in their heads? Every study of electronic voting machines suggests they're hackable, prone to glitches and easy to upgrade—for a price. (And if ATMs were half as unreliable, wouldn't we have solved the problem before you could say, "Katherine Harris actually wore that?'') The real question is how much voter confidence is worth to us, since solutions on the cheap haven't worked that well.

After the train wreck of the 2000 recount, Florida's Sarasota County purchased electronic voting machines from Election Systems & Software, the same company that produced the ballots of hanging-chad fame. (This despite the fact that, as this barely seen but excellent Dan Rather documentary argues, ES&S was having a hard time marketing its touch-screen voting machines until it decided to cut back on the quality of paper used to make the ballots that wound up dimpled and hanging in 2000. The company's own quality-control folks refused to sign off on the change and warned their bosses that if they went with the cheaper paper, it would expand in the Florida humidity and be a big old mess by Election Day. They were ignored, but they were right. And when their predictions came true, their company was rewarded with contracts for the shiny new electronic voting machines they'd been having trouble unloading. Whee!)

OK, so now it's 2006, and those same ES& Smachines work their magic in Sarasota County, where thousands of people sign affidavits that they had trouble casting ballots in just one race, for Democratic Congressional candidate Christine Jennings, who according to the machine tally lost by fewer than 400 votes. Golly, can't let that happen again, so the super magnanimous Charlie Crist, the state's new Republican governor, says let's do away with those touch-screen machines that leave no paper trail. Only, tucked into the wildly popular bill that did away with paperless ballots was ... the provision that moved up the date of the state's presidential primary and led to the current fight over what to do about Florida's delegates to this summer's Democratic National Convention. Republicans in the state "knew exactly what they were doing,'' says Christine Jennings, who is still running against Vern Buchanan. Only, he's an incumbent now. That the solutions just keep making things worse makes you wonder how seriously we take the problem. And as long as we put the need for voting reform on a par with taking on little green men, 2000 won't ever be over.

P.S. to Ruth: A blog virgin, who knew? I agree she didn't mean TO say it. But that's not the same as not meaning what she said.

Overtime

I hear you, Hanna and Emily et al.—OK, pretty much everybody, now—and no doubt you're right, but I have to confess that I don't feel entirely ready for this to be over. I like this contest. I like the analysis and entrail-reading. I like getting up in the morning to find out how the returns came in overnight. I like watching as the Democratic party tries to manage the Godzilla-versus-Mothra nature of this battle between two formidable candidates and as superdelegates and party people try to decide which side to side with. It's suspenseful and exciting—like a great basketball game that's now gone into overtime. It doesn't seem such a bad thing if these two candidates continue to differentiate their positions and levels of readiness; and if Obama starts getting tougher media questioning and being obliged to respond, surely that will enable all of us to get to know him better. And I think that the primary results do enable us to look for illuminating patterns among voters. 

Ruth Marcus has a terrific column today in the Post. She convincingly refutes Hillary Clinton's complaints about sexism: Given that Clinton began this race as the establishment favorite, Marcus point out, it's ludicrous for her to plead that the playing field, for her, isn't level. However, Marcus also points out that for future female presidential candidates, sexism, while it may not be the most constraining "-ism" in America, cannot be dismissed. Noting that Hillary Clinton doesn't do as well among Democratic men as she does among women, and that there have been sexist overtones to some criticisms directed at her—the b-word among them—Marcus says, "I've been wondering whether the country, particularly the male half, can comfortably fit a woman into its mental picture of a president. Obama's success stems in large part from his ability to use rhetoric to inspire and persuade. The country has scant experience of a woman in that role." She quotes Ruth Mandel, director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, pointing out that Americans lack "historical memory" of a charismatic leader who is a woman. Would we accept one, I wonder? Would voters flock to a woman with Obama-like charisma? If not, why not? Hillary Clinton isn't the candidate to answer these questions; there are too many variables, too many other reasons why someone might oppose her, besides gender. But I think these are interesting conversations to have and I'm prepared to keep having them for a while longer. It beats working.

The Great White Divide

After Super Tuesday, Slate's William Saletan pointed out that Obama had made serious inroads with white voters, passing the 40 percent mark in eight Super Tuesday states. From last week's elections, add Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Obama tied Clinton with white voters in Connecticut and beat her among them in Virginia, California, Illinois, and Utah. Obama did this even though, until tonight, he has lost to Hillary among white women in every state except Illinois and Iowa. If you crunch the exit poll data for race and gender in 20 states, you come up with the following two-part rule:

1) When Hillary wins white women by 20 points or fewer, she loses white men. States this has been true for: Maryland, Georgia, Connecticut, Virginia, New Mexico, and California. Plus tonight in Wisconsin, where more than nine in 10 voters are white, Hillary won women by a slim margin and Obama walked away with men. (Exception to the first part of the rule, sort of: South Carolina, where she lost white men by one point with John Edwards still on the ballot.) 2) When Hillary wins white women by more than 20 points, she wins white men. States true for: New York, Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada, Missouri, Louisiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, along with an even split of white men in Delaware. Exception to the second part of the rule: Massachusetts, where Hillary won white women by 31 points, according to the exit polls, and lost white men by one point.

The 20-point fulcrum suggests that to win white men in a state, Hillary has to do really really well there. Which since Super Tuesday of course hasn't happened, and is getting harder and harder to imagine. Without white men, she has only won over all a couple of times, most notably in California. Hillary still has the solid support of Latinos: They broke for her strongly—especially women, but men too—in the four states I checked, which have sizeable Hispanic populations: Arizona, California, New Mexico, and New Jersey. But even in Texas, how can that be enough?

Hillary Is Losing Women

I don't think the point is that women are not responding to her the way African-American voters are responding to Obama—though that is true—but that no demographic is responding to her as it is to him. The guy won every income group, the Catholic swing-voters everybody said he'd have trouble with, independents by a mile, and Latinos. Which is a blow to identity politics but not, as I see it, to women; on the contrary, isn't it a testament to how far we've come that just because she is a woman doesn't mean she's automatically our woman? Yesterday, when a friend of mine said she didn't understand how any woman could decide not to support Hillary, all I could think was that that made no more sense to me than if she'd said she didn't understand not voting for the white person.

What We Owe Hillary

Since the Iowa caucuses, I've been feeling the Hillary tug. Most of the women I've talked to in the last couple of months have felt it, too: Even if they weren't sure they'd vote for Hillary, they were rooting for her on some level. They wanted her to make a strong showing. They didn't want the girl who worked hard to lose willy-nilly to the guy who waltzed in. Those feelings must have helped bring more women than men to the polls in state after state, almost always in favor of Hillary.

But you know what? The tug doesn't feel the same to me now. I wonder if that's true for other Democratic women who could have gone either way, too. If Obama's margins are wide enough to carry women in Maryland and Virginia and D.C. tonight—and so far, according to the exit polls, he has the majority of women in Virginia, by a lot—maybe this shift will help explain why. Hillary has been an excellent first for us. No one else could have done what she's done, with all her aplomb and professionalism and seriousness. But she doesn't have to be the nominee, or the president, to have come through. She hung in there past every other contender save one. She made it to the finals, the last round, overtime—whatever sports metaphor you want to use. I don't mean to suggest that she's done. But if she loses for good in the next weeks or months, she loses with dignity and heft and heart. And she'd leave us feeling, in a way I know I've never felt before, that a woman can be elected president. We already owe her. We'd owe her for that, too. Even if we don't owe her, or give her, our votes.

Momentum and Who Votes Next

Show Up, Iowans!