http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040923-121550-2873r.htm
Analysis: Security moms may swing election
By Peter Roff
UPI Senior Political Analyst
Washington, DC, Sep. 23 (UPI) -- Democratic Party nominee for president John F. Kerry has staked his bid for the White House on two wars: Vietnam and Iraq.
His emphasis may be misdirected.
For much of the campaign, Kerry has played his service in Vietnam as a shield against charges that he, unlike the other Democrats who sought the presidency in the years since 1972, was not soft on U.S. national security.
It was an interesting campaign strategy -- at least until the activities of the anti-Kerry 527 organization Swift Boat Veterans for Truth made his war record a liability almost equal to its value as an asset.
Now, after a flirtation with domestic issues like healthcare and education, Kerry is talking about Iraq almost around the clock while his campaign cedes states once thought to be competitive -- like Missouri and Arizona -- to the Republicans.
Polling data suggest the key voter bloc in the 2004 election, the successor to soccer and waitress moms and NASCAR dads, may be security-minded women for whom the war in Iraq is much less of a concern than the war on terror.
The idea of security moms holding the key to the White House in 2004 was evident at least as far back as February, when former Clinton administration and political strategist Morris Reid predicted the "Homeland Security Moms," which he defined as "30- to 55-year-old mothers living in and around major cities," could be the deciding factor in the election's outcome.
"A recent poll by the Pew Research Center revealed that 76 percent of women with young children are more concerned with national security than they were prior to 9/11," he said at the time while arguing the issue should work in the Democrats' favor.
Yet with the election weeks away, the terror war remains George W. Bush's strongest issue.
The Sept. 8 CBS News/New York Times poll of more than 1,000 adults showed that, by a ratio of 2-to-1 respondents approve of the way Bush is handling the war against terrorism. Sixty-two percent of those surveyed gave high marks to Bush for his job fighting terror; 31 percent said they disapproved.
In that same poll 71 percent of those asked said the threat of terrorism is a permanent problem for the United States -- something the nation must "always live with." Only 25 percent said terrorism could someday be eliminated as a threat to the American way of life.
The issue is still very much alive, pollster Kellyanne Conway says, but may be driving many of the women who heretofore were reliable votes for the Democrats at the presidential level into the Bush camp.
The founder and chief executive officer of the Polling Company, Conway is also the publisher of WomanTrends, a Washington-based quarterly newsletter analyzing information on how women create trends or are affected by them.
She says the trend toward greater concern about security -- personal and well as national -- has become very evident since the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington, a view shared by other pollsters as well.
The Pew Research Center's Andy Kohut has previously noted that most polls "showed women feeling much more personally vulnerable, much more personally threatened" after Sept. 11.
"Security moms look at the world through the prism of their children. In 2000 that meant they were focused on issues like healthcare, education and -- to some degree -- the environment," Kohut said.
In that election, the exit polls said, Vice President Al Gore ran ahead of Bush among women by 11 points, with Bush showing a particularly acute deficit among the so-called soccer moms -- middle- to upper-class married women living child-centered lives in the suburbs.
The "security women" voter bloc, Conway says, represents an amalgam of soccer moms, the so-called waitress moms -- blue-collar working women, often single but supporting children and typically drawn to the Democrats because of their reliance on activist government in many aspects of their lives -- and single women seeking avenues to empowerment.
These two types of moms are bound together, Conway says, by two things: First, they all have school-age children, a fact that colors their political thinking; and second, their sense that the most important issue facing the country is security. And this, she says, is where Kerry is missing the boat.
"The war in Iraq is not nearly as important to these women as the war on terror," she says, "which screams 'homeland security' and is a critical issue where they too can play a vital role." In fact, she suggests, voters generally may not connect the two.
"For today's woman, the most important, most precious commodity they possess isn't time or money, it's control -- something they all lost a sense of on Sept. 11" -- which also makes the issue one of importance to women, especially highly educated women without children who nonetheless want to contribute in a meaningful way to the national priority of fighting terrorism.
For women, the terror war cuts across party lines and ideologies. Californian Debbie Carlson told Time magazine earlier this year that since Sept. 11, "All I want in a president is a person who is strong" -- despite the fact that she usually backs candidates who favor abortion rights and support expansive welfare programs.
The anecdotes and the data both suggest the same thing: If voters in November base their choice on the war in Iraq, as Kerry hopes they will, it will work to his benefit. If, however, they base their vote on their desire to keep the homeland secure, the benefit appears ready to adhere to Bush.
