BROWN: Palin pick targets the gender gap

By Peter Brown, Special to the Rocky

Published September 3, 2008 at 7:46 p.m.

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One of the unfortunate truisms about the media is that once a storyline gets started it takes a life of its own — whether or not it makes sense.

The idea that John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate in a transparent effort to win the women who voted for Hillary Clinton makes that case.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but those who think the Hillary voters are the grand prize that led to Palin’s selection need to take a remedial math course.

Of course, Republicans will happily accept any disenchanted Clinton supporters.

But the Palin pick — and the thrust of her campaigning — will be primarily aimed at a much larger audience of women.

Slightly more than 10-million women backed Sen. Clinton in the Democratic primaries — a number that pales compared to the estimated 62 million females expected to vote in November.

Most aren’t that ideological, and that is why Palin is presenting herself as a pragmatic problem solver who is just like them. “I was just your average hockey mom ... I’m not part of the permanent political establishment,” she told the convention.

Go ahead and subtract Hillary’s 10 million. The vast majority of those who voted for her are ideological soul mates.

Most are unlikely to support the anti-abortion, gun-toting, gay marriage-opposing, evangelical Christian Palin in any case.

But a big chunk of the other 50 million-plus female voters, as they say in the politics biz, is “in play.”

Most were leaning toward Obama before McCain tapped Palin. We know that because in state after state, polling shows a sizable gender gap — that is McCain cleaning up among men and getting walloped among the fairer sex.

Take Ohio, perhaps the most important swing state in the country. A Quinnipiac University poll taken on the eve of the Democratic convention found McCain and Obama in a statistical dead heat.

But the close overall contest hid a gender-polarized electorate. Obama led by 14 points among women, McCain by 13 points with men.

Those numbers included African-Americans who have no gender gap; Obama will get virtually all the votes of black men and black women.

Among whites in that Ohio poll, McCain had a 22-point lead among men, but a one point deficit among women.

It was primarily to those women to whom Palin was speaking. Her approach has the potential to change the gender dynamics of this election.

That was almost certainly why McCain named her over his personal favorite — Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, whose selection would have driven the Washington, D.C. press corps to joy and the Republican base into open revolt.

Instead, Palin’s pick has created a strongly negative vibe in the news media and an even more positive one within the GOP convention hall — which is not an unusual circumstance on many matters.

The bold gamble of her selection provides insight into McCain’s view of the campaign.

Entering the Democratic convention, when McCain settled on Palin, the polls had him only slightly behind Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

That led many to anticipate McCain would make a conventional choice for his running mate since the race was so close. They theorized that if he were further behind he might be more likely to roll the dice with a non-traditional choice — a category in which Palin falls.

But McCain decided that the polls understate his problem. He looked at the unfriendly political environment — ailing economy, unpopular war, less popular GOP president and felt he could not play it safe.

After all, close may count in horseshoes, but not in presidential politics, which is the ultimate zero-sum game. Losing by a little is the same as losing in a landslide — you can ask Al Gore about that.

But in order for voters to see the qualities that led McCain to pick Palin, she has to pass their threshold test — that is, voters must feel comfortable with her as president if the 72-year-old McCain died in office.

That’s why last night’s speech was so important.

If she can pass that threshold, then Palin will have the opportunity to lobby those 50-million-plus women who didn’t vote for Hillary to pull the lever for McCain.

Peter A. Brown, formerly the chief political writer for Scripps Howard, is the assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute and a weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal online.

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