Barack Obama: coming up short among female voters.

By Moe Lane | 8:30 PM on April 23, 2012

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There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on under the hood of this Hill poll showing that more voters believe that Romney & the GOP respect working women than voters believe that Obama & the Democrats respect stay at home parents. Especially since the same poll is giving the edge to Romney on who understands women’s issues better, and a tie on which party is better for women. But what I’d like to point out is another poll that was only touched upon in passing; because the information found there will be even more distressing to the Democrats. Yes, this is a burying-the-lede post. We have to do a lot of those.

The poll in question was a CBS/NYT one of registered voters that have Romney and Obama tied at 46% each. The Hill didn’t link, but I will – it’s here – and there’s one crosstab in particular that needs to be looked at: among women voters, Obama leads Romney 49/43. That further breaks down to Obama beating Romney 62/34 among unmarried women, Romney beating Obama 49/42 among married women, and … why am I pointing this out?

Because all of these numbers represent a serious degradation of Barack Obama’s 2008 numbers among women. Exit polls indicated that Obama beat McCain 56/43 among women generally; 70/29 among unmarried women; and McCain only beat Obama 50/47 among married women. Hopefully this chart will help clarify matters:

Category	BO	MR	Diff	BO	JM	Diff	Shift
Women	49	43	6	56	43	13	-7
Unmarried	62	34	28	70	29	41	-13
Married	42	49	-7	47	50	-3	-4

As you can see, Mitt Romney (MR) is currently doing much better in 2012 than John McCain (JM) did in 20o8 against Barack Obama (BO); or, more accurately, Barack Obama is doing much worse. I note this because it does not seem to be indicative of any sort of ‘unity bounce’ on Romney’s part; the Republican candidate seems to be more or less holding his own. But President Obama is in free fall. Now, of course it should be noted that this is one poll, and it may not be a representative poll, and that it is certainly not any sort of predictor of what the polls will look like in November. But there is still a technical term to describe a candidate who is suffering from significant erosion in his support from a key demographic, to the extent that Barack Obama is currently suffering among female voters.

That technical term is ‘losing.’

Moe Lane (crosspost)