According to the latest Politico story:
A stunning Quinnipiac survey last week showed maverick Republican Carl Paladino within striking distance of Democrat Andrew Cuomo, with Paladino leading Cuomo 49 percent to 46 percent among male likely voters. Women favored Cuomo by 54 percent to 34 percent — a 15-point gap in Paladino’s support from women.
“There’s a bigger gender gap than I’m used to seeing,” said Quinnipiac pollster Doug Schwartz. “We’ve seen it in all our races.”
Other Quinnipiac polls have also found wide gender gaps that endure even with the large margins of error of subsamples, like one that found GOP Senate candidate Pat Toomey leading Rep. Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania, thanks to an 18-percentage-point margin among men.
Two other polls have found a 17 point gender gap in congressional polling, Quinlan Rosner has 12 point gap. But what is their headline? "Female Voters cool to Dem Efforts" Hello? That's not your story.
It's true that women are less enthused to vote this year. The poll found that 48 percent of Republican men found themselves 'very enthusiastic' about voting, whereas only 28 percent of Democratic women did. And it's true that the Democrats should take this as a warning, and step up their efforts to motivate women voters.
But the bigger story behind the poll numbers is that the light they cast on one of the bigger media stories of the past couple years: Despite the Tea Party's self righteous claims to be the new party of women, the poll numbers just aren't bearing this out. We've had the rise of Sarah Palin, her embrace of the "Mama Grizzly" movement, and one after another of conservative female personalities parade themselves across the media, from Lynne Cheney, Meghan McCain, Michelle Bachmann, Nikki Haley, Christine O'Donnell and more.
The problem is, despite this overwhelming media blitz arguably designed to woo women towards the GOP, ordinary women aren't responding, at least not yet. Polls show that the tea party tends to be male. Instead, we have this quote from Democratic pollster Celinda Lake: "In times when the role of government is particularly controversial, you tend to see a particularly large gender gap," said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster.
And:
"It’s reminiscent of the gender gap we had when the gender gap first emerged, which was around [the time of] Ronald Reagan," she said.
Doug Schoen, a centrist pollster said: grass-roots conservatism’s focus on spending has less appeal to women. “Women are more concerned about a social safety net and less impacted by the movement to fiscal conservatism/tea party.”
And from Stephanie Shriock, president of EMILY's List:
“The Republican Party, in partnership with the tea party, has pushed extreme candidates through their primaries — candidates whom women do not want to see in office,”
In short, women aren't responding to the tea party message. All the faces are right, only the message is wrong.
That should have been Politico's headline.
UPDATE: While I was writing this diary, Politico changed their headline to "Behind the GOP Surge: Men", then they changed it back again. They can't make up their mind as to what spin they want, apparently.