Has Sarah Palin Motivated the Very Voters That Obama Needs to Win?

By Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted September 12, 2008.

By ignoring the needs of single women, Palin may have lit a fire under
the country's biggest voting bloc -- one with the power to swing the
election.

Sarah Palin's coming-out speech at the Republican convention was
remarkable for several reasons. First, it was watched by an astounding
37 million people. That's more than the Oscars and the World Series,
though still a million less than those who watched Barack Obama's
historic Mile High Stadium speech.

The Palin speech was shocking for its aggressive attacks against
Obama, and it was full of condescending misrepresentations of Obama
and his record. Palin used a lot of what Rachel Maddow has taken to
calling lies on her new MSNBC show (joining a chorus of journalists
who are trying to shame the corporate media into acknowledging
mendacity when they know it to be present).

But a third and perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the Palin speech
was who and what she left out of her picture of Alaskan adventure and
small-town values. Palin never mentioned health care, women's economic
issues like equal pay, or showed any empathy for the economic plight
of millions who have done very poorly in George Bush's America --
particularly unmarried women, who, by virtue of their single status,
tend to fare the worst in economic downturns.

At 26 percent of the voting-age population, single women are also the
biggest single eligible voter demographic. And according to a survey
by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, they are the most dependably progressive
voters in the electorate. In the last two elections, unmarried women
supported Democrats with 62 percent of their vote in 2004 and 65
percent in 2006.

With her speech, or rather with what was missing from it, Palin drew
attention to the biggest fault line in the election: the huge chasm
between mostly white, married women, and the less white, overall less
affluent, but far more progressive unmarried women.

The dirty little secret in this election is that the gender gap --
which may be as high as 10 percent for Obama -- is dwarfed by the
marriage gap. In a recent tracking survey by Gallup in mid-August,
Obama led 49 percent to 39 percent among women, but trailed 49 percent
to 40 percent among married women. Meanwhile, among unmarried women,
Obama trounced McCain by 57 percent to 30 percent.

It is unlikely that the Palin nomination will change the marriage gap
dynamics. In fact, it might exacerbate them further. But the bigger
challenge is this: Single women, for a variety of commonsense reasons,
do not vote at the same rate as married women, who frequently vote the
same as their husbands. In order for progressives to gain influence
and for Obama to win, the large unengaged voting bloc of single women
will need to be registered and mobilized immediately. And the primary
way to reach them is by talking about "kitchen table" issues, not
cultural issues and "family values" that Republicans use to frame
their messages.

Who Does Palin Think She Is?

Many people watching the Palin speech must have wondered: "Who the
hell does she think she is?" After all, Obama has spent a grueling
year meeting and speaking to many thousands of Americans across the
country, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, winning a majority
of the primaries and garnering more than 17 million votes via an
incredibly organized and effective primary campaign, not to mention
his sterling nomination speech in front of 80,000 delirious supporters
in Denver. And Sarah Palin, what had she done? For 20 months she was
governor of a state with a population of about 70,000 less than her
"favorite city," San Francisco. She showed up when John McCain
beckoned her to St. Paul, bringing her moose jokes and small-town
hockey mom credentials. Her task: to stir up the pots of race, class,
gender, culture and resentment in America.

Of course, the mostly male media loved her speech, since for many of
them politics is best when it involves combat. Time magazine's Jay
Carney enthused, "Two things are clear after Sarah Palin made her
do-or-die debut before 20-plus million people tonight. She is
amazingly self-confident. And she knows how to nail a speech." James
Gordon Meek and David Saltonstall at the New York Daily News wrote:
"Sarah Palin boasts she can take it -- and boy, can she dish it out."

The killer narrative of the pit bull with lipstick, dishing it out to
the Ivy League smarty pants, was too enticing for the ratings-hungry
media to ignore. So they glossed over the false content in the speech
-- the rampant lies and the striking omissions -- and focused on the
fairy tale, the pugilism and the delivery: "Gee, Sarah Palin reads
real good from the teleprompter." "She is a comer." "She could turn
this race around." That's what passed for analysis in the mainstream
media. And Palin, with the media's enormous hype, took all the oxygen
out of the rest of the convention, including McCain's clumsy follow-up
speech. Palin continues to dominate McCain's campaign stops.

The corporate media saw a big opportunity when Palin arrived on the
scene. Why not make the presidential campaign one big reality show,
with Sarah Palin as the centerpiece? It took about two days before
Palin was on the cover of US Weekly, clutching one of her key
political assets -- her infant Down syndrome son, Trig. Soon the media
began presenting Palin as Obama's equal, at least in terms of
coverage, pushing the old war horses John McCain and Joe Biden to the
sidelines. The slice of America that is reality show-obsessed got its
gender-versus-race story line back, and there is no telling where this
chapter is going to lead.

Along the way, the media made the assumption that women would be as
thrilled with Palin and her presentation as they themselves were.
After all, wasn't she a powerful example of modern feminism? A woman
who could manage her unwieldy family and run the state of Alaska at
the same time, no problem? And besides, she is so cute in that Tina
Fey, helmet-headed, librarian kind of way. But of course, as we have
come to learn in an avalanche of revelations, Palin is far from
perfect. The biggest blow to the idyllic scene was the small fact that
her teenage daughter was pregnant and was going to get herself married
to the guy right away, even if he doesn't want kids and prefers to be
"fuckin' chillin," according to his MySpace page.

Who and What Was Left Out

In her speech, Palin painted a picture of small-town life, patriotism
-- "always thinking of country first" -- unencumbered by the
complexities of big-city crime and poverty. I'm sure such places
exist, and probably many yearn for the good old days -- a life that
was more simple and less economically stressful. But Palin's
small-town perfect picture is far more fantasy than reality. In truth,
small-town life often is a big struggle for its denizens, in terms of
jobs, mortgages, affordable health care and much more. Rust Belt towns
and cities have been boarded up. In many parts of the country,
perfect-pitch America has passed into a world of agribusiness, housing
sprawl, Wal-Marts and fast food strips -- a lot like life apparently
is in Wasilla, Alaska, where Sarah Palin was a small-town mayor.

And who is left out of the idyllic, nonexistent vision of "America" so
adored by conservatives? Huge numbers of Americans: city dwellers,
people of color (who represent 26 percent of eligible voters -- but
that's not important to Republicans. As the Washington Post reported,
the Republican convention was the whitest in 40 years), homosexuals,
millions of creative people whose lifestyles are not in the Palin
world view, and of course single people, particularly single women.

Single women, of course, cover a wide gamut of wealth and education,
but their single common denominator is they are making their life on
their own. And because of huge wealth stratification, most single
women are less well off than their married sisters. It is these single
women, the group Palin may have alienated with her speech, that have
been hit hardest by the Bush economy. Palin showed no empathy for the
many millions of single moms, widowed women on social security, women
abandoned by partners, or simply independent women who have a
challenging time in an economy where 80 percent of inflation-adjusted
income has shifted upward and away from them. The top 1 percent of
households now claim nearly a quarter of the nation's wealth, a
troubling trend given that women account for 59 percent of low-wage
earners -- those making less than $8 an hour -- and, on average, still
earn only 77 cents for every dollar a white man earns. That figure
shrinks to 63 cents on the dollar for African-American women and 53
cents for Hispanic women.

When Palin was fetishizing her version of the perfect family ("Our
family has the same ups and downs as any other, the same challenges
and the same joys. Sometimes even the greatest joys bring challenge"),
she missed the huge audience of single women by a mile. And as some
post-speech polls indicated, women overall are not so excited by
Palin.

A national survey of 1,356 women -- 1,295 likely voters -- conducted
on Sept. 2 and 3 and focus groups conducted after Palin's acceptance
speech by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for WVWVAF found that
while the selection of Palin is seen positively by female voters, it
is also the case that her selection has given little lift to the
Republican ticket and significant questions about her remain to be
answered. Female voters -- married and unmarried alike -- were
impressed with Palin's poise and confidence but wonder what she stood
for and how she would address America's most pressing problems.
Fundamental to the unmarried women in these groups was the fact that
she did not sufficiently address key issues in their lives. This is
particularly true of the economy, about which unmarried women claim to
have heard almost nothing of relevance to their economic standing. One
single woman said point-blank, "I didn't get anything about the
economy."

On the other hand, Palin has attracted big crowds while campaigning
and reading, from teleprompters, the same speech she gave at the
convention. The Washington Post reports that positive ratings of Palin
spike to 80 percent among white women with children at home and among
white women who are evangelical Protestants. The percentage of white
women with "strongly favorable" opinions of McCain jumped 12
percentage points from before the parties' national conventions.

The Progressive Challenge

While the media is hyped up on Palin, and she has energized the
conservative base, it is unlikely she will gain any ground with the
single women vote, which has historically been much more progressive
than married women as a group. In 2004, John Kerry won women by 51
percent to 48 percent; he lost married women, 44 percent to 54
percent, while enjoying a huge margin among unmarried women, 62
percent to 37 percent. In the 2006 congressional races, unmarried
women supported Democratic candidates by a 33 percent margin.

So although unmarried women are more likely to support Obama than
McCain, getting them to the polls is another matter. Unmarried women
are underrepresented in the electorate. In 2004, 20 million unmarried
women did not vote. Compared to married women, single women are 9
percent less likely to register and 13 percent less likely to vote. To
use one striking example, given that John Kerry won unmarried women by
62 percent to 37 percent, not getting unmarried women out effectively
left 12 million progressive votes at home -- and possibly cost Kerry
the election.

Relative to the rest of the electorate, unmarried women remain
unengaged. According to the Greenberg research, 64 percent describe
themselves as very interested in politics (10 on a 10-point scale),
which compares unfavorably to 73 percent of voters overall in an NPR
survey in battleground states; among married women, the number reaches
78 percent, a 14-point difference. Stanley Greenberg adds that "on
balance unmarried women report the same level of contact as other
voters." But as Greenberg emphasizes: "More important, given their
progressive instincts and the fact that they are less likely to
participate in politics, unmarried women should be getting more
contact than average."

And while the unmarried-women demographic is a vastly diverse
constituency with varied politics and needs, economic issues have a
huge impact on many of their lives:

More than 40 percent of single women have household incomes of $30,000
or less;

Single women make 56 cents on every dollar that a married man makes;

Single women are less likely than married people to have health
coverage;

More than 10 million are single moms with children at home.

This is why meat-and-potato issues rate at the top of the agenda for
unmarried women, and why progressives need to reach out to single
women by addressing these issues.

Getting the Job Done

So the challenge for progressives over the next two months is to
energize unmarried women by addressing their highest priority -- the
economy -- in a way they can relate to their own experience. All the
rhetoric about inflation, or whether we are in a recession or not, is
likely baloney to them. Many single women are making it paycheck to
paycheck. So it would stand to reason that Obama's tax plan -- which
would reduce taxes for 95 percent of the population and only raise
them for people making more than $250,000 -- would be a well-known
fact and a cause of motivation. Yet for reasons that are hard to grasp
but could certainly be attributed to the media repeating false
Republican talking points, some polls show that more than half of
voters think Obama is going to raise taxes on them, not lower them.

So, to progressive leaders, consider the math: Single women are the
biggest voting bloc; they will vote for the Dems 2-1. Increasing their
turnout in relation to the overall electorate by 3 points would
increase the Democrats' vote by 2 points. In other words, single women
would make up 24 percent of the vote share instead of 22 percent, and
that could make a big difference. Since overall single women make up
26 percent of total voting-age population, if you do the simple
arithmetic, they are the group primed for the biggest growth among
progressives and the electorate at large. It's time to reach out and
motivate.