Posted on 12/02/2013 4:43:32 PM PST by Libloather
As the 2014 midterm election season begins, the Democratic Party is in full bloom as the political home of the modern American woman.
For the last half-century, women were swing voters between the parties. A gender gap emerged in the 1980s with single women leaning toward the Democrats on issues from abortion rights to national defense.
Over the last decade, Democrats have tried to widen the gap by charging the GOP with conducting a “War on Women.” There are several fronts in that war, Democrats say: Republicans oppose easy access to contraception, oppose abortion rights and oppose expansion of entitlements to help the poor (who are disproportionately women and children).
A 2012 Pew survey found that 57 percent of women favor Democrats. Young, single, gay, minority and pro-abortion-rights women have been with the party for a while. Older, white, married women lean to the GOP. But now married, churchgoing women living in cities are also voting for Democrats.
That explains why an October ABC/Fusion poll found 60 percent of Democrats want more women elected to Congress. Republicans do not see the need. Only 26 percent of conservatives and 23 percent of Republicans want more women in Congress.
The two politicians who produce the most passionate response among Democrats, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, are former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). They stirred the Democratic base more than President Obama or Vice President Biden. Women are the future of the party.
Consider the following examples:
Hillary Clinton is the party’s clear choice to be their 2016 nominee for president. The battle for second place is between Vice President Biden and Warren, whose profile as a populist warrior for the middle class keeps rising. The power of a Clinton-Warren ticket is beyond question.
Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.) is the party’s lead negotiator on any budget deal.
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) and Claire McCaskill (Mo.) are the two leading voices in dealing with the military sexual abuse scandal.
The same female dynamic is evident in the House.
Democrats are led by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), now the minority leader but also the first female Speaker in the nation’s history. The overwhelming majority of the record 78 women in the House are Democrats — 59 members.
A quarter of women now in Congress are freshmen elected in a 2012 wave that featured 20 female Democrats and only 4 Republicans.
The rise of Democratic women is tied to the rising power of female voters in the party’s base.
In the 2012 presidential election, 53 percent of the voters were female, and those women gave 55 percent of their votes to the Democrat, President Obama.
The extent of the female flavor of Democratic politics is currently on display in the Senate Armed Services Committee.
There, Gillibrand is leading the fight to take military commanders out of the decision about whether to prosecute any military person accused of sexual assault. The New York senator’s approach is to create an independent commission on military sexual assaults.
Her proposal has won the support of more than 50 senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as well as the Tea Party’s leading voice in the Senate, Texas Republican Ted Cruz.
The opposition is coming from McCaskill. The Midwestern Democrat wants to keep the overwhelmingly male commanders in charge of deciding whether a sexual assault case goes to criminal proceedings but to deny commanders the right to dismiss a conviction. McCaskill’s proposal also makes it a crime to retaliate against anyone who reports a sexual assault.
McCaskill’s approach has the support of Pentagon leadership. She argues her approach prevents military leaders from being able to “wash their hands of any responsibility” and would result in more prosecutions for sexual abuse.
At the moment, Gillibrand has captured the spirit of underdog women fighting back against abuse in a male-dominated military. The Pentagon reported that, last year alone, there were 26,000 cases of unwanted sexual contact and assault, and only 3,000 of those cases were reported.
The divide between the two powerful female Democrats is edgy because McCaskill won reelection last year by defeating GOP Rep. Todd Akin, who damaged his candidacy with talk of “legitimate rape” and near-total opposition to abortion.
So it is ironic that McCaskill is now the target of women’s rights groups. An advertisement in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in July said her proposal allows attackers to “continue to go free.” McCaskill recently told reporters that her critics are buying an “emotionally powerful” line “that to be against Gillibrand is to be against victims — and frankly, at times, it’s personally painful for me.”
The political lesson from this dispute is that on any issue relating to women, it is Democrats, and increasingly powerful female Democrats, who speak for America’s increasingly powerful women voters — now the controlling heart of today’s Democratic party.
Oh hell yeah.
Entomology.
Indeed. Single women are more likely to be dependent on the government.
I have women friends. Often, they are STUPID about politics!
Funny how the party of the gay misogynists own women... you know, only good for death.
These are not women per say because men too are now wood to this side. And without the media and the GOP conceding everything to the Democrats, it would not be so.
Truth of the matter is promoting woman’s inadequacy by saying it is good to get abortions as if adequacy was a bad thing is how it is spun. They do not forgive adequacy the way the right and the religious have forgiven inadequacy.
To live in fear of having responsability over children is the foundation of terror... and this is why it acceptable to them to see suicide islamic terrorists children. Because animals fear men and women, the evil wants to turn them thus. It is the same way they turned black people around with the GOP conceding again guilt.
Show me a communit collectivist and I will show you that the rest of the world regardless of race or mental abilities as a far better off place than these fear-beasts.
Never mind Obamacare and its destruction of health depending women... the GOP is conceding democrats are leaders in womens health solutions to the media drumbeat.
Some more wandering Williams wordy worthless writhings.
Why don't they create a national campaign telling Americans what their vision of health care is and what they would do rather than sitting on their collective duffs and complaining about Obamacare.
Yes, Obamacare sucks, but where is the positive message about how it could be and would be under Republicans? Why are they wasting this opportunity to be cheerfully positive and giving real hope to Americans who desperately need it?
“I have women friends. Often, they are STUPID about politics!”
I haven’t seen any of those political knowledge polls in a while. There’s definitely a Republican/Democrat difference, but the male/female thing is astounding. A common result for a question that about 55% of Republican men get right, you see about 45% of Dem men get right, with the female Democrats being aware in the low to mid teens.
Bob Becklel I can watch. Juan gets muted or better yet I change channels.
19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women\'s Right to Vote www.archives.gov › America's Historical Documents Passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment guarantees all American women the right to vote. Achieving this ...
No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t want to live in Saudi Arabia either.
So do you feel the same about blacks voting?
People who don't support the system should not be permitted to vote.
Why bother repeating yourself? I would have no problem seeing the vote limited to those who work and those who own property. The way it was when America was founded
But you repeat yourself, suggesting we’d be better off without women voting—yet somehow you sense that it wouldn’t be right to say the same about blacks voting.
I wonder how many people would willingly trade their right to vote for government handouts?
That would be an interesting solution. Since one receiving government aid could be seen as receiving a bribe, it makes a certain kind of sense that anyone receiving money from the government (outside of Social Security) should have their voting privileges suspended until such time as they are no longer receiving said aid. The justification being that anyone receiving aid would only vote to continue receiving or expanding that aid.
Hmmmmmmm.
What’s happened is that all the young, single, pro-abortion-rights women of the Eighties and Nineties have spent the last ten years finding husbands to browbeat in a desperate attempt to breed and so are no longer single. They’ll be lucky to have one kid, and thus their numbers will be halved within a generation.
Yep, all they do is whine about the Tparty and conduct “inquiries”.
All those women with kids going to bolt when the insurance bill comes due.
Not if they are fully subsidized, which is the plan.
Oh, but they won’t. In fact, I bet most of them end up on the short end of the stick in this deal.
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