Political analyst Charlie Cook writes for National Journal that polling data says this difference is pulling women to vote Democratic. He reports that Obama runs ahead among those who identify the environment, education, health care, and birth control as key issues. On the other hand, he finds those who identify the economy and foreign policy/defense as important favor Romney.
Cook makes the quite tiny intuitive leap to identify the former as "women's issues" and the latter as "men's issues." He argues that Romney needs to develop some chops on the mommy issues if he hopes to be elected.
Is Cook right? In a crappy economy, with lots of people out of work and home values down, are all of these issues equally salient? Except for people who actually work in health care and education, I have to think again in 2012 "it's the economy, stupid," in the prophetic words of Bill Clinton's ragin' Cajun, James Carville.
For the 10 million or so people of both genders employed in the K-12 public schools, education is very important. For the 11.5 million employed in health care it is important, and most of those are women. The environment and birth control are not huge employment fields so they don't have the same enormous "where I sit is where I stand" constituencies. Which is not to say that each of these four issues doesn't have non-employee single-issue enthusiasts, for of course they do.
On the other hand, the economy is literally everybody's issue: every home or condo owner, everyone with an IRA, everybody worried about a pension plan, everyone with a job they could lose (or have lost), or a friend or relative out of work. All must worry about the economy, Romney's strength.
