Soccer and Security Moms Unite: "That’s what happens when a president has a 30% approval rating..."

NYT: Soccer and Security Moms Unite
By JANET ELDER
Published: September 19, 2007

Political campaigns are marketing campaigns. And ever since Richard Nixon campaigned for the votes of what he called “the silent majority,” political operatives have targeted specific demographic groups. Even establishing the name of the group in the political lexicon can be part of the campaign, with voters seeing themselves in the catchy name. Angry white men, soccer moms, waitress moms, office park dads, Nascar dads, security moms — gender is almost always the noun. But the voter as marketing niche is getting harder to find.

In the polling world, President Bush has had a “leveling effect among subgroups,” as Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, put it. The tension between groups like married women and unmarried women is disappearing. That’s what happens when a president has a 30 percent job approval rating; there’s not much room for dramatic contrast.

Women are a good example. Married or not, behind the wheel in the suburbs or not, women as a group made up more than half of all voters in the last presidential election, 54 percent. Overall, women voted 51 percent Democratic to 48 percent Republican in the 2004 presidential election, but those figures obscured differences when it came to subgroups of women. Marriage then was the great divide. In 2004, married women, who made up 32 of the electorate, voted for Mr. Bush by a 55 percent to 44 percent margin. But unmarried women voted the opposite way. They voted for Senator John Kerry by a margin of 62 percent to 37 percent.

But shortly after that, married women started to see things differently. Some say it was the war. Others say it was the Terry Schiavo case or Hurricane Katrina or changing views of the threat from terrorism. Married women, including the ones who live in the suburbs, now appear more likely than in 2004 to vote for a Democrat this time around. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in July, a plurality, 46 percent, of married women who live in the suburbs said that if the presidential election were held today, they would vote for a Democrat, while 29 percent said they would vote for a Republican....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/us/politics/19web-elder.html?8dpc