Women voters yet to decide

KATHARINE Q SEELYE

The intense competition for the female vote was underscored on Wednesday as both presidential campaigns seized on a remark by Richard E Mourdock, the Republican Senate candidate in Indiana, that pregnancy is "something that God intended to happen" even if it is the result of rape.

Romney, who had just made an ad for Mourdock, quickly distanced himself from the statement, while the Obama campaign just as quickly suggested that it reflected the backward thinking of Republicans and said that if elected, they would pose a danger to women's health.

The quadrennial obsession with winning over female voters can sometimes lead to mythmaking. Pollsters now question the validity of soccer moms as a distinct voting bloc; the term came into vogue in the 1996 presidential election but vanished soon after.

Presently, whether or not the term "waitress moms" endures, it defines a distinct demographic: blue-collar white women who did not attend college. And they are getting a lot of attention from both campaigns as the presidential race barrels toward its conclusion because even at this late date, pollsters say, many waitress moms have not settled on a candidate. They feel no loyalty to one party or the other, though they tend to side with Republicans.

"Blue-collar women are most likely to be the remaining movable part of the electorate, which is precisely why both campaigns are going at them as hard as they are," said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, who is advising Priorities USA, a pro-Obama "super PAC."

About 9 percent of all voters in 2008 were white women without college degrees who had an annual household income of less than $50,000, according to exit polls.

So when the candidates talk about women, the waitress moms are top of mind. Obama, for example, is now discussing abortion and birth control not as a matter of controlling one's own body but as "a pocketbook issue for women and families," as he said in the recent town-hall-style debate, noting that many women rely on Planned Parenthood not just for contraceptives but for referrals and screenings.

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