Understanding How Women Vote 16 wars were worth it and less likely to think the Bush administration had made the country more secure.55 Not only were mothers not supportive of Bush on military issues they were also more liberal than nonmothers on many social welfare issues, such as health care, government support for jobs, assisting the poor, and gay rights.56 The media and candidates should have learned an important lesson in 2004 assuming a small segment of women are single-issue voters who can sway an election is dangerous. Neither the security mom nor the Sex and the City voter behaved as the media and pundits expected. As it turned out, women, even a small segment of women, were not single-issue vot- ers, and it was incorrect to assume that mothers would become drastically more conservative after 9/11. This election highlighted the importance of examining the issue pos- itions of a variety of subgroups of women with a variety of demographic characteristics. Furthermore, focusing solely on one or two groups of women allows both the news media and candidates to ignore a much larger segment of voting women. Despite the fact that these assumptions about women were incorrect in 2004, similar generalities were made in following elections. THE OBAMA YEARS: GENDER IN THE 2008 ELECTION The real news of the 2008 election of Barack Obama was not as much about women voters as about minority and young voters, whose turn- out reached record numbers. Of particular note was the turnout of black women, who voted in significantly higher numbers than previous elections, with 63.7 percent of eligible black women voting in 2004 and 68.8 percent in 2008. A larger proportion of eligible black women voted than any other demographic subgroup.57 Women voters in general were also still an import- ant portion of the electorate and were given special attention because of Hillary Clinton’s primary race and Sarah Palin’s Republican nomination for vice president. Some pundits argued that women would simply vote for a female candidate regardless of party, but this proved to be far from the truth. Hillary Clinton’s historic run for the Democratic presidential nomina- tion brought gender to the foreground of the primary and general elec- tions, and Clinton held unique appeal to female voters. Early polling indicated that gender was an important factor in opinions of Clinton. In April 2007, there was a clear gender gap in Clinton’s favorability ratings men were equally split (47 percent favorable, 49 percent unfavorable), but she was significantly more popular among women, with 58 percent giv- ing her a favorable rating and 36 percent an unfavorable rating.58 While
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