WASHINGTON — The incendiary topic of rape and abortion re-entered the 2012 campaign Wednesday and threatened to singe Mitt Romney after an Indiana Senate candidate’s comments that pregnancies conceived by rape should not be aborted because “God intended” conception to happen.

DERRY, N.H. — Emmakate Paris was a one-woman tornado the other day, whipping through the racks at the thrift shop here, hunting for clothes for her children and one special item for herself: a green suit. For Halloween, she wants to dress up as Tippi Hedren in the Hitchcock movie “The Birds.”

Halloween is a small indulgence in a life that Ms. Paris, 41, said was consumed by worries — “about the kids, insurance, vacation, school, taxes, the price of gas, everything.”

She voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but is now torn. Mr. Obama has not lived up to his promise, she said. “My husband and I both have to work full time, and we’re just getting by.”

But she is not thrilled with Mitt Romney either. She said he would set women back because he did not understand their needs.

“Women worked so hard to get where we are today and to take our rights away from us is — no,” she said, shaking her head.

Behold the coveted female swing voter of 2012. She has slipped a rung or two down the economic ladder from the soccer moms of the more prosperous 1990s, as indicated by her new nickname —waitress mom. Rather than ferrying children around the suburbs in minivans, she is spinning in the hamster wheel of a tight economy and not getting ahead.

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

Mr. Romney, who had just made an ad for Mr. 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, to be replaced by the equally dubious post-9/11 “security moms.”

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, which they do a lot these days, the waitress moms are top of mind. Mr. 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.

A recent Romney ad featured a young woman telling her newborn: “Dear Daughter. Welcome to America. Your share of Obama’s debt is over $50,000.”

Clearly economic issues are front and center for women here in this blue-collar town in Rockingham County, which Mr. Obama won in 2008 by less than 1 percent of the vote.

Michelle Trulson, 39, actually is a waitress (not all waitress moms are waitresses, of course, nor are they all mothers). She works a second job too, as a lab technician. Fearing that Mr. Romney would undercut her efforts to provide for her family — and end financing for Planned Parenthood — she supports Mr. Obama.

“I’m a single mom,” she said. “I’m not on welfare. I do work. I don’t collect food stamps. But my kids need insurance, so they’re on Medicaid and I don’t want that messed with.”

“I’m a woman, so obviously I believe in woman’s rights,” she said but added that the economy was her overriding concern and Mr. Romney would do better at creating jobs.

While women in general have historically supported Democratic presidential candidates, working-class white women without college degrees are among their weakest links. Mr. Obama lost them to Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries in 2008, and to John McCain, the Republican, in the general election.

But Mr. Obama won women over all because black and Hispanic female voters turned out in greater numbers than usual and supported him overwhelmingly, as did white college-educated women. As he seeks to rebuild a winning coalition in battleground states like this one, analysts say, he needs to keep his losses among waitress moms to a minimum.

“Women are the volatile vote at the end, particularly independent, non-college-educated, married women,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who has long specialized in women’s voting patterns. Important as these women are to both campaigns, they are only one slice of the much sliced and diced female electorate. Pollsters tend to find women more interesting than men because women are more likely to be swing voters, while men usually make up their minds early.

Pollsters have found differences among women in all kinds of ways that seem to correlate with their voting habits. Unmarried women, for example, tend to vote Democratic, they say, while married women tend to vote Republican.

The multiple differences among women have created a kind of kaleidoscopic inter-gender gap, from which catchy labels sometimes emerge. Apart from waitress moms, there are now “Walmart moms,” a group defined by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm — and adopted by the retail giant — as any woman who has shopped at a Walmart in the last 30 days. They differ from waitress moms in that many have college degrees and higher incomes.

Actually, there is nothing about Walmart that pegs its shoppers as swing voters, said Will Feltus, senior vice president of National Media, which buys advertising time. Citing data from Scarborough Research, a leading market research firm, he said that a higher percentage of independent female voters was likely to be found at Lord & Taylor, T.J. Maxx and Macy’s.

The data yield other tidbits that could be useful to campaigns trying to reach independent women. Their taste in television programming, for example, runs to the daytime soaps, their preferred soft drink is Diet Sierra Mist, and their preference in wine is, fittingly, rosé.

“Groups of women simply don’t resemble each other anymore, which is really fascinating,” said Kellyanne Fitzpatrick Conway, a Republican pollster — whereas, she added, the gender gap between men and women had become fairly predictable.

“Mars versus Venus,” she said, “is a yawner.”

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6 COMMENTS

October 24, 2012 |

A sign from Slutwalk NYC. -  Photo Credit: Sarah Seltzer

Another week, another offensive comment about women, sex, consent and abortion. We’re getting numb to it by now; a candidate or public figure says something alarming that shows a basic misunderstanding of female anatomy, the nature of rape or the realities of abortion. Everyone gets upset, the person in question semi-backtracks, we realize how awful his policy agenda is, and then the next comment comes down the pipeline.

This has been the year of “aspirin between the knees” and “legitimate rape,” the month of “some girls rape easy” and the awful, false claims that pregnancies are never life-threatening from Rep. Joe Walsh (even after his colleague testified about her own life-threatening pregnancy on the House floor last year). This is the year that women in the military “should expect to be raped,” the year of “abortions on women who aren’t pregnant” zombie myth, the year of maybe we should reconsider  incest exceptions to abortion bans . And now we have  Richard Mourdock saying pregnancy by rape is “God’s will. ” So here’s the question: why do they keep saying these things? It’s 2012, and these statements about rape, abortion and sex are actually really energizing for their opposition–they pull middle-of-the road voters away from the group they see as “extreme” and toward Democrats, who seem more reasonable, understandable and moderate on social issues. So why does ill-advised stream-of-consciousness ranting continue?

1. They really and truly believe this stuff . (They also don’t believe in the considerable evidence that refutes it.) For years, many vocal pro-choicers have been saying that the bulk of contemporary anti-choice ideology is more motivated by misogyny and the desire to shame and punish sexually active women than by concern for the potential life of an embryo or fetus–thus the lack of interest from this faction in childcare, education, maternal health, maternal leave policy, etc.

That sturdy link between anti-choice advocacy and misogyny also explains why so many casual, women-hating comments come out of the mouths of these guys. This is their doctrine, their bread and butter. Also, these are the same people who don’t trust things like facts and figures. They deny the realities of climate change and fight the teaching of evolution–so the science on women’s health is hardly going to convince them.

Even more insidious than these casual connections is the fact that many of those making offensive comments are hardline movement anti-choicers. Just this week Todd Akin’s ties to an anti-abortion militia were revealed , along with his history of multiple arrests protesting clinics.2. They’re emboldened by the Tea Party and the war on women. This is a story we at AlterNet, particularly Adele Stan, have been telling for a long time. The extreme, socially conservative, right-wing faction of the GOP used to be kept somewhat at bay by the Washington insider, fiscally conservative faction. Not so anymore. The Tea Party has allowed all of the uglier ideas that used to be swept aside, from racist birther conspiracy theories to those other theories about legitimate rape into the light. And it isn’t pretty.

3. They’re in denial about the dangers women–and all of us–face . It’s no coincidence that Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment and Joe Walsh’s absurd claim that no pregnancies can be medically life-threatening are classic examples of making up facts to suit a preexisting argument. Mourdock’s comments, on the other hand, are another kind of denial, a paper-thin religious assurance that the bad things that happen are part of a plan. The reality is twofold: first, issues like rape, incest and life-threatening pregnancies are the kinds of complexities that make the case for legalized abortion for all women, because each person’s case and situation is different, because we can’t stand in each other’s shoes.

Second, however, mainstream liberals have been too quick to turn to these examples of dire situations to justify abortion. “But rape and incest and life of the mother!” we cry. When we move into that territory, they do not cede it to us–they attack us on it. So now rape victims are being targeted. We shouldn’t be surprised. Instead of acknowledging the real dangers and complications in our lives, right-wingers invent made-up terrors that rob women of agency, like abortion providers who operate on women who aren’t even pregnant, a particularly bizarre myth.4. They haven’t been punished by voters yet. The Tea Party swept in in 2010. The war on women began in January 2011. There has been no ballot-box pushback against this ideology yet, and it’s unclear whether there will be a strong enough effort to send a message that such statements, and the policy that goes with it, is not okay. But what we’ve witnessed is two years of an assumed mandate, in which extremists with little regard for women’s social equality have felt empowered to say whatever comes to their minds.

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Sarah Seltzer is an associate editor at AlterNet and a freelance writer based in New York City. Her work has been published at the Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, Jezebel and the Washington Post. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahmseltzer and find her work at sarahmseltzer.com.