In 2004, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the voter turnout rate for women was 60.1% compared with 56.3% for men, and across the United States 8.8 million more women than men voted. Women have voted at higher rates than men in all presidential elections since 1980, with the gap between women and men growing slightly larger in each subsequent election year. Moreover, in 2004, women outvoted men (in terms of both turnout rates and actual numbers) in every racial and ethnic group—African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, and whites (Center for American Women and Politics 2005a).
Not only did women outnumber men among voters in 2004, but a gender gap in voting preferences, measured as the absolute difference between the proportion of women and the proportion of men voting for the winning candidate, was also very much apparent. The nationwide exit poll conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International showed that 48% of women compared with 55% of men voted for George W. Bush, resulting in a gender gap of seven percentage points.
The 2004 gender gap was neither the largest (11 percentage points in voting for Bill Clinton in 1996) nor the smallest (four percentage points in voting for Bill Clinton in 1992) for presidential elections since 1980. In fact, gender differences in voting in 2004 appeared very average in magnitude; the mean gender gap for all presidential elections from 1980 to 2000 was 7.7 percentage points (Center for American Women and Politics 2004; Center for American Women and Politics 2005b).
The suffragists who struggled long and arduously for women's enfranchisement would undoubtedly be heartened by these statistics, and yet one imagines that many of the suffragists would be very disappointed that the increase in women's voting and the emergence of the gender gap have not translated into significantly greater political power and influence for American women. There is not much evidence that women's lives have improved dramatically as a result of public policy enacted in the two and a half decades since the 1980 election, when women first surpassed men in their rate of voter turnout and the contemporary gender gap in voting first became evident. We are still a long way from gender equity in the United States. For example, on average, women who work full time earn only 76.5 cents for every dollar men earn (Institute for Women's Policy Research 2005). Women are more likely than men to live below the poverty level, and 50.9% of families living in poverty in 2001 were headed by women (U.S. Census Bureau 2003). Many women still struggle to find affordable, quality child care, and the United States provides only 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave, in contrast to 163 other countries that offer guaranteed paid leave to women who give birth (Heymann et al. 2004, 1). Moreover, reproductive rights seem just as much in jeopardy in 2005 as they were in 1980.
Despite persistent gender inequities, the gender gap in voting, and the much larger number of women than men who vote, recent presidents have not made public policy on women, or policies aimed at alleviating gender inequities, a priority of their administrations. One searches long and hard on the official Website of the Clinton-Gore administration detailing policy accomplishments from 1993 to 2000 for a single mention of “women” (“The Clinton-Gore Administration” 2000). In contrast, there is an entire section on “families and community,” along with sections on issue areas such as crime and drugs, the economy, education, health care, housing, and immigration. Women are not even mentioned in a lengthy section called “moving families from welfare to work” (instead, gender-ambiguous “parents,” “people,” and “families” are the preferred terminology)—even though a large majority of those “moved” off the welfare roles were very clearly women.
The Bush-Cheney White House Website (“The White House: Policies and Initiatives” 2005) is no better. The Web page offers a long list of categories under “Policies and Initiatives,” not one of which pertains to women. Unlike the case for the Clinton-Gore Website, however, women do appear in some of the more detailed discussions under certain issue headings. Specifically, they appear in discussions of “Afghanistan” and “Iraq,” where there is mention of how women are guaranteed seats in the national governing bodies and how, under the proposed Iraqi constitution, “Discrimination on the basis of gender is banned” (“The White House: Renewal in Iraq” 2005). Ironically, of course, there is no mention on the Website of presidential proposals or support for guaranteeing women seats in the U.S. Congress or adding an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning discrimination on the basis of gender.
My point is simply that the persistent inequalities women face and the lack of priority given by recent administrations to policies targeted to American women are seemingly quite inconsistent with the fact that women voters outnumber men by 8.8 million and have different political preferences. Increases in the numbers of women voting and the persistence of the gender gap have not translated into significant increases in political clout and major advancements in public policy for women. Why?
Electoral Manipulation
There is no simple answer to this question. I suggest that part of the answer lies with the prevalent practice in recent elections of targeting a small and unorganized segment of the electorate who are deemed to be the “swing” voters who will determine the outcome of the election. These voters may be Democrats or Republicans or independents, but what makes them “swing” voters is that they are not strongly committed to one candidate or another in a particular election. They are presumably persuadable.
In recent elections, many of the groups targeted as swing voters have been gendered, and the targeted swing voters have been men as well as women. In the early 1980s, the most coveted group of swing voters were Reagan Democrats—blue-collar men who had traditionally voted Democratic but who voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. For years thereafter, Democratic campaigns focused on trying to win back the so-called Reagan Democrats. In 1994, the “Year of the Angry White Male,” white men had apparently “swung” their votes over to the Republican Party, giving the Republicans an unexpectedly large victory in the congressional elections. Leading up to the 2004 elections, there was talk of NASCAR dads—white males, blue-collar and socially conservative, who normally would have voted Republican but who were seen as up for grabs politically because of the downturn in the economy.
Women have also been targeted as swing voters in recent elections. The most notable targets by far have been the so-called soccer moms in the 1996 and, to a lesser extent, the 2000 elections (Carroll 1999; Vavrus 2002) and security moms in the 2004 elections (Carroll 2005). Democratic pollster and consultant Celinda Lake, who is credited with coining the term NASCAR dads, has also tried to push the idea of “waitress moms” as possible swing voters in recent elections. Waitress moms, however, never attracted nearly as much attention as soccer moms or security moms.
What impact have these targeted, swing-voting women had in recent elections? Paul Frymer, in his insightful book Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America (1999), may suggest an answer. He identifies a phenomenon he calls “electoral capture,” and argues that the influence of African Americans on U.S. elections has been limited by this phenomenon. Electoral capture occurs when a group that
votes overwhelmingly for one of the major political parties … subsequently finds the primary opposition party making little or no effort to appeal to its interests or attract its votes…. The party leadership, then, can take the group for granted because it recognizes that … the group has nowhere else to go. Placed in this position by the party system, a captured group will often find its interests neglected by their own party leaders. These leaders, in turn, offer attention and benefits to groups of “swing” voters who are allegedly capable of determining election results. (Frymer 1999, 8)
Certainly, women have not been among the electorally captured. In fact, some women have been viewed as among the highly desired swing voters to whom benefits are supposed to accrue. Frymer suggests that the political influence of swing voters is far greater than that of the electorally captured. Nonetheless, I argue that the interests of women voters, like the interests of African-American voters, have been neglected by political leaders (in this case, recent presidents) of both parties, despite the fact that women have been identified as key swing voters in recent elections.
Women, as voters, have been subject to a phenomenon that might be called “electoral manipulation,” as opposed to electoral capture. Electoral manipulation involves the creation of a socially constructed target group of voters (whether Reagan Democrats, NASCAR dads, or security moms) who do not consciously identify with one another and who are not represented by any existing organization or interest group. A campaign can target appeals to this hypothetical group and talk about their importance in an election without any fear that the victorious candidate will be held accountable to this group—since there is no organized entity to articulate the political interests of this social construction, to lobby the candidate or his or her staff once elected, or to call attention to the victorious candidate's failure to be responsive to the social construction's political interests. In this manner, a candidate can appear to be responsive to the voters who are supposedly most critical to the outcome of an election, while promising little or nothing to “real” organized groups that could actually hold the victorious candidate accountable.
In recent elections, there has been yet another dimension to this process that has made the phenomenon of electoral manipulation even more problematic for women voters. Women have been subjected to a particular form of electoral manipulation that could be considered “electoral momipulation” (as opposed to manipulation) in that they have been targeted only in their roles as “moms.” The soccer moms of 1996 and 2000 and the security moms of 2004 were not constructed as groups of women broadly interested in a host of issues, including their own status as women. Rather, they were constructed as narrowly focused, self-sacrificing moms whose concerns centered almost exclusively on the welfare of their families and children.
The remainder of this essay examines the social construction of soccer moms in the 1996 election and security moms in the 2004 election, illustrating how the process of electoral momipulation has undermined the potential inherent in the gender gap and limited the political influence of women.
Soccer Moms
Soccer moms received considerable attention during the 1996 presidential race. A search for newspaper articles mentioning the words “soccer mom(s) and election(s)” published between July 1 and November 30, 1996, within the “major papers” classification in LexisNexis yielded 303 stories, of which 211 gave more than passing attention to soccer moms. The New York Times published 11 articles on soccer moms, while the Washington Post and USA Today each published nine. More than three-fifths of news stories were published in the two weeks before and one week after the November 5 election.
The first reference to the term soccer mom in the context of the 1996 election appeared in a July 21, 1996, article by E. J. Dionne, Jr. in the Washington Post, entitled “Clinton Swipes the GOP's Lyrics; The Democrat as Liberal Republican.” In the article, Alex Castellanos, a senior media advisor to Bob Dole, suggested that Bill Clinton, following the advice of his pollster, Dick Morris, was targeting a voter whom Castellanos called the “soccer mom,” defined in this article as “the overburdened middle income working mother who ferries her kids from soccer practice to scouts to school.” As this account makes clear, the soccer mom was the creation of consultants involved in the presidential campaigns.
Newspaper coverage of the 1996 election commonly portrayed the soccer mom as a mother who lived in the suburbs, was a swing voter, was busy and stressed out, worked outside the home, and drove a minivan or sports utility vehicle. Newspaper coverage also described the soccer mom (although somewhat less frequently) as middle class, married, and white (Carroll 1999). Thus, soccer moms were frequently marked explicitly by race and class as well as gender.
There was a near consensus about the concerns of the soccer moms among reporters and the political pundits whom they quoted as sources. The soccer mom's interests focused on her children and her family. She was concerned about her children's futures, their education, and their safety. As Republican pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick noted, “If you are a soccer mom, the world according to you is seen through the needs of your children.”1
Neil MacFarquhar, “Don't Forget Soccer Dads; What's a Soccer Mom Anyway?,” New York Times, 20 October 1996, sec. 4.
Froma Harrop, “Chasing Soccer Mom,” Tampa Tribune, 21 October 1996.
Both presidential campaigns in 1996 appealed to so-called soccer moms through their children and families. Bill Clinton and Bob Dole talked about a number of issues that, according to reporters, were aimed at soccer moms, including education, v-chips, school uniforms, student financial aid, drug use among young people, smoking among children, and teen curfews (Carroll 1999). Absent in newspaper reports of the campaigns' attempts to appeal to soccer moms were a whole host of other issues associated with organized feminism, or related to women's status or interests apart from their roles as mothers: for example, abortion, welfare reform, health care for women, sexual harassment, job training for women, pension reform, and child care.
From Soccer Moms to Security Moms
The security mom was the hot, new woman voter of 2004. Security moms made the list—along with eight other terms, including Mess O' Potamia, red state/blue state, TiVo, and wardrobe malfunction—of Time magazine's buzzwords of the year (“The Year in Buzzwords” 2004). Like the soccer mom, the security mom seems to have been invented by a pollster who worked for political candidates and campaigns; several sources attribute the first use of the term security mom to Republican pollster David Winston (Gilson 2004; Tumulty et al. 2003; “The Zoology of Swing Voters” 2004), although prominent Democratic pollsters, such as Celinda Lake, helped to propagate the idea of security moms as well.3
For example, Starr 2003; Lois Romano, “Female Support for Kerry Slips; Polls Show Women View Bush as Stronger on National Security,” Washington Post, 23 September 2004, sec. A.
The media portrayed the security mom as a former soccer mom, transformed by the events of September 11, 2001. Worried about future terrorist attacks and single-mindedly focused on the safety of her family and children, she was, according to most media reports, a swing voter who would help to determine the outcome of the 2004 election.
One of the first media references to security moms was in an article entitled “How Soccer Moms Became Security Moms” by Joe Klein, which appeared in Time magazine in February 2003. He argued that the “war on terrorism is two wars, one for men and one for women.” While men were focused on special forces and bombing runs, women, according to Klein, were concerned with “protection of hearth and home against the next terrorist attack.” In support of his thesis, he cited Joe Biden:
When I was out campaigning last fall [2002], this [a possible terrorist attack] was all women wanted to talk about…. Not schools, not prescription drugs. It was “What are you doing to protect my kids against terrorists?” Soccer moms are security moms now. (Klein 2003, 23)
Despite this and other occasional references, security moms did not receive much media attention until mid-September 2004 after Bush experienced an upswing in popular support following a very successful Republican convention focused on security and terrorism-related themes and the tragedy in Beslan, where terrorists held hundreds of Russian schoolchildren hostage, many of whom were killed during an attempted rescue mission. A total of 130 articles that mentioned the words “security mom(s) and election(s),” including 13 in the Washington Post and 10 in the New York Times, were published between July 1 and November 30, 2004, in newspapers classified as “major papers” within LexisNexis. As with soccer moms in the 1996 election, interest in security moms peaked during the last two and a half weeks before the November 2 election and in the first few days of postelection analysis, with almost one-half of all stories appearing between October 16 and November 7.
In an editorial entitled “Myth of the Vanishing Swing Vote,” published in the Washington Post on October 5, 2004, Mark J. Penn, who conducted polls for the Clinton campaign during the 1996 election, was one of many who pointed to security moms as important to the outcome of the presidential election (although, unlike others, he did not explicitly refer to them as security moms):
Who are the voters swinging back and forth? They are the very ones we identified in 1996 as the most important group of swing voters: middle-aged white women…. These modern moms work, have kids and live in the suburbs. They are not concerned with party labels, Vietnam service or the National Guard. They are voting on the basis of what they think will be best for the future of their families. Forty-seven percent of these voters believe security is the most important issue.
The idea that security moms were swing voters who could determine the outcome of the election was a very prevalent theme in newspaper coverage of security moms. In fact, the two most frequently mentioned characteristics attributed to security moms were that they were swing voters and that they were the same voters as the soccer moms from previous elections. Besides being swing voters and former soccer moms, their most frequently mentioned attributes were that they were mothers, married, white, and lived in the suburbs (Carroll 2005). Like the soccer moms of 1996, the security moms were often explicitly marked by race (i.e., as white) and implicitly marked by class (i.e, as living in the suburbs).
Not surprisingly, security moms were seldom portrayed in print media coverage as interested in any issue other than security, terrorism, and the safety of their families and children. Article after article described security moms as women “who are fearful of another attack within the United States,”4
Katharine Q. Seelye, “Kerry in a Struggle for a Democratic Base: Women,” New York Times, 22 September 2004, sec. A.
Lionel Barber, “Bush Gambles the Presidency on Mobilising the Faithful,” Financial Times, 30 October 2004.
Richard Morin, “Swing Voters Who Hang Real Loose,” Washington Post, 3 October 2004, sec. D.
Just as newspaper articles portrayed security moms as almost single-mindedly focused on terrorism and safety, so too did these stories present the presidential campaigns and candidates as appealing to these voters largely on the basis of security issues and the need to have a strong and proven leader. In stories where candidate appeals were described, more than half the appeals focused on national security, terrorism, or safety, while another one-fifth were based on leadership qualities (e.g., proven leader, protector, strong leader) commonly linked to the war on terror (Carroll 2005).
Conclusions and Implications for the 2008 Elections
Electoral momification, involving the targeting of soccer moms and security moms in recent elections, has undermined the potential inherent in the gender gap and limited the political influence of women. The emphasis on soccer moms in 1996 and 2000 and security moms in 2004 detracted attention from the problems and concerns women face in American society as workers, as activists for feminism and other social causes, as the majority of adults living below the poverty line, as members of minority populations, and as a majority of the elderly. The fact that soccer moms and security moms were portrayed through media coverage as the critical swing voters who mattered most made it easier for the candidates largely to ignore women voters who might be politically unpalatable (e.g., women on welfare, female immigrants) or who might push to have their concerns addressed in the campaign or placed on the president's agenda (e.g., feminists, women of color, professional women).
In addition to diverting attention from other female voters and their concerns, the focus on soccer moms and security moms as moms also erased from public view any interests the women who fit the soccer and security moms' demographic profile (white, married with children) may have had in roles or capacities other than as protectors of the welfare of their children and families. For the most part, the focus was not on these women, but rather on their children and their families. Women were represented only in their roles as mothers.
Women as voters did have concerns other than those attributed to the soccer moms and security moms. For example, in a survey conducted on November 1–2, 2004, by Lake Snell Perry & Associates for Votes for Women 2004, a nonpartisan network of women's organizations created to monitor the gender gap in the 2004 presidential elections, women identified health care, education, and the economy and jobs as the top issues they wanted the president to focus on over the next four years. Large proportions of women also indicated that they would like to see the administration give priority to violence against women, women's equality under the law, and equal pay (Lake Snell Perry & Associates 2004).
A very positive development from the 2004 election was that parties, advocacy groups, and even the press seemed more cognizant of the diversity among women voters and were less likely to treat women monolithically than ever before. In trying to increase women's turnout, political parties and advocacy groups targeted very specific subgroups of women with very distinctive appeals (MacManus 2006). Similarly, at least impressionistically, the press in the 2004 election cycle seemed more than ever before to recognize that different subgroups of women voters exist. Yet in the final weeks of the campaign, security moms received far more public attention than any other subgroup of women, either real or fictional, leaving the impression that they were the only women who really mattered. Ironically, then, at the same time that there has been a move away from a monolithic notion of women as voters, the women who have been seen as most important to election outcomes have been reduced to their roles as moms—and nonthreatening white, middle-class moms at that. In a sense, the monolithic, but politically relevant, category “women” has now been replaced by the narrower, monolithic category “moms.”
All that President Bush has to do in his second term to seem responsive to the concerns of the women viewed as most critical to his reelection—the security moms—is to keep their children and families safe from terrorists. He need not do anything for these voters as women because, as security moms, they were portrayed as having no concerns outside of their maternal roles. And regardless of what Bush does in his second term, he certainly does not have to worry that some association of security moms will come knocking on the White House door in an attempt to hold him accountable.
If recent elections are any indication, electoral manipulation and momipulation are likely to occur again in the 2008 election cycle. For feminist activists, the lesson to be learned from recent history is that the creation by political consultants of a socially constructed target group of female voters who do not consciously identify with one another and who are not represented by any existing organization or interest group should be viewed with great skepticism—and even resistance. So should the dissemination of information about this group in the media. Even though the constructed target group draws attention to women as a political force, in the end this construction is not likely to serve the interests of women or feminists. Rather, it is likely to divert political and media attention away from the concerns of “real” (i.e., socially recognized and organized) groups of women voters.
It is far too early to tell what will happen in the 2008 elections. Perhaps the security moms of 2004 will resurface in 2008; this seems likely if the country remains preoccupied with terrorism. Or perhaps security moms will morph back into soccer moms if security concerns recede and domestic issues once again come to the forefront. Yet another possibility is that political consultants will invent a new group of politically relevant moms who swing. Although it may be too early to tell which group might be targeted in the 2008 elections, it is not to early for feminists to begin to strategize about ways to resist momipulation in the next election.
