Unlike Florida, the proof of our power is not sullied with statistical probabilities. Nationally, women gave Gore their vote by an 11-percent margin while Bush won men by 11 percent. In Florida, the margins mirror this national vote with women backing Gore and men Bush. Whether by age, education or economic status, the pattern holds.

This paragraph is disingenous. Yes the pattern holds by age, education or economic status — unfortunately it does not hold by race and by marital status.

The so-called gender gap is in fact largely a racial gap. Black and Hispanic women broke overwhelmingly toward Gore, while depending on which polling data you rely on, Bush barely won or barely lost the white female vote. If, in fact, NOW had been able to deliver its core constituency of white women to “fight the right,” Gore would have won in a landslide.

Bush also beat Gore among married women (as well as men). NOW activists may indeed “have begun outreach in their communities to tell the cold, hard truth about the threat that George W. Bush, if elected, poses to the nation” early in the campaign, as one of their press releases claimed, but if they did a lot of women simply weren’t buying what they were selling.

Source:

Anti-Women Backlash Strategy Dwindling. Tanya Melich, WomensENews, No date given.

NOW and the Voting Gender Gap is a post from: EquityFeminism

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Steinem certainly has the right to share her views, but toward the end of the presidential campaign she penned a “Top Ten Reasons Why I’m not Voting for Nader” letter that was widely distributed via e-mail. Among the ten reasons Steinem wasn’t voting for Nader, number four was bizarre,

4) Nader asked Winona LaDuke, an important Native American leader, to support and run with him, despite his likely contribution to the victory of George W. Bush, a man who has stated that “state law is supreme when to comes to Indians.”

This is a bit bizarre. She’s not going to vote for Nader specifically because he was able to convince a woman to run as his vice-president? As Ellen Johnson noted in a reply to Steinem, she appears to be questioning LaDuke’s agency, as if the Native American activist had no choice in the matter.

I think LaDuke was a bad choice because, like Nader, she’s pretty much wrong about everything, but to argue that feminists should vote against Nader because he had the temerity to ask a woman to run as his vice-president is absurd.

Steinem: Nader Was Wrong to Have a Woman on His Ticket is a post from: EquityFeminism

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