BOB DOLE DOESN’T LIKE the gender gap. “It annoys him,” says an adviser to his presidential campaign. According to Dole pollster Tony Fabrizio, “it irks him that the White House says he’s done nothing [for women].” Dole believes this is a “bad rap,” says another senior Dole adviser. And it is, insists Rep. Susan Molinari of New York, Dole’s personal choice for keynote speaker at the Republican convention: “He’s got a tremendous record on women’s issues. ” Dole is so obsessed with the gender gap that he brings the subject up frequently in meetings with aides. “He says things like, ‘There’s a gender gap. We’re going to close it.'”
Yes, Dole has a strategy for doing just that. Unfortunately, it’s not likely to work. Dole has targeted upper-middle-class professional women as potential supporters, and he’s wooing them ardently. The trouble is most of them, because they’re pro-choice or otherwise culturally out of sync with Republicans, have long since realigned out of the GOP Closing the gender gap between them and average American males is probably impossible. But there’s another gender gap, one involving married suburban women, a culturally conservative bloc that includes millions of homemakers and evangelical Christians. They’re normally part of the Republican coalition. But Dole hasn’t won them over yet. And he’s doing practically nothing that would appeal to them.
“Right now Bill Clinton is ahead among married stay-at-home mothers for the first time for any Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964,” says a Republican strategist. Well, not quite. Dole leads Clinton 44 percent to 42 percent among white female homemakers in a recent national survey by American Viewpoint, a Republican polling firm. But that’s breathtakingly bad news for Dole. To have a shot at defeating Clinton, he needs to capture homemakers by a landslide, not a whisker. Among all married white women, the news is worse: Clinton leads 47 percent to 38 percent. If Dole can’t prevail among married women, he might as well forget about becoming president.
But all Dole’s maneuverings are aimed at attracting upper-middle-class women, some of them unmarried and feminist. He’s fuzzed his position on abortion and picked Molinari, who is pro-choice, to give one of the longest speeches at the convention. In press releases issued by his campaign, Dole touts his support for the Violence Against Women Act, which funds studies by feminist scholars, and the Glass Ceiling Commission. His aides boast of his appointment of a woman chief of his Senate staff and the first female secretary of the Senate. Dole also spotlighted women in his July 24 speech on aiding small business. “One of the greatest economic stories of recent times,” he said, is “the number of women who are small-business owners. . . .I’m proud to say that not only was my father a smallbusiness person, but so too was my mother.”
There’s nothing wrong with this pitch — except that it’s not the way to appeal to the women whose votes Dole actually has a chance of getting. “The continental divide of American politics is not defined by gender, but by other demographic characteristics such as marital status, childbearing, and church attendance,” says Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition. “The smartest thing for Dole and the Republican party to do is to aggressively appeal to suburban married women with values issues such as education, crime, and welfare.” Some Dole strategists agree with Reed. “A lot of people in Washington think the way to deal with the gender gap is to talk up women’s issues,” argues a Dole strategist. “Wrong.”
Dole doesn’t have to wipe out the gender gap entirely, and he couldn’t if he wanted to. Some of the gap is structural and sheerly the result of Republican gains among males, not Democratic gains among females: For nearly two decades, men have trended Republican and women haven’t. In 1980, Jimmy Carter narrowly lost to Ronald Reagan among women (47 percent to 46 percent) but was clobbered among men (55 percent to 38 percent). Reagan and George Bush won a majority of women in 1984 and 1988, but Republicans don’t have to do this to win. In 1994, for example, women voted Democratic in congressional races (54 percent to 46 percent). This was more than offset by men (57 percent to 43 percent). The result: The GOP captured the House and Senate.
The 1994 gender gap — the differential between how men and women voted — was 22 points. But Fabrizio, the Dole pollster, has calculated that the structural gap in presidential races is 10 points. The problem for Dole is the gap is higher now. Fabrizio says it’s 3 points higher. Linda DiVall of American Viewpoint pegs it slightly higher. Whatever the gap, it would be acceptable if a surge of male voters to Dole were the cause, but it’s not. The cause is women’s skittishness about him. The biggest gap of all is among white working women. Next come married white women.
Gary Bauer, the head of the Family Research Council and a critic of the Dole campaign, says Dole will never attract conservative married women while appealing to feminists. Bauer said he spoke recently to a conservative Catholic group, the National Hibernians, which had canceled a speaking invitation to President Clinton after he vetoed the ban on partial-birth abortion. The group was two-thirds female, but their disenchantment with Clinton didn’t translate into support for Dole. Bauer said leaders of the organization estimated members would back Clinton by 65 percent to 35 percent.
Dole is doing one fruitful thing to improve his image among women: trying to change his style. Fabrizio contends Clinton has stolen his approach to women from the book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The president now speaks more softly and has changed his body language, Fabrizio says. “It looks like he’s read the book 15 times.” Dole hasn’t gone that far, but Don Sipple, a Dole media consultant, screened a video of Dole for several focus groups of women. Dole appeared in a relaxed, informal, and conversational setting — no suit and tie — and women liked him better. Dole probably won’t be able to recapture this stress-free, amiable style while campaigning. But expect his TV commercials to feature it.
by Fred Barnes
