There’s been a lot written about a recent USAToday/Gallup poll conducted in 12 states likely to be targets in presidential election showing a precipitate drop in support for Mitt Romney among women. Example: this piece in Roll Call by Stuart Rothenberg, which is full of sensible analysis. As Rothenberg notes, the standard meme has been that this shows that the Obama campaign’s charge that Republicans are waging a “war on women” has moved something like 10 million Americans to change their votes. But, as Rothenberg also notes, this trend is not discernible in other recent polls.
In other words, there’s every sign that the USAToday/Gallup poll is the one out of every 20 polls which polling theory tells us are wrong. It looks very much like an outlier. We should keep our eyes open to see whether other polls show a similar phenomenon. But for the moment this swing against Romney among women looks more like something left-wing feminists would like to see happening than something that is actually happening out there in the real world.
