Lifetime's Poll of Women

Too bad Mark Penn isn’t working on campaigns anymore, because I get the feeling he’d love to talk about the poll of “Lifetime moms” the women’s network just released. The poll, which certainly raises more questions than it answers, shows women pretty evenly divided between the Republican and Democratic tickets. Women voters in the poll were equally divided on the question of which candidate best represents the interests of women.

One of the many weird things about this poll is that the consensus was that they felt Sen. Hillary Clinton was treated more fairly during the campaign than Gov. Sarah Palin, with “56% saying coverage of Clinton was fair and 50% saying that coverage of Palin has been fair.” But this doesn’t seem like a fair comparison. Clinton has been in the public eye for decades. When she campaigned as a potential first lady, first in 1988 and then in 1992, she experienced some pretty harsh treatment by the media, including of her hair. Today, Sarah Palin is new to the national scene and she, too is experiencing some harsh criticism–including wouldn’t you know it, of her hair.

The one thing that we know from 2004 is that married women tend to vote very differently than single women. This is a curious trend to me. I’d like to see a breakdown of the Lifetime poll above to see how many of the 534 likely women voters they surveyed were married and if those trends reflect larger marriage trends in American society today. In the end, the Lifetime poll shows women are as divided about the election as, say, America as a whole. It just reconfirms that women aren’t a monolithic group.

Cross posted on Pushback.