John Baer: Women, Latinos mean good and bad news for Hillary ... maybe
THERE'S SOME good news and maybe some less-than-good news for Hillary Clinton as she hits the great state of Pennsylvania today. (She's scheduled in Scranton this evening, Harrisburg and Philly tomorrow.)
THERE'S SOME good news and maybe some less-than-good news for Hillary Clinton as she hits the great state of Pennsylvania today. (She's scheduled in Scranton this evening, Harrisburg and Philly tomorrow.)
At first blush it might seem Pa.'s not such a great state for women, a key and growing constituency for Clinton.
A look, for example, at the Web site of WomenVote PA, a Philly-based Women's Law Project initiative "to improve the status of women," paints a pretty bleak picture.
Did you know - the site asks - that Pa. ranks 47th among states in women's political participation?
Or that Pa.'s the only state where women are less likely to register to vote than men?
Or that Pa.'s one of just seven states where women vote at rates lower than men?
The info - showing that just 47 percent of Pa. women vote - is attributed to the Washington-based Institute for Women's Policy Research.
So one could conclude that Pa. women are backwoods stay-at-homers, too busy frying bologna and polishing their husbands' hunting rifles to worry about highfalutin stuff such as politics.
Wrong.
The good news for Hillary is that the info is outdated and not applicable to presidential election years.
It's taken from a 2004 report on the states but based on averages of women's registration and voting from 1998 and 2000.
More recent data from the '04 presidential election show a very different story.
Erica Williams, the institute's study director, tells me that Pa. women vote just fine in presidential years. In fact, she says, unpublished '04 data show that they register and vote at rates above the national average.
"In Pennsylvania, 63.5 percent of women voted in '04, whereas 61.3 percent of men voted," Williams said. "The national average that election was 60.1 percent for women and 56.3 percent for men."
So Pa. women (who outnumber men in the state) are more likely to register and vote than Pa. men in presidential years.
A further review of the data, originally from the U.S. Census Bureau, shows that Pa. women in the last presidential election voted at higher rates than women in California, New York, New Jersey and Texas, and only slightly lower than women in Ohio.
This, I would think, should make Hillary smile.
(Barb DiTullio of WomenVote PA concedes that the Web-site data are old, and promises that "those numbers are coming down soon.")
And Joanne Tosti-Vasey, president of Pennsylvania NOW, says Pa. women this year are almost certain to up their voting numbers.
"As a woman, to be able to have the chance to vote for the first woman president is absolutely exciting," she says.
The maybe-not-so-great news is that another constituency kind to Clinton - Latino voters - isn't much of a Pa. factor.
In four of the five large states that Clinton so far has won - California, New York, New Jersey and Texas - the Latino population exceeds the 14.8 percent national average; in California and Texas by more than double (it's 36 percent in each state).
Pennsylvania's Latino population is 4.2 percent.
So no need for Hillary's TV ads here to carry Spanish subtitles, as they did in Texas.
But there is a silver lining. The fifth big state she won, Ohio, has a Latino population of just 2.3 percent.
Not all women, nor all Latinos, are pro-Clinton. But she won Latinos by 36 points and white women by 21 points in Texas, and white women by better than 2-to-1 in Ohio.
And the bad news for Barack Obama?
Ya can't believe everything ya might read about Pennsylvania women.
Send e-mail to baerj@phillynews.com.
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