The AP tells the grim tale for the president:
Less than two weeks out from Election Day, Republican Mitt Romney has erased President Barack Obama’s 16-point advantage among women, a new Associated Press-GfK poll shows. And the president, in turn, has largely eliminated Romney’s edge among men.
Those churning gender dynamics leave the presidential race still a virtual dead heat, with Romney favored by 47 percent of likely voters and Obama by 45 percent, a result within the poll’s margin of sampling error, the survey shows.
Herein lies what this “war on women” campaign has been all about from a political-strategy point of view. As the New York Times told the tale immediately after the midterm elections in 2010 that made John Boehner Speaker of the House:
For the first time since 1982, when exit polls began measuring support for Congressional candidates, Republicans received a majority of women’s votes. Two years ago, House Democratic candidates won women by 14 points.
Dems lost women. Dems need women. Dems are not making the sale to women. Perhaps because they are cynically, insultingly insisting that all women care about is forcing employers to cover their abortion drugs and contraceptive pills and tubal ligations.
If Dems listened to the likes of Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch, they might be in better shape with American women. Doubling down on Sandra Fluke and Planned Parenthood may have been a miscalculation, when all is said and done. But they are blinded by the client politics Jay Cost writes about in his book and well as pure radical ideology, an ideology of secularism that does, in fact, believe that abortion is health care and those arguing for religious freedom as we’ve known it are just a wee bit backward and oppressive. Unfortunately, the tyrannical tendency is where the law has moved under this president, under the Department of Health and Human Services abortion-drug, sterilization, contraceptive mandate you may have heard about here. The one that has not just Catholics, but Evangelicals, and Baptists — and a Bible publisher — suing the federal government to protect religious liberty in the United States.