2014: Will the GOP Lose Women Again?

In the nearer term, the GOP has a more pressing worry: will GOP candidates again lose the votes of women by a large margin.  Given that the Christofascist base of the GOP believes that women should be subservient to men (being bare foot and pregnant and locked in the family home is the ideal), have no access to contraception, and aren't entitled to equal pay for equal work, selling the GOP to women is an uphill battle even in so-called red states.  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP's apparent inability to grasp this simple reality as it continues to push Christofascist inspired sound bites.  Here are some highlights from the article:

Republicans are relieved that so far, there’s no Todd Akin in the 2014 election cycle. Yet even without a clueless GOP candidate blathering about “legitimate rape,” the party still trails Democrats among women voters, even in races that feature female GOP candidates, and it could cost them a chance to take back the Senate. So Americans for Shared Prosperity is riding to the rescue with an ad so condescending to women it might have been made by Todd Akin. It rivals that “Creepy Uncle Sam” ad that backfired on the Koch brothers’ Generation Opportunity.

In the 60-second spot, which ran on the Sunday shows as well as reportedly in Colorado and North Carolina, a lovely, latte-skinned young woman in a pink shirt and pearls is sitting on her white sofa, complaining about a man she met online: “In 2008, I fell in love. His online profile made him seem so perfect. Smart, handsome, charming, articulate.” We see her MacBook screen, and there he is: the cad she calls “Barack,” President Obama.

Yes, admaker Rick Wilson and Americans for Shared Prosperity believe the way to convince women to vote for Republicans is to compare the president to a bad boyfriend. Obviously they think we’re idiots who put romance before reason, even in politics.

The ad is clearly targeting the most loyal Democratic constituency: College-educated and unmarried women voters who may or may not be white. (Barack’s soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend could be Latina.) Creepily, the language makes it sound like not merely an unhappy relationship but an abusive one. He’s spying on her emails and text messages — an NSA reference, I guess – and she only “stuck with him because he promised he’d be better.”

That’s another fail: Republicans deny it, but in fact women voters care a lot about “free birth control.” An October 2012 poll found that women backed Obama’s contraception policies 56-35 percent; USA Today called it “the president’s strongest issue by far.” A third of women said the issue was “extremely important” in their vote, twice the number of men.  And two-thirds of women voters opposed Hobby Lobby’s attempt to evade the contraception mandate, though the Supreme Court sided with the corporation’s right wing Christian owners.

Maybe the worst thing about the ad is that its sponsors are utterly clueless about how demeaning it is.

Now that the ad has aired, and reaction has been almost universally scathing in the media (beyond the confines of sad Erick Erickson’s deeply sexist RedState.com), have any of its backers had second thoughts? It doesn’t seem like it . . . .

And they wonder why they lose the women’s vote?