On Wednesday, Katherine Seelye solemnly informed us in The New York Times that "Kerry in a Struggle for a Democratic Base: Women". Today, Lois Romano piled on and claimed in the The Washington Post that "Female Support for Kerry Slips", which was particularly heavy with theorizing about the importance of the alleged "security mom". Both articles, however, were thin on data and logic, never stopping to ask themselves whether, if Kerry has less support than he did, say, six weeks ago, whether he has actually lost more support among women than among men. And neither bothered to look at how women stack up to men in terms of being politically motivated and supportive of the president because of security issues.

Nah. Too complicated.

First, let's take the issue of how much women's support of Kerry has changed compared to men's. Here's what Philip Klinkner, Professor of Government at Hamilton College and contributor to the political science blog, PolySigh, has to say:

[Wednesday's] NYT reports that the Kerry campaign is worried about losing support among women. The story however provides no evidence that the gender gap is closing. The only numbers cited show that Kerry is running worse among women than Gore did in 2000, but Kerry's also been running worse than men. In fact, there's no evidence that Kerry has lost any more support among women than among men. Bush, at least until recently, has been running better than Kerry, so that almost inevitably means that he'll be doing better among women as well as among men. But is there any evidence that Bush is closing up the gender gap? In fact, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the demise of the gender gap are greatly exagerated.

In 2000, exit polls showed that Democratic vote for women was 54-43 and for men it was 42-53. Calculating the gender gap as the women's Democratic vote minus the men's Democratic vote divided by two, that gives a gender gap of 11 points [((54-43)-(42-53))/2]=11

In the latest (early September) WaPo poll, the Democratic vote was 49-43 among women and 39-57 among men. That's a gender gap of 12 points...a bit higher than in 2000. The latest ARG poll shows women voting Democratic 50-42 and men 42-51. That's a gender gap of 8.5 points, a bit lower than in 2000. Both polls suggest that the gender gap is running about where it was 4 years ago.

Furthermore, there's no evidence that Bush's recent surge came more from women than from men. The early August WaPo poll showed Kerry leading Bush 50-44. The early September poll had Bush up by the same 50-44 margin. That means Bush picked up a net of 12 points (he went from down 6 points to up by 6 points). In August, Kerry was running 56-39 among women and 44-50 among men. That means Bush picked up a net of 11 points among women (from down 17 to down 6) and a net of 12 among men (from up 6 to up 18). Thus, the Bush surge came equally from men and women.

Well, that takes care of that. Now on to the security moms nonsense. Pollster Anna Greenberg is all over this one, as you can see from checking out her excellent memo, "The Security Mom Myth". Here are some excerpts from the memo:

Sixty-four percent of women voters are married, but only 43 percent have children under 18 years of age. This means that only 26 percent of all women voters could be characterized as “security moms.” If we narrow the analysis to white women, this number goes down to 22 percent of all women voters. Women are diverse and trying to characterize them as a monolithic group with unified set of political views misses the mark. As we know, there are huge differences among women voters, just look at the marriage gap between married and unmarried women. Kerry currently wins unmarried women by 22 points and loses married women by 4 points.

...Women tend to be more worried about their personal and economic security than men, which is not surprising because they are more likely to be victims of crime at home and they are more likely to live on the economic margins. But this concern about personal security does not necessarily translate into political preferences. In fact, men are much more likely to make the war on terrorism and security a part of their voting calculus.

...Since 9/11, Bush has garnered strong ratings on security from everybody...It is important to note, however, that men give Bush stronger ratings on all matters of security than women: they prefer Bush on the war on terrorism to Kerry by 26 points while women only prefer Bush by 9 points; they prefer Bush on foreign policy by 9 points, while women are evenly divided between the candidates; and they prefer Bush on being respected in the world by 10 points while women prefer Kerry by 13 points.

Women are more skeptical, moreover, about the situation in Iraq than men and women (55 percent) are more likely than men (47 percent) to say that the war in Iraq has made us less secure.

Well, you know what they say: you can't believe everything you read in the papers. And the Times and the Post have provided us with a couple of fine examples.