In South Carolina, predictions of Mitt Romney being favored to win in part because women would go for him over Newt did not materialize. And to be clear, we’re not talking the gap between how men versus women vote for Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich. We’re talking about the gap between who women prefer between the two candidates. This time around, in Florida, people seem much more certain that this favoring of Mitt will stick. From the Wall Street Journal: Citing his combative style and...

This absolutely, totally made me cry. This post at BlogHer is also worth reading for a number of the links and information on the news.

Talk about your mixed messages being sent. Former Congressman, Speaker of the House and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich won the female vote in South Carolina, according to exit polls and despite reports to the contrary, just the day before, of a significant gender gap that should have helped former Massachusetts Governor, Mitt Romney, if it really existed — which it appears it did not. And why not? Shouldn’t Romney had had the women in his column? I...

This isn’t really news, Pew showed Newt’s weakness with women back in December. But The State is out with this article today, in pertinent part: Who will win? It could depend on who votes — men or women — and where they live — the Upstate or coast. “It may be very close,” Matt Moore, executive director of the S.C. Republican Party, said Friday. Polling shows Gingrich and Romney running neck and neck. But it also shows a gender divide between the two front-runners, sources in...

GQ’s Top 25 Power People in DC? One and a half women. One and a half. And a whole lotta white guys. Here’s the full list of 50 from Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook: FIRST LOOK – GQ’s “The 50 Most Powerful People in Washington (People with the last names Obama and Biden not included,” by Reid Cherlin, Rob Fischer, Jason Horowitz and Jason Zengerle: 1) Eric Cantor 2) Mitch McConnell 3) David Plouffe 4) Leon Panetta 5) Hillary Clinton 6) Ben Bernanke 7) David Petraeus Kevin...

You may go see the Non Sequitur cartoon from Friday, 1/13/12 which the Plain Dealer did not run. I used it as a teaching moment with my 6th grader and he got why it could be objectionable right away. Whether or not it should have been published is of course a different matter. Here are the comments at my Facebook thread and many times more can be found at former Plain Dealer journalist Connie Schultz’s (aka Pulitzer Prize winner and US Senator Sherrod Brown’s wife). Multiple folks in...

And that is not leadership. Whether we’re talking Herman Cain’s economic plan (9-9-9 or 9-0-9) or how he and his campaign are failing to deal with Politico’s reporting on the settlement specifics between the National Restaurant Association (when Cain was its head) and two of its former employees regarding alleged sexual harassment in the workplace, Cain seems to believe that he can reduce, minimize and make disappear whatever complexities he thinks ail others from being able to...

I did little research before this eighth (yes, eighth! and that doesn’t even include the Twitter debate) Republican presidential primary candidates’ debate. Check out this list for videos of each of them. Luckily, I keep myself pretty immersed in news on a daily basis between online, radio, newspapers, a senior in high school who wishes he could vote and a sixth grader who made it onto student council and now wants to be vice president (of his grade, that is). But to those who did bone...

From Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight, with this lede from new research by Christopher Stout and Reuben Kline, both political scientists: Looking at Senate and Gubernatorial candidates from 1989 to 2008 (more than 200 elections in over 40 states), we analyze the accuracy of pre-election polls for almost the complete universe of female candidates and a matched sample of white male cases. We demonstrate that pre-election polls consistently underestimate support for female candidates when compared...

Late last night, after watching some spin room action about the Republican primary debate in California, I started thinking about this question in a way that harkens back to just after Hillary Clinton was no longer in the 2008 race. It’s not going to be Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin.  Yup, I’m predicting that right now.  Neither will be the general election presidential candidate for the GOP and I’m doubtful that either will be a VP selection of the eventual nominee either....

According to two CNN polls, Texas Governor Rick Perry has gone from having a significant deficit with women Republican voters to a double-digit lead with them. First, about the July poll (Perry was not yet an official candidate seeking the Republican nomination for the presidential race): Perry leads among male voters with 20%, but he’s tied for fifth place with Ron Paul when it comes to female voters — 0nly 8% support him. The only other candidate with a gender gap of nearly that size is...

When I wrote about June’s New Hampshire debate, I wrote that answering the question of what I want in a candidate has two parts: first, the policy part, and second, the competency part. Neither takes precedence over the other in any absolute way, but I defined the competency piece as going “…to overall experience, dedication, integrity, sincerity, thoughtfulness, consistency and respect for all voters, not just the ones that will vote you in, once you are in office.” Last...

Did you know that this is actually the third GOP primary debate? Well, if you like following live-blogs while eating popcorn and watching politicians try to win us over, then you will love the action tonight as conservative pundit Emily Zanotti (aka American Princess) and I live-blog tonight’s Republican presidential primary debate. Though the candidates will be in Iowa, we’ll be following and commenting on everything here starting at 9pm! Can you name the only candidate who will be...

What is it with women like Sheila Bair, former head of the FDIC, who is just soooo difficult, and Elizabeth Warren, creator and designer of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, who is just soooo controversial and now U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D, FL-20) who is just soooo not acting like a lady? I mean, really. Who do we think we are when we use our voice – a voice that was selected and in many cases, elected, from among many others to be heard and to give voice to people and issues...

On Saturday, I wrote about this entity and former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray’s role in it. Now we read, on Sunday, that he will head it instead of Elizabeth Warren. From Politico: President Obama has selected former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to lead the embattled Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Obama will make the announcement Monday from the White House. The report first appeared Sunday in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. Of course the party who could not possibly...

No shortage of coverage, thank goodness, of the life and death of Betty Ford, former First Lady to Gerald Ford’s president, 1974-1977. Spiro Agnew’s resignation and Richard Nixon’s resignation were seminal political events in my life, very much as Gerald Ford, the pardon of Nixon and Chevy Chases’ Ford-inspired pratfalls were too. I’m devouring everything that’s being published about Mrs. Ford and I hope I can find this 1987 telepic in which one of my favorite...

In the clip below from this morning’s TODAY show, U.S. Representative from Minnesota and Republican primary candidate for president, Michele Bachmann, shows how to handle being asked if she fears being “palinized” (in the video at about the four minute mark). In my opinion, as someone who has run for office, anyone who “fears being palinized” should not be running for office in the first place and Amy Kremer, Co-Chair of the Tea Party Express, should stop using the media...

It’s hard to know where to start, as a mother of three kids under 18, one of whom has a recurring respiratory problem whenever he gets a cold, and living in a state that gets an overall F in clean air, when it comes to how universally savage the Republican presidential hopefuls are toward the Environmental Protection Agency. If you missed the news, here’s a breakdown of how each of seven candidates addressed environment and energy issues in this past Monday’s Republican presidential...

It’s possible no one else will say it, but US Rep. and now Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann got major earned media tonight at the New Hampshire primary debate because she announced that she’s officially entering the presidential primary competition. Why else was it her night? (If you missed the debate, I live-blogged it all here and so did Joe Gandelman, here.) She did not use any cards with graphs on them. She did not make any sweeping generalizations about liberties,...

Christiane Amanpour hosted an excellent roundtable this morning on This Week that explored the following observation: You’d be hard-pressed to find a sex scandal involving a female politician these days, which begs the question, what if there were more women in politics and in positions of power? Would they change the way business is done from Wall Street to Washington and beyond? I urge you to watch the entire segment (but you can also read the transcript here, located on page 9): I particularly...

I’m actually the spouse in politics in my house, but as I watch how the media – and voters – handle the spouses of candidates and politicians, it seems impossible to determine the root cause for why one particular spouse gets followed and others, you have to actually Google to find out what their first name is. For example, I knew that Haley Barbour’s wife had reportedly nixed his run for president because that’s what the headline copy said. But it was hard to find...

And I breathe a sigh of relief. Because seriously, I hate when it gets all “I’m better because I’m a mom and she was never a mom” or “I bake cookies better than she does” (even though that’s the spouses). From the looks of it, the media has stuck to the issues in how its covered the race between Republican State Assemblywoman Jane Corwin and Erie County Clerk Kathy Hochul (the Democratic candidate).* Why? Because both of these candidates have run before,...

So, just how much does electing women – no matter their policy positions but rather just because of their gender – really help women? Turns out, not so much. In the Senate: The three veteran Republican women, Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins (both Maine) do not want to defund Planned Parenthood. They know what’s really going on. Veteran and retiring Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas) is a motivator behind a “military troop funding through a government shutdown”...

Here’s an incredibly powerful statement of conviction about what goes on, still, in most classrooms and what educating is all about. I’d love to have him compose a similarly-toned response for me and other local electeds when we’re getting abused for reminding people about the finite nature of resources and the short and long-term consequences of making decisions for a municipality based purely on politics, or a for-profit business model. This video has been around since 2006,...

This satirical music video lampoons Ohio Governor John Kasich’s inability to find even one qualified non-white person for his cabinet (of 23 spots, 22 are filled, 17 to men, 5 to women). As Politico (“Ohio Gov: I don’t need your people”) and especially the Ohio blog, Plunderbund have noted, Governor Kasich has even gone as far as to say, in a room filled with the members of the Ohio Black Legislative Caucus, “I don’t need your people.” Here now, Ohio Governor...