The ABC News
finding that Sarah Palin dramatically upped John McCain's support among
white women is one I'm not entirely convinced by, mostly because other polling by the same agency
shows Sarah Palin performing worse among women than she does among men.
One needs to remember that the margins of error are much higher for
subsamples of the data than for the poll as a whole. That's why I
generally don't spend a lot of time focusing on the demographics in
individual polls. If a poll is breaking out six or eight different
demographic groups, and the margins of error on these subsamples are 6
or 8 or 10 or 12 points, then odds are that something is going to be
out of alignment merely due to chance alone.
With that said,
there is a subheadline in the ABC poll that I find both more
interesting and more believable. Sarah Palin polls very
well among women with children -- specifically white women with
children, who give her an 80 percent favorability rating. In fact, it
appears to me that Palin's high favorability ratings among women are
entirely owing to her popularity among women with children. Roughly
one-third of registered female voters should have children at home,
which means that among white women without
children, her favorability rating is around 60 percent -- still pretty
decent, but barely different from the 58 percent she received in the poll
overall.
So -- one is led to ask -- which state has the most moms?
The table below ranks the 50 states, based on 2000 census data, by the
percentage of residents aged 18 and up who are women with their own
children living in the same household (WWC). States that are presently
in the top 15 in our tipping point rankings are highlighted in a
maternal purple.
This
distribution is mostly a function of age: states with young populations
like Utah and Texas rank toward the top, and states with older
populations (meaning more women are post-menopausal), like Hawaii and
Florida, rank toward the bottom. In general, the top of the list
consists of red states; whether motherhood begets conservatism or
conservatism begets motherhood, we will leave as an exercise for the
reader (my guess is the former). Among the battleground states, 11 of
15 rank below average.
But now let's look at an arguably more relevant metric, which is the percentage of white women with children at home (WWWC):
Here,
the swing states are distributed a bit more evenly, in part because the
swing states tend to be somewhat whiter than the country as a whole. I
don't quite buy that Palin is going to help in New Hampshire, which is
the fourth most pro-choice
state in the country, but some of these other states are worth
watching. Conversely, there isn't much of the Palin target demographic
in states like Florida and Nevada.
--Nate Silver