Battling for the Show-Me Moms

By Massimo Calabresi

Call them the show-me moms. They may be this political season's equivalent of the soccer moms or the NASCAR dads--a slice of the electorate that turns out to be vital to one party's triumph, or either's. This year strategists on both sides are focused on a small subset of females: white women over 55 in the South who were raised as Democrats but tend to be culturally conservative. The group eschews party loyalty in favor of candidates offering practical solutions to problems like education, security and health care and is "very critical," says a top G.O.P. strategist, in the deadlocked Senate races in Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia. To take the Senate, Democrats probably need to win at least two of the races in those red-state redoubts.

Women in general are more independent than men, decide later how to vote and--older women especially-- are more active in midterm elections, all of which means they are central to Democratic attempts to make up for the men the party can't win in the upper South. Democrats are optimistic about swaying older women, says pollster Celinda Lake, because they "were among the most supportive in the early days of the war in Iraq and now are some of the most critical." While 54% of Southern women voted for Bush in 2004, a recent Associated Press poll found that only 32% of them approve of his handling of the war, compared with 36% of all Southerners. Republicans argue that they can hold these show-me moms by stressing the good economy and the moderate popularity of President Bush's prescription-drug program.

The fight for the matron vote can get rough. Senator Jim Talent, the Missouri incumbent who faces a hard contest against state auditor Claire McCaskill, has spent heavily on ads accusing her of failing to investigate abusive nursing homes. And last week in Virginia, Republicans spent more than $1 million on TV ads attacking challenger James Webb for, among other things, a 1979 article opposing women in combat and his novels, whose raunchy sex scenes incumbent George Allen called "demeaning to women." This close to Election Day, there are still plenty of votes to scrap for: a recent Missouri poll found 5% of men are unsure but 9% of women still in play.