The [Pew] study, which examined the views of married women with children from April through this week, found that they support Democrats for Congress by a 12-point margin, 50 percent to 38 percent. That is nearly a mirror-image reversal from a similar period in 2002, when this group backed Republicans 53 percent to 36 percent. In 2004, exit polls showed, Bush won a second term in part because 56 percent of married women with children supported him.
That is a 29 point swing, and when any large voting block swings that hard it spells trouble for the party in which they are swinging away from. Newt Gingrich has said that the Democrat's slogan for this cycle should simply be "Had Enough." Well, it appears that women with children have indeed had enough. For instance, they are carrying Sherrod Brown to an eight point advantage with their fifteen point lead among them for Brown.
There is a larger meaning to this, and a lesson to be learned from both political parties.
I've often written here about the "soft seven," which is the apolitical seven percent of the electorate that ultimately decide elections. They often break in mass toward one side or the other. You piss these people off at your own peril. In 2004, they were fairly evenly split. It now appears that they are firmly in column marching this nation back from the right.
These people are in fact, the moral compass which guides the country as opposed to the righteous left, or the fire breathing right. When the nation gets out of step, they push us back to the place we rightly should be, and they're pushing awfully hard right now because even moderate republicans are falling in line with them. Seven percent can only swing you fourteen percent, this is a twenty-nine point swing.
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