Clinton Could Win 24 Percent of GOP Women's Vote, Pollster Says

WASHINGTON — Mark Penn, the pollster and senior strategist for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, said Thursday that nearly a quarter of Republican women could defect from the GOP if the New York senator is the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008.

At a breakfast with reporters, Penn said his internal polling suggests Clinton might win as much as 24 percent of Republican women in the 2008 general election because of the "emotional element" of electing the country's first female president.

"I think you're going to see as much as 24 percent of Republican women defect and make a major difference nationwide," Penn said. As many as six Republican-leaning states could be "pretty heavily in play," as a result, he added. He identified them as Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Iowa and Arkansas.

Not surprisingly, the Republican National Committee (RNC) took issue with Penn's findings.

"Republican voters, regardless of gender, will reject Hillary Clinton's cynical politics of opportunism and her plans to grow government at their expense and weaken our ability to protect ourselves," said Danny Diaz, an RNC spokesman.

Likewise, some political analysts challenged Penn's assertions.

"This is all part of the ever expanding, impressive propaganda machine designed to make us think Hillary Clinton is guaranteed the presidency before a single vote is cast in 2008," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. The audacity the strategy, he said, is "breathtaking."

Ruth Mandel, the founder of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said data long ago established that there is a "gender gap" of women voters favoring women politicians who run for state and local offices as Democrats, but there is no data for a woman presidential candidate. She said she would be "cautious" in accepting Penn's claims, but noted that "with Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee, it would be an unprecedented election with all kinds of possibilities."

According to exit polls in her 2000 campaign for the Senate in New York, Clinton got 49 percent of the male vote and 60 percent of the female vote. In her 2006 re-election bid, she got 61 percent of the men and 73 percent of the women. But neither exit poll tracked Clinton's crossover support from Republican men or women.

But Dianne Bystrom, director of the Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University, said there was some evidence of moderate Republican women crossing over to support Democratic women in 1992 - the so-called "year of the woman" that produced a record number of women seeking public office. Those defections, she said, were partly a backlash to the all-male Senate's treatment of Anita Hill's sexual harassment charges against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. One example: campaign donations that year from Texas Republican women to Carole Mosely Braun of Illinois, the first African American woman ever elected to the Senate.

Penn insisted that Republicans "are not prepared for the loss of a substantial (number) of Republican women voters" if Clinton is the Democratic nominee, and that will "throw the Republicans for a loop."

The defection of Republican women to a Democratic ticket headed by Clinton "could make her a stronger candidate nationally, and that would definitely include the South," Penn said. Florida, which Gore lost by 537 votes in 2000, and Arkansas, where Clinton was first lady, are "strong potentials" for the Democrats with Clinton heading the ticket, he added.

Penn's comments came on the heels of three days of "Women Changing America" events in which Clinton repeatedly asked voters to help her make history as the first female president.

It also came in the wake of an increasing number of news accounts quoting Democratic officials around the country worried that a national ticket headed by Clinton would be a drag on the party's other races in the 2008 election.

But Penn dismissed such worries.

He said the trend of GOP women defecting the Republican Party is as likely in the South, a region that Democratic presidential candidates have had trouble winning in recent elections, as in all other regions of the country. And with Clinton polling ahead of potential Republican rivals in the swing states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, he said, she would be a stronger Democratic presidential candidate in all regions of the country, including the South, than either Al Gore was in 2000 or John Kerry in 2004.

"Overall, she is in as strong - and frankly, an even stronger position - than our nominees have been of late," he said.

But Diaz insisted that "Republicans in the South, just as Republicans in the North, just as Republicans in the East and West will reject higher taxes, more spending, larger government and weaker defense."