Progress Illinois

Will Hillary Clinton supporters ditch the Democratic Party in order to back GOP candidate John McCain this November? It's a theory repeatedly posited by the media since the New York senator suspended her campaign, but one that should be quickly put to rest.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released last week found that women favored Obama over McCain, 52-33 percent. The survey also reported that voters who cast ballots for Clinton in the Democratic primaries preferred Obama over McCain, 61-19 percent. The Los Angeles Times has more:

Now that the Democratic marathon is over, Clinton supporters like [North Carolina voter Marilyn] Authenreith are siding heavily with Obama over McCain, polls show. And Obama has taken a wide lead among female voters, belying months of political chatter and polls of primary voters suggesting that disappointment over Clinton's defeat might block the Illinois senator from enjoying his party's historic edge among women. [...]

"There are women still struggling with a real sense of grief that Hillary is not the nominee," said Maren Hesla, who runs campaign programs for EMILY's List, a group that promotes female candidates who support abortion rights. But that sense "will grow smaller with every day that passes from the nomination battles."

As Frank Rich pointed out in his astute New York Times column Sunday, those leads are substantial. John Kerry won women by only three points, Al Gore by 11. And it's increasingly clear that the narrative of defecting women was itself a product of a sexist media landscape.

Now, there’s no question that men played a big role in Mrs. Clinton’s narrow loss, starting with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Mark Penn. And the evidence of misogyny in the press and elsewhere is irrefutable, even if it was not the determinative factor in the race. But the notion that all female Clinton supporters became “angry white women” once their candidate lost — to the hysterical extreme where even lifelong Democrats would desert their own party en masse — is itself a sexist stereotype. That’s why some of the same talking heads and Republican operatives who gleefully insulted Mrs. Clinton are now peddling this fable on such flimsy anecdotal evidence.

While women are siding with Barack Obama for the same reasons as their male counterparts -- the war, taxes, health care, the environment -- McCain's record on issues of reproductive rights and gender equality have likely pushed some undecided women over the edge.

Think Progress' Wonk Room provides a nice rundown of McCain's stances on women's rights and they aren't pretty. He's voted against equal pay, he wants Roe v. Wade overturned, he supports limiting access to contraceptives, and has promised that his court appointees would follow in the Roberts/Alito tradition:

McCain said he will appoint “clones of Alito and Roberts.” The effect of a conservative judiciary would not just be limited to choice and privacy. Over the past two decades, there have been a large number of 5-to-4 decisions limiting the reach of civil rights statutes. We’d feel the effects of having Alito/Roberts clones on the Supreme Court, as well as on lower courts, for generations to come.