What Do Women Want?

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he fact is that "women move around [politically] more than men," says Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, and with issues so pressing, many have said they want to hear more specifics, especially from Kerry. Greenberg doesn't think security issues are Kerry's problem.

She thinks he began to fall behind when he was talking more about Vietnam and Iraq than about Social Security and health care. But other pollsters see Kerry's handicap as being less about policy than personality. "Where Bush is beating Kerry among men and women alike is on leadership," says Carroll Doherty, an editor at the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. In a TIME poll taken Sept. 21-23, when voters were asked which candidate would provide leadership in difficult times, 60% of men and 53% of women chose Bush.

The Bush camp has always counted on voters generally and women particularly to prefer the President's character even if they question his choices. "They may agree or disagree with him," says a Bush official, "but women like his steadiness, which is why you might notice we've used the word steady a few times." Ask the Bush campaign to talk about the women's vote, and they sound as if they were channeling Dr. Phil. "Women don't like a man who can't commit," says a senior Bush adviser, finding yet another way to talk about Kerry's winding positions. Another senior Republican official likes to speculate along these lines: "Kerry seems like a depressed man trying to act cheerful. That would make a lot of women feel compassion but not want to be led by him. Kerry is the weirdo first husband you married in college when you were an art major. Bush is the solid second husband who saved you, helped you raise*spacekids and taught you golf."

As a war President, one of Bush's challenges has been to remind voters of what Laura Bush calls her husband's softer side. That has been adviser Karen Hughes' assignment—to fold in the egg whites, make sure he talks about flex time and the "ownership society." The Bush campaign has a special W Stands for Women division (you can buy the pink baseball caps on its website) that is dedicated to showcasing for women the merits of the No Child Left Behind law, praising the Administration's work against the global sex-slave trade and highlighting the increase in women's health funding at the National Institutes of Health. Late last year Bush began doing more town-hall-style events in his shirtsleeves to create an atmosphere of intimacy. He likes to talk about how he has surrounded himself with strong women and, he says, appointed more of them to positions of real power than any of his predecessors.

Laura Bush, who is more popular than her husband and better liked than Kerry's wife Teresa, can hardly be called the campaign's secret weapon anymore, since she's about as visible as any First Lady could be. When she visits a small electrical-supply company run by a married couple in Albuquerque, N.M., she sells the Bush agenda for all the ways it helps women specifically. The President's push for tort reform? Good for businesses owned by women. The war on terrorism? It makes families safer. Medical-savings accounts? "Women can take these accounts with them if they start a new job or if they leave work to go home and raise a family," says the First Lady. "This is health care that we own, we manage and we can keep."

For all the compassion in the conservatism, however, the campaign is not above playing on women's fears. "I can't imagine the great agony of a mom or a dad having to make the decision about which child to pick up first on September the 11th," says the President in a campaign advertisement. The ad is designed to show that Bush is empathetic but also to remind women that dangers can break into their daily routine. The Beslan school massacre was a stark reminder of that. Both campaigns realize the atrocity shook women to the core. At the White House on Sept. 24, Bush met with children from the local John Quincy Adams Elementary School who had helped organize a toy and school-supply drive for the children of Beslan. Even Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill has cited Beslan as a reason for Bush's resurgence. In a speech in Philadelphia, Kerry declared that "no American mother should have to lie awake at night wondering whether her children will be safe at school."

Given such raw nerves and the mounting bad news from Iraq, Kerry has wrestled for weeks about how much to balance his message between foreign matters and domestic ones. A recent TIME poll found that women trusted Bush more to fight terrorism by 10 percentage points, while they favored Kerry on the economy by 4. The key, Kerry aides say, is not to prove the Senator is better than Bush on defense but to prove he's capable. "Bush is always going to win the comparison," says a Kerry staff member. "He is the Commander in Chief. For us, this is not a comparison. It's a threshold issue."

So Kerry has adopted a two-tiered strategy. He challenged Bush aggressively in a series of speeches leading up to the first debate, calling Iraq a "diversion" from the war on terrorism. But in more locally targeted ads Kerry portrays the Iraq war as diverting resources from domestic needs. His ads in battleground states like Ohio, Florida and Iowa have focused on his domestic agenda. One ad says the $200 billion spent in Iraq (a figure he has inflated; the actual total is $157 billion) is money not spent in the U.S. on education, health care and other concerns. Kerry went on Live with Regis and Kelly and recalled how, as a prosecutor in Boston, he created a rape-counseling program. Like Bush, he taped a show with Dr. Phil, which will air this week. "Women, especially those who are single women, are really busy people," says Kerry pollster Diane Feldman. They are "not people who necessarily have the time to consume information that is hard to find."

The goal for Kerry is to lock women in and turn them out on Nov. 2.

If single women were to vote at the rate of married women, it could make all the difference. In a TIME poll from September, 50% of single women supported Kerry, versus 38% of married women. Single women comprise 43% of the U.S. female voting-age population, but in 2000 nearly half of them remained on the sidelines (compared with 40.5% of the general public). They either had not registered or did not vote.

To make sure they get to the polls this time, the Democratic National Committee has a program called Take Five that encourages female supporters to identify five single women and get them out to vote by contacting them repeatedly before Election Day.

Women's groups are mustering their forces as well. Planned Parenthood helped sponsor a Vaginas Vote, Chicks Rock concert to raise money and awareness last month at the Apollo Theater in New York City. In battleground states last week an organization called Mothers Opposing Bush began running ads featuring Sopranos star Edie Falco talking about failing schools and inadequate health care. In college papers the group is placing ads warning about a reinstatement of the draft unless Kerry wins. Persistent if unsubstantiated rumors of a coming draft may have explained Bush's explicit promise in his closing debate remarks to maintain an all-volunteer force.

The pro-Kerry organizations are lined up against groups like Security Moms 4 Bush and Women in Support of the President. All those women may have at least one thing in common: whatever the outcome on Nov. 2, they are not packing up their political tents. Having discovered their power to move the levers of an election and get the candidates to court them, many are already planning their priorities for the next crusade, which begins Nov. 3.