Posts Tagged ‘white house’

It’s the quintessential difference between Republicans and Democrats. I don’t mean beliefs or legislative platform. I mean their ability to coalesce around a candidate and move forward expeditiously to get him or her elected.

Super Tuesday came and went without a resolution to who will be the Democrats’ standard bearer, while John McCain’s ascent to front-runner status was aided by the Republicans’ winner-take-all-delegates primary rules. The Democrats–we both love then and hate them for this characteristic–are more, well, democratic. So they have a complex if not downright Byzantine, proportional formula for awarding delegates to their nominating conventions.

Which brings me to the importance of women in this election this year. Check out the state-by-state breakdown in Women’s e-News today. Women are the majority in the population, even more so the majority of voters because a larger percentage of women then men actually cast votes. And this year, the intersection of race and gender has made the breakdown of how women cast their votes more volatile than ever, as African American women–a pivotal Democratic constituency–are choosing to vote for Barack Obama in epic proportions, as high as 80%.