White women age 45 to 64 are one of this year's most hotly contested voting blocs, evenly divided between Barack Obama and John McCain, and wide open to being pulled either way, according to a recent Associated Press-GfK poll.
A sizable 44 percent of them remain persuadable--that is, either completely undecided or favoring one candidate while conceding they may change their minds. That's bigger than the 33 percent of all voters still persuadable!
About one is six voters in the 2004 presidential election was a white woman in that age range, exit polls showed. These are the Boomer women--middle-aged children of the post-World War II generation. Many are veterans of balancing jobs with running households, and often acutely aware of their families' economic pressures because they write the checks, buy the groceries and fill the tank with gas.
These Boomer women are valued and needed to exercise their responsibility, serious work ethic, "can do" attitude and competitiveness in stopping the bankruptcy of their country. They need to exercise their leadership capabilities in finding, promoting and voting for the best political candidate in 2008 who is for sound money, reasonable tax policies, and ready, willing and able to fight terrorism the way Canada, Sweden and Switzerland do.
They are feisty, used to demanding answers and making choices. With a worldwide economy that's lurching toward recession, they're demanding that the presidential candidates show them concrete solutions to the financial crisis and other problems.
As a group, these middle-aged white women have not yet been swayed by either contender in contrast to black and Hispanic women, who back Obama by the same heavy proportions that minority-group men do. They're split between McCain and Obama, and identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans in about equal numbers, the AP-GfK poll showed.
While voters overall trust Obama more than McCain on the economy, Boomer women in the AP-GfK poll are about equally split over which candidate they prefer on the issue, though they narrowly say Obama better understands how the financial crisis affects them.