The gender gap is closed? Yeah right.

Via BarackObama.com

The lastest poll numbers have everyone freaking out but one thing about Pew poll stood out to me:  The poll has Romney and Obama tied among likely women voters.  The last time the poll was conducted a month ago, President Obama had an 18 point lead.

So what gives?  Over at the New York Daily News I wrote that this detail stands out mainly because Romney had a great performance in a debate that didn’t mention women’s issues once so closing the gender gap is highly unlikely and probably due to an oversampling of older, married women.  That turns out to be the case.

Via New York Daily News:

Ask yourself this: What has Mitt Romney done in the past month to close the gender gap and attract women voters who were previously supporting President Obama?

The answer is nothing.

So it is extremely surprising to learn through Pew Survey’s national tracking poll released yesterday that through the power of a single debate performance, which completely ignored women’s issues, Romney has miraculously closed an 18 point gender gap in three weeks’ time.

While it is possible that there is some shift and that the gap has tightened because married women (who typically support Republicans in higher numbers anyway) solidified their support, it is extremely unlikely that women all of a sudden forgot about Obamacare, contraception, legitimate rape, forcible rape and trans-vaginal ultrasounds and switched to Team Romney in the blink of an eye.

The new numbers for Romney likely mean he is solidifying support among women who were more likely to support him in the first place.

The presidential election is going to be close but the idea that women jumped from supporting President Obama to supporting Mitt Romney and his running mate Mr. Forcible Rape is a little too much to take.  The media better start looking into the numbers more carefully and stop with the assumptions that women – who have such an obvious choice this election – would be so easily swayed by aggressive debate lying.

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