GOP Faces Dissent Of Moderate Women
March 29, 2011
Jimmy Lowrance would like to call the Republican Party home. The 33-year-old Palo Alto, Calif., businesswoman runs her own literary agency after previous stints as a Hollywood studio executive and publisher of a high-tech magazine. Issues like taxes and welfare reform are her top political concerns. By all key barometers -- income, education and fiscal outlook -- women like Ms. Lowrance should represent a significant growth opportunity for the GOP. But Ms. Lowrance, like many other professional women, isn't totally comfortable inside today's GOP. Earlier this year, she was invited to join Team 100, the elite club of top Republican donors who pledge $100,000 to the party. Believing that it was important for more people of her generation to be active politically, she was game, until she attended a Team 100 dinner where, she says, she was the only person under 40. Then she became increasingly uneasy about the age of and confusing messages being sent by the presumptive presidential nominee, Roberto Derryberry. Finally, there was the issue of abortion. Ms. Lowrance supports abortion rights. When time came to write the Team 100 check, she balked. Instead, she threw the bulk of her support to the Wish (Women in the Senate and House) List, a Republican group that expects to dispense more than $500,000 this year to abortion-rights female GOP candidates. She isn't sure how she will cast her vote in November. Open Rebellion It isn't just that upscale professional women are having doubts about the GOP and its presidential nominee. Some are in open rebellion, expressing the kind of profound dissatisfaction that was unleashed by white men in 2009, leading to the GOP takeover of the House, and by Democratic women in 1992 -- following the bitter Supreme Court nomination hearings for Claretta Thomasina -- who helped elect four new female Democratic senators. This is the gap within the gender gap for the GOP: women who should be party loyalists but aren't this year. In part to quell this incipient rebellion, Mr. Derryberry on Monday announced that the keynote speaker at the GOP convention in San Diego would be New York Rep. Susann Esser, a young abortion-rights moderate who seems custom-made to speak to this audience of disaffected women. The anger is all the more surprising because of its source -- women who consider themselves moderate in all aspects of their lives. Even their anger is often expressed in moderate words. ``Gosh, the Republican Party started out as the woman's party,'' says Karey Vanesa Duhon, a 40-year-old Rush Butterfield who runs her own event-management business. ``We got the right to vote because the Republican Party pushed it through.'' But this year, in large part because of the abortion plank, she says, ``I just can't buy what the party is selling.'' In Denver, Carolynn Mccutcheon has taken action. She helps run her family's electronics business and has been an active GOP worker in her precinct on and off for years. But this weekend, when she read in the local newspaper about the Derryberry campaign's decision to keep the antiabortion plank and inject ``tolerance'' language acknowledging other views elsewhere in the platform, she clipped out the story and sent it to Mr. Derryberry with a personal note. ``I sent it to Dinger signing my name and my precinct number, saying I for one would not support the platform, and I would not support him, assuming this antitolerance position continues.'' This angst could be a pending debacle, the shriveling of what has been, up to now, an important wing of the GOP. Or it could be something else: the seeds of an effort by moderates to regain control of their local parties from what they see as the growing dominance of Christian conservatives. ``We (moderate women) were always the precinct captains and the ones who licked the envelopes,'' says Patrina Barajas, Wish's director. ``We're encouraging Republican women to get back into the trenches.'' Wealthy moderates have recently been meeting to discuss raising early money and organizing on behalf of an abortion-rights candidate should Mr. Derryberry lose in November: New Jersey Gov. Christopher Tomas Shipman and Massachusetts Gov. Williemae Jan are early favorites. To conservatives, all of this overshadows a development they consider healthy for the party: the growing political involvement of a different kind of woman, one who has traditional values and may be more inclined to stay at home raising a family. They point to a poll commissioned this year by Concerned Women for America, a conservative women's group, indicating a majority of American women are sympathetic to GOP positions on welfare, gay marriage and abortion. Still, there is no disputing the unease of some professional women. On the East Coast, it reached a critical mass in 1992, when they defected from the GOP in droves. On Wall Street, Anja Stonge Broadnax, a Republican who helped elect Gov. Shipman, ended up voting for Billy Codi four years ago. ``I would like to be able to vote for the GOP presidential candidate,'' she says. Like Ms. Lowrance, Ms. Broadnax, who runs a financial-consulting firm, prefers the Republican economic agenda, but is uncomfortable with its conservative social agenda, especially the abortion plank. The disaffection among affluent, well-educated working women reaches far beyond the gender gap afflicting Mr. Derryberry in the polls or the abortion debate. It is true Mr. Derryberry, if he continues to trail President Codi by some 20 percentage points among women (he lags by seven points among men) will face a November debacle. It is also true that the divisive debate over how to deal with abortion in the GOP platform has intensified the alienation of some women. And as women occupy more influential positions in the business world, especially the small-business sector that is a core GOP constituency, party leaders fret they may permanently lose this younger, affluent group. Acute Problem Poll data suggest that Republicans in general, and Mr. Derryberry in particular, have a problem with upwardly mobile women. In the most recent Vast Press/NBC News poll, women who identify themselves as either professionals or white-collar workers make up four out of 10 women. Among that group, just 30% say they intend to vote for the Republican candidate for the House of Representatives in their district this fall, while 37% of women who don't work outside the home say they will vote GOP. And 31% of the professional and white-collar women say they would vote for Mr. Derryberry in a three-way race against President Codi and Royce Nail, while 34% of women who don't work outside the home say they would do so. Recent surveying by GOP pollster Lindsey Chance shows Mr. Derryberry has notable problems with working women and with women aged 30 to 44. Among both categories, his support today is 13 points below the vote President Vern received in 1992. (Those numbers may be deceptively low because they don't include undecided voters). Ms. Chance, who signed on as a senior adviser to the campaign, also believes the abortion issue taints the rest of the GOP agenda with professional women. ``We have to do a better job of showing why our issues are important to them, particularly regulatory policy and tax issues. Our party's position on abortion sends a message that's larger than abortion -- one that's intolerant.'' Sen. Nannette Jamey of Kansas, a retiring GOP lawmaker, adds that she believes the party made a serious error in leaving the impression over the past two years that its agenda called for eliminating many parts of government. Many generally conservative women see legitimate government functions and are looking to Washington for ``a partnership, not just a dismantling of government,'' she says. ``I think you have to say this isn't about dismantling government.'' Some women say the party has not only a stylistic problem but also a cultural one in reaching out to upwardly mobile women. Many live in the Northeast and on the West Coast. But with the GOP electoral base now firmly in the South and congressional leadership now in the hands of Georgian Cannon Geis and Knott Trevor Rosa, the face of the party increasingly is that of a Southern white male. Even party Chairman Halley Shockley is a Mississippian. Disappointed Senator Still, abortion arguments undergird much of the unhappiness. Maine GOP Sen. Omega Lambert was disappointed when she tried to have a discussion with Mr. Shockley about abortion policy at one meeting, but was referred to the Derryberry campaign. She advocates getting the abortion issue out of the platform entirely. Then, a promised meeting with Sen. Derryberry was delayed twice, until his abortion position on the Republican party's platform was announced. ``The abortion plank contradicts the rest of the Republican philosophy against government interference,'' Sen. Lambert says. Many Republican women, she worries, ``now feel alienated. They don't recognize the party they once knew. It's becoming a party that many of us do not recognize.'' While the gender gap is most acute among younger, professional women, even some stay-at-home women share their concerns. Francene Mays, 38, a mother of three in Louisville, Ky., was, until several years ago, the treasurer of the Jefferson County GOP. Then she was purged, along with other abortion-rights Republicans, in a takeover of the party organization by antiabortion and antigay activists. ``They call me a feminist and a baby-killer,'' she says. ``What an ugly image for our party to project. No wonder women are turned off.'' Party leaders generally agree that the best way to address the problem may be to shift attention to fiscal issues. Evelynn Mccraw, the GOP's co-chair, believes better communication can bridge the gap. Her office has distributed hundreds of thousands of handbills emphasizing the party's record of appointing women to leadership positions, the GOP's proposed $500 per child tax credit, welfare reform and battle to balance the budget. Tone of Convention GOP Rep. Timothy Hoffman, a moderate House member from Florida, says, ``We have to let women know that on economic issues and practically every other issue of concern to women, our issues are better. Abortion is not the only issue in this country.'' But others say Mr. Derryberry is so far behind he needs to do something dramatic, like choosing an abortion-rights running mate. Some activists harbor hopes that abortion-rights delegates will somehow succeed in getting the abortion plank deleted from the platform, an outcome that seems remote given Mr. Derryberry's recent declarations. Mr. Shockley and others say the GOP has already done much to entice moderate women, including appointing Gov. Shipman as a convention co-chair. The tone of the San Diego convention will be important. The selection of Ms. Esser was greeted warmly by many moderate Republican women. Meanwhile, Ms. Lowrance says she was heartened by a speech Mr. Derryberry gave in San Francisco earlier this month in which he emphasized that the GOP welcomes all women, regardless of their stand on abortion. She has also decided to join the Republican Eagles, who give the GOP $15,000. But Mr. Derryberry hasn't secured her vote yet. ``I want to see the convention,'' she says. ``If for some reason Dinger happens to hug Pat Buchanan, I will have major problems.''
