Wal-Mart Moms

'Wal-Mart moms'

A Karen Tumulty of Time Magazine has a must-read on the voters Palin seems to have -- at least for now -- made the central swing voters in this election:

White women are always a key demographic in close races. Classic swing voters, they tend to be more pragmatic than partisan, and usually make up their minds late in the race. The ones who matter most, however, are not necessarily the same in each presidential election. In 1996, they were the "soccer moms" who responded to Bill Clinton's small-bore initiatives and rescued his presidency. The white female vote was crucial to George W. Bush's victory in 2004, a year that was marked by the post-9/11 political emergence of the so-called "security mom" — a term, interestingly enough, coined by Joe Biden, the man who is now Obama's running mate. But where 55% of white women voted for Bush in 2004, only 50% voted for Republican candidates in the 2006 mid-term elections, which was one of the reasons that the party lost both houses of Congress. And as much as the conservative base of the party, they were the real target audience that McCain was aiming at with his surprise pick of Palin. The campaign hopes female voters will relate to her thoroughly modern and complicated everywoman story, even if they don't agree with her on the issues. (See photos of Sarah Palin here.)

The women that pollsters are watching most closely this year are different in some ways from their "soccer mom" and "security mom" sisters of those earlier election cycles. For one thing, they are slightly older than the soccer moms (in their 40s and 50s) and are juggling another set of problems — how to pay for college for their kids, and how to take care of their elderly parents. They are also less upscale. Lacking college degrees, they are more likely to be feeling the brunt of an array of economic problems that now includes high energy prices, rising unemployment, soaring health care costs and housing foreclosures.