CHICAGO, Aug. 10 (UPI) -- Republicans are promising the most diverse National Convention in party history in New York City this month with more African-Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics and women than ever before.
Women, while not a minority, have been increasing their influence at Republican National Conventions, comprising 36 percent of total delegates at the last GOP confab four years ago, up from 33 percent in 1996.
This year 44 percent of the 2,509 delegates and 2,344 alternate delegates will be women. Minorities will make up 17 percent of total delegates -- a 70-percent increase from 2000.
"When Republicans host our first-ever convention in New York City this month, we will welcome the most diverse group of delegates in our party's history," Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said in a statement last week.
An examination of U.S. Census data shows diversity is the future of the United States and its domestic politics. Hispanics already are the nation's largest minority group, and it's projected there will be no single majority group in the U.S. population by mid-century.
With the country nearly equally split between Democrats and Republicans, the 2004 election may turn on the votes of an estimated 5 percent who are undecided -- and the majority of them are women.
A poll of 1,426 registered voters conducted for the Pew Center for People and the Press June 3-13 found up to 58 percent of swing voters -- registered voters who are undecided or may change their minds before Election Day -- were women.
Women between the ages of 30 and 64 were most evenly divided between the major-party candidates.
A June poll by Democratic consultant Celinda Lake of Lake, Snell, Perry & Associates Inc., found 65 percent of undecideds were female.
Lake points to a gender gap in voting. Women tend to vote Democratic more often than any other group except African-American men. Men tend to vote more Republican, a reversal from the 1950s when more women voted Republican and more men supported Democrats in the years following World War II and the Korean conflict.
The political landscape changed radically in the '70s and '80s as more women left the home and joined the workforce.
"Suddenly, Democratic positions were more attractive to them, when in the past they were irrelevant or unattractive," Byron Shafer, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
In 1984 Ronald Reagan won 54 percent of the female vote compared to 62 percent of the male vote.
The political landscape changed again in September 2001, and the GOP began targeting women on security issues. Most women are concerned about the threat of terrorism but don't like the war in Iraq.
Women appear conflicted, wanting a president strong on terrorism but also strong on domestic issues like child care, education and healthcare.
Women also are aware the next president of the United States likely will make appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court that could affect abortion rights and other issues. The battle for undecided women, especially the working and unmarried, is on.
"One of the things we see is that single women turn out significantly less than married women. There are 22 million single women out there who didn't vote in the last election," Lake told National Public Radio at the Democratic National Convention in July.
Lake said Al Gore would have won Florida by 63,000 votes if unmarried women had just voted at the statewide average in 2000. Democrats' efforts to promote their agenda start with getting time-crunched women to register.
The Bush and Kerry campaigns are aware they won't win without women and are reaching out to female voters, whose main concerns are the economy, the Iraq war and disparities in healthcare.
The number of women voting in presidential elections historically exceeds the number of men who vote.
The "W Stands for Women" initiative geared to single and suburban women and the Republican National Committee's winningwomen.com Web site present news and issues tailored to women, urging them to provide "the local leadership needed to deliver President Bush's compassionate-conservative message."
But will women still be receptive to a compassionate-conservative message after a first term defined by terrorism and war?
Democrats answer with the "W is Wrong for Women" campaign.
The Democratic National Committee is highlighting kitchen-table economic issues of working families, calling Bush administration policies "harmful to American women in our workplaces, hospitals, and doctors' offices and in our children's schools."
A position paper called "The State of Women in George Bush's America" said the number of Americans living in poverty rose to 34.6 million between 2000 and 2002. The majority of the additional 3.5 million poor were women.
Gender-gap and equal-pay issues are fair game in a battle for these "how-am-I-going-to-make-it-today-moms" who average $30,000 a year. Democrats cite U.S. Census data that show salaried women earned 76 percent of what salaried men made in 2001. Minority women made 69 cents and Hispanic women made only 56 cents for each dollar a white man earned.
Democrats also attack the president for not fully funding the 2-year-old No Child Left Behind Act in any of his budgets. They say the number of women without health insurance has increased by 1.2 million under Bush.
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