Goodbye, Soccer Mom. Hello, Security Mom

By Karen Tumulty And Viveca Novak

Swing voters have always been elusive creatures, changing shape from election to election. The profile and assumptions about them in one contest seldom apply to the next one. This axiom is proving true again with that most-talked-about slice of American political demography: the Soccer Mom. Since 9/11, polls suggest she has morphed into Security Mom--and that development is frightening to Democrats, who have come to count on women to win elections. She used to say she would never allow a gun in her house, but now she feels better if her airline pilot has one. She wanted a nuclear freeze in the 1980s and was a deficit hawk in the 1990s, but she now believes the Pentagon should have whatever it wants. Her civil liberties seem less important than they used to, especially compared with keeping her children safe. She's someone, in short, like Debbie Creighton, a 34-year-old Santee, Calif., mother of two who voted for Bill Clinton twice and used to choose the candidates who were most liberal on abortion and welfare. "Since 9/11," Creighton says, "all I want in a President is a person who is strong."

Listen to what these moms had to say last week, as Washington put the country on orange alert for the fourth time in a year. Jillian Kelly, a 43-year-old single mother and owner of a Chicago-area massage-therapy business, used to consider the Homeland Security Department "a joke." Now she's worried it isn't getting enough money. Netaya Anbar, a 45-year-old Pelham, N.Y., mother of three and still an avowed Democrat, worries about the erosion of civil liberties but at the same time recognizes that it could protect her family. "I'm very torn," she admitted. "Before 9/11, I would not have been." Nancy Potter, a 52-year-old teacher in Murfreesboro, Tenn., did not vote for George Bush and still thinks he stole the election from Al Gore. But when it comes to what the Administration has done against terrorism, she admits, "I think everything they've done is necessary. I absolutely support them in this." Adds Terri Brill, a 42-year-old mom from the Denver suburbs: "Personally, I think we need to close our borders; the threat is out there, it's coming after us, we need to protect ourselves."

The sea change in these women has already reshaped voting patterns. Their new attitude helps explain why the gender gap that had worked to the Democrats' advantage since Ronald Reagan was in office narrowed sharply in last fall's congressional elections. For the first time in more than a decade, the Republicans had near parity with women. President Bush's top political adviser Karl Rove believes a shift among women with children under 18 was a major factor in the G.O.P.'s historic victory in last year's midterms, in which the President became the first Republican in a century to see his party gain seats in an off-year election. "9/11 changed everything," says a senior Bush aide. "Everybody's more concerned. But what's driving the movement is women, especially women with children." And sure enough, because security trumped everything, these women voted Republican even though they continue to disagree with the party on many issues. As former President Clinton put it in a speech last December: "When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right."

Women reacted to 9/11 in ways that were both more practical and more profound than men's responses. They were the ones who scrambled to pick up the kids from school that day. They stood in line for bottled water and duct tape, fretted over whether the eighth-grade field trip was worth the risk, wheeled their strollers through security to get to tot swim classes. Polls in the weeks after 9/11 found far more women than men reporting that they were depressed, losing sleep and fearful from the news coverage they had watched. "All the polls showed women feeling much more personally vulnerable, much more personally threatened," says Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. "I don't want to play to some stereotypes, but it just comes screaming out of all of the data." One result was that women's support for defense spending--even for expensive, untried concepts like a missile-defense system--shot up to levels roughly equal with men's. Another was the doubling in the number of women signing up for the National Rifle Association's courses on how to handle a gun. Those behaviors were new.

Even today, the disparity in anxiety level between the two sexes continues. In last week's TIME/CNN poll, for instance, a healthy majority of men said they were more fearful about an economic downturn than another terrorist attack (56% to 37%); women, on the other hand, were marginally more worried about terrorism (47% to 43%). And 59% of men said they are more concerned about national security than they were before 9/11, but 71% of women are. Among moms with children under 18, the figure is 76%.

All of this doesn't necessarily mean that President Bush has a lock on these women or that there are no opportunities for Democrats. "On all kinds of measures, women are more worried than men," says Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg. "They're worried about their personal security, but that doesn't mean soccer moms aren't still concerned about education, health care and social security." The latest TIME/CNN poll indicates that while 63% of Americans continue to approve of the job President Bush is doing overall, only 42% think he's doing enough about unemployment, and just 40% believe he's handling the budget deficit as he should. Kerry Baldwin of Grand Rapids, Mich., says her vote in 2004 will ride on economic issues. "The economy has me much more concerned right now," says Baldwin, who knows many people who were laid off from Steelcase as the Michigan office-furniture company cut thousands of jobs in the past two years. And some are worried about what domestic security measures are doing to the civil liberties that make the U.S. unique. "In some cases, a lot of innocent people have been held without enough facts," says Gena Maddox, a 42-year-old mother of three in Little Rock, Ark.

But if Democrats want voters to hear their arguments on the economy and other issues, they must first convince these voters that they are credible, competent guardians of security. Kansas Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius heard it on the campaign trail last year: "People seemed to be saying, 'Assure us that you will know what you are doing' on the security front. 'How do we know that you will be able to do this?'" Women, especially, need candidates to meet this requirement. Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says the literally thousands of women he encountered at shopping malls and supermarkets in three months of campaigning last year focused on one thing before all others: "Am I safe? Are my children safe? Is there going to be another attack? What about anthrax?" Bush is vulnerable in '04, Biden says, "but not if we don't establish credibility on security issues."

All of which explains why presidential contender John Kerry, a Senator from Massachusetts, rarely misses an opportunity to allude to the fact that he is a much decorated Vietnam veteran. As he concluded a speech to members of EMILY's List, the women's political group, last week in Washington, Kerry took a swaggering jab at Bush's most celebrated photo opportunity of late, getting off a riff that might have seemed more appropriate for a V.F.W. hall than before a liberal-leaning audience of women activists. "I know something about aircraft carriers. I've worked with aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin," he said. "I can't wait to remind this country that landing on an aircraft carrier with a Navy pilot doesn't make up for the lack of an economic plan or a security plan for the United States of America."

Other Democratic presidential contenders are taking aim at Bush on national safety. Florida Senator Bob Graham, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, argues that the war with Iraq was a distraction from the real business of fighting global terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and Hizballah, and accuses the Administration of covering up intelligence information from before 9/11 that might help the country protect itself from future attacks. Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman frequently points out that he was pushing for a Homeland Security Department when Bush was still against the idea, and issues almost daily warnings that the Administration is not doing enough to protect the nation's ports or providing enough money for police, fire fighters and medical personnel. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean has accused the Administration of "strangling the cities and the towns and not giving them the money that's necessary to protect them."

But the Republicans are not shy about firing back. The party issued a memo last week pointing out instances in which the various Democratic candidates had voted to cut intelligence funding and other security programs. Said Republican National Committee Chairman Marc Racicot: "Many of the same Democrats who now criticize the President's efforts to protect our homeland ... [also] criticize legislation they supported which provides the President the tools to make us safer."

But is this skirmishing the kind of talk women want to hear? Republican pollster David Winston was one of the first to identify the shift from Soccer Mom to Security Mom, and he warns: "What these women are looking for are solutions to make their families and children safer. It's about solutions; it's not about partisan bickering." Democratic political consultant Rachel Gorlin agrees: "We can't criticize what the Bush Administration is doing unless we make it clear that the criticism is toward a new and improved approach--we're turning people off." It's that kind of impatience with point-scoring politics that nettles women like 31-year-old Stacy McDaniel, who stockpiles water and canned goods in San Diego, and plans her exit route when she goes to a ball game. "I expect our leaders to get more done now," she says. "I'm less tolerant of inefficiency. I'm less tolerant of poor decision making." For their own security, both parties are scrambling to listen--and respond--to women like her. --With reporting by Steve Barnes/Little Rock, Matt Baron/Chicago, Amanda Bower/New York, James Carney/Washington, Rita Healy/Denver, Maggie Sieger/Grand Rapids and Jill Underwood/San Diego

With reporting by Steve Barnes/Little Rock, Matt Baron/Chicago, Amanda Bower/New York, James Carney/Washington, Rita Healy/Denver, Maggie Sieger/Grand Rapids and Jill Underwood/San Diego