WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

By NANCY GIBBS

KRISTEN BREITWEISER, LIKE HER HUSBAND RON, VOTED for George W. Bush in 2000. Far from being any kind of activist, she didn't know her Congressman's name before Sept. 11, 2001, the day her husband died on the 92th floor of the World Trade Center's Tower 2. But she knows her way around politics now. It has taken her three years to get on an airplane, but she did it on Sept. 22, the day before the state of Iowa started accepting absentee ballots. To mark the occasion, the John Kerry campaign was holding a women-and-security rally in Davenport. Kerry was nursing a cold, so John Edwards filled in, but it was Breitweiser who took center stage before the crowd of more than 600 in a sweltering hall. As she has on countless talk shows, she described her fight to get the White House to appoint a commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks. Bush, she said, agreed only after the Senate voted 90 to 8 in favor of it. "We gave every opportunity to President Bush to do the right thing," said Breitweiser, a high-profile widow whose presence on the campaign trail is designed to project the message that women can count on Democrats to protect their kids.

The security moms are this political season's cartoon action figures, the vital voters whom Kerry and Bush are supposedly chasing in the final weeks of the race. These heirs of the soccer moms have provided a handy explanation for how Kerry lost his lead this summer, when terrorism alerts went back up to orange and the scarring images of the school siege in Beslan, Russia, settled into the suburban psyche. In recent presidential elections women have leaned Democratic by at least 8 percentage points, and after his Boston convention, they favored Kerry by 14. But in recent weeks that margin has vanished, and some polls have shown Bush pulling ahead even among women. So the notion that fear of terrorism was driving normally Democratic women into the Bush camp provided the theorists with a story line and led the Kerry camp to seek out allies like the 9/11 widows.

The reasons behind the shifts in women's views, however, are much more complicated than that, as is Kerry's challenge in winning back female support. Women overall are less likely than men to cite security as a top issue. Women worry more about domestic issues like jobs, where Democrats traditionally have an advantage. The archetypal security mom--a white, married, suburban woman concerned about her family's safety--is not really a swing voter anyway. She has been in Bush's camp from the start, and is more likely to cite his faith and values than his national-security policy as the reason. "I don't even know what [security mom] means," says a senior Kerry adviser. "Is it someone who cares about security more than anything else? That's very few women. Is it somebody who cares about security? That's almost every woman and every man."

But the polls do suggest that plenty of women are in motion, and Kerry has had to struggle since the beginning of this race to win them over--a struggle he can't afford to lose, given that men back Bush over Kerry by a solid margin. Al Gore carried the women's vote by 11 percentage points in 2000, but it was still not enough to win him the White House. "Both parties have had a gender gap--Democrats with men and Republicans with women," says Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman. "At the moment, our gender gap has been fixed, and theirs hasn't."

The initial soundings from the first presidential debate brought Kerry some good news: an ABC News poll found that women gave Kerry stronger ratings than men did. A CBS poll indicated that Kerry's likability rating among undecided women had moved above the President's. But Kerry has more work to do. "We've suffered a little bit because of our focus on security," says Kerry campaign strategist Joe Lockhart. "We haven't talked enough about issues like health care that women care about." The campaign planned an immediate pivot: Kerry's speech last Saturday focused on the middle-class squeeze. "Two incomes barely cover the basics," said Kerry. "The costs of health care, gas, child care and tuition are through the roof. Personal bankruptcies are at an all-time high. And the typical family is making $1,500 less each year." These themes were meant to bring undecided women home to the party in which they have traditionally felt more comfortable. "The bottom line," says Lockhart, "is if that happens, we win the election." Unless, of course, in the process Kerry inspires even more men to head in the opposite direction.

SINCE THEY MAKE UP SLIGHTLY MORE THAN half the population and are more likely to vote than men, women have always been a target audience. In 2000 nearly 8 million more women than men went to the polls. Women become especially crucial in the last weeks of a race because they tend to decide late. According to a recent TIME poll, 61% of undecided voters are women.

But for all the commentary about the women's vote, women have never been a bloc that could be specifically targeted like tobacco growers or whale watchers. In a close race a group that large has to be sliced into identifiable targets, so that both sides can pick the most promising women to woo--old or young, married or single, the populists, the small-business owners, the social conservatives, the libertarians, the waitress moms.

In interviews across the country, women told TIME that this election matters more than past ones, even as the intensity of the issues pulls them in different directions. Cyrene Ajluni, a lifelong Republican in Johnston, Iowa, who has two teenage children and supported Bush enthusiastically four years ago, has switched sides because, among other reasons, she fears a draft. Kassie Auker, a college student in Cleveland, Ohio, likes Bush's tax policies but thinks gay marriage should be left up to the states. Minneapolis, Minn., secretary Sandy Eischen voted for Bush four years ago, but is now undecided because her husband has been laid off, and, she says, "when you become one of the statistics, you start rethinking things." Susie Cho, a high school teacher turned law student in Westfield, N.J., usually votes for Democrats but worries about changing leaders in the middle of a war. "Perhaps changing would slow down diplomacy," she says. "Perhaps Kerry would be perceived as weak where we need him to be strong." Lisa Umstead, a day-care receptionist from Philadelphia, usually votes Democratic but this year is inclined to adhere to the housekeeping principle, You make a mess, you clean it up. "Bush started this [war]. Maybe he should finish it," she says.

The fact is that "women move around [politically] more than men," says Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, and with issues so pressing, many have said they want to hear more specifics, especially from Kerry. Greenberg doesn't think security issues are Kerry's problem. She thinks he began to fall behind when he was talking more about Vietnam and Iraq than about Social Security and health care. But other pollsters see Kerry's handicap as being less about policy than personality. "Where Bush is beating Kerry among men and women alike is on leadership," says Carroll Doherty, an editor at the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. In a TIME poll taken Sept. 21-23, when voters were asked which candidate would provide leadership in difficult times, 60% of men and 53% of women chose Bush.

The Bush camp has always counted on voters generally and women particularly to prefer the President's character even if they question his choices. "They may agree or disagree with him," says a Bush official, "but women like his steadiness, which is why you might notice we've used the word steady a few times." Ask the Bush campaign to talk about the women's vote, and they sound as if they were channeling Dr. Phil. "Women don't like a man who can't commit," says a senior Bush adviser, finding yet another way to talk about Kerry's winding positions. Another senior Republican official likes to speculate along these lines: "Kerry seems like a depressed man trying to act cheerful. That would make a lot of women feel compassion but not want to be led by him. Kerry is the weirdo first husband you married in college when you were an art major. Bush is the solid second husband who saved you, helped you raise kids and taught you golf."

As a war President, one of Bush's challenges has been to remind voters of what Laura Bush calls her husband's softer side. That has been adviser Karen Hughes' assignment--to fold in the egg whites, make sure he talks about flex time and the "ownership society." The Bush campaign has a special W Stands for Women division (you can buy the pink baseball caps on its website) that is dedicated to showcasing for women the merits of the No Child Left Behind law, praising the Administration's work against the global sex-slave trade and highlighting the increase in women's health funding at the National Institutes of Health. Late last year Bush began doing more town-hall-style events in his shirtsleeves to create an atmosphere of intimacy. He likes to talk about how he has surrounded himself with strong women and, he says, appointed more of them to positions of real power than any of his predecessors.

Laura Bush, who is more popular than her husband and better liked than Kerry's wife Teresa, can hardly be called the campaign's secret weapon anymore, since she's about as visible as any First Lady could be. When she visits a small electrical-supply company run by a married couple in Albuquerque, N.M., she sells the Bush agenda for all the ways it helps women specifically. The President's push for tort reform? Good for businesses owned by women. The war on terrorism? It makes families safer. Medical-savings accounts? "Women can take these accounts with them if they start a new job or if they leave work to go home and raise a family," says the First Lady. "This is health care that we own, we manage and we can keep."

For all the compassion in the conservatism, however, the campaign is not above playing on women's fears. "I can't imagine the great agony of a mom or a dad having to make the decision about which child to pick up first on September the 11th," says the President in a campaign advertisement. The ad is designed to show that Bush is empathetic but also to remind women that dangers can break into their daily routine. The Beslan school massacre was a stark reminder of that. Both campaigns realize the atrocity shook women to the core. At the White House on Sept. 24, Bush met with children from the local John Quincy Adams Elementary School who had helped organize a toy and school-supply drive for the children of Beslan. Even Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill has cited Beslan as a reason for Bush's resurgence. In a speech in Philadelphia, Kerry declared that "no American mother should have to lie awake at night wondering whether her children will be safe at school."

Given such raw nerves and the mounting bad news from Iraq, Kerry has wrestled for weeks about how much to balance his message between foreign matters and domestic ones. A recent TIME poll found that women trusted Bush more to fight terrorism by 10 percentage points, while they favored Kerry on the economy by 4. The key, Kerry aides say, is not to prove the Senator is better than Bush on defense but to prove he's capable. "Bush is always going to win the comparison," says a Kerry staff member. "He is the Commander in Chief. For us, this is not a comparison. It's a threshold issue."

So Kerry has adopted a two-tiered strategy. He challenged Bush aggressively in a series of speeches leading up to the first debate, calling Iraq a "diversion" from the war on terrorism. But in more locally targeted ads Kerry portrays the Iraq war as diverting resources from domestic needs. His ads in battleground states like Ohio, Florida and Iowa have focused on his domestic agenda. One ad says the $200 billion spent in Iraq (a figure he has inflated; the actual total is $157 billion) is money not spent in the U.S. on education, health care and other concerns. Kerry went on Live with Regis and Kelly and recalled how, as a prosecutor in Boston, he created a rape-counseling program. Like Bush, he taped a show with Dr. Phil, which will air this week. "Women, especially those who are single women, are really busy people," says Kerry pollster Diane Feldman. They are "not people who necessarily have the time to consume information that is hard to find."

The goal for Kerry is to lock women in and turn them out on Nov. 2. If single women were to vote at the rate of married women, it could make all the difference. In a TIME poll from September, 50% of single women supported Kerry, versus 38% of married women. Single women comprise 43% of the U.S. female voting-age population, but in 2000 nearly half of them remained on the sidelines (compared with 40.5% of the general public). They either had not registered or did not vote. To make sure they get to the polls this time, the Democratic National Committee has a program called Take Five that encourages female supporters to identify five single women and get them out to vote by contacting them repeatedly before Election Day.

Women's groups are mustering their forces as well. Planned Parenthood helped sponsor a Vaginas Vote, Chicks Rock concert to raise money and awareness last month at the Apollo Theater in New York City. In battleground states last week an organization called Mothers Opposing Bush began running ads featuring Sopranos star Edie Falco talking about failing schools and inadequate health care. In college papers the group is placing ads warning about a reinstatement of the draft unless Kerry wins. Persistent if unsubstantiated rumors of a coming draft may have explained Bush's explicit promise in his closing debate remarks to maintain an all-volunteer force.

The pro-Kerry organizations are lined up against groups like Security Moms 4 Bush and Women in Support of the President. All those women may have at least one thing in common: whatever the outcome on Nov. 2, they are not packing up their political tents. Having discovered their power to move the levers of an election and get the candidates to court them, many are already planning their priorities for the next crusade, which begins Nov. 3. --Reported by Perry Bacon Jr. and Karen Tumulty/with Kerry; Matthew Cooper/ Washington; John F. Dickerson/with Bush; Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis; Charlotte Faltermayer/ Scotch Plains, N.J.; Eric Roston/Davenport; and Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines

With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr.; Karen Tumulty/with Kerry; Matthew Cooper/ Washington; John F. Dickerson/with Bush; Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis; Charlotte Faltermayer/ Scotch Plains, N.J.; Eric Roston/Davenport; Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines