Christian SM: Democratic Pollsters discuss Unmarried Female Voters

[La_Serpiente]

Stanley Greenberg and Celinda Lake

Excerpts from a Monitor breakfast on unmarried women voters.
By David T. Cook

Stanley Greenberg is chairman and chief executive officer of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. He founded the company in 1980 after teaching at Yale where he won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has a BA from Miami University and a Phd from Harvard. He has been polling advisor to President Clinton, Tony Blair, and Nelson Mandella.

Celinda Lake is president of Lake Snell Perry, a national political research firm. She holds an undergraduate degree from Smith College, and a masters in political science and survey research from the University of Michigan. She has served as political director of the Women's Campaign Fund and Research Director at the Institute for Social Research in Ann Arbor.

<snip>

On how to appeal to unmarried women voters:

(Greenberg -Interviewer) "What drives them away is the remoteness of it, not listening to them, the powerless, a politics that (does not) address their problems. There needs to be a change in the topic of politics....there needs to be a politics that is relevant to them. They want a politics that deals with job security, that deals with education, and deals with health care costs."

(Lake - Interviewee) "If you think of the symbols and images of politics, the average politician out there is married, everybody in the family looks good, their lives are together, the two kids, the wife, the suit jacket over the shoulder. That's not the lives of these women. They are economically marginal, they are short of time, they are juggling, and hoping that one of the balls doesn't fall on their head at any given time.

The dialog and the symbols of politics don't address them.... We need a politics that reaches out to these women, that gets them information early .... a grass roots activity that doesn't come in two weeks before the election but actually starts early getting information and talking to them about the kind of issues they care about...."


more...

Stanley Greenberg and Celinda Lake