Mitt Rom­ney loves women. Do women love him back?

I’ve writ­ten before about a Repub­li­can Con­gres­sional focus on women’s health issues instead of on jobs. After that arti­cle was writ­ten, a num­ber of well-​​publicized inci­dents turned that ill-​​conceived (!) focus on women’s repro­duc­tive issues into a full-​​fledged Repub­li­can War on Women meme.

A CBS/​New York Times poll released yes­ter­day showed Mitt Rom­ney with an eight point lead among men and a five point deficit among women. (I would give you the raw num­bers but the press release does not include crosstabs.)

A July Pur­ple Strate­gies poll of swing state vot­ers — their “swing states” are Col­orado, Florida, Iowa, Min­nesota, Nevada, New Hamp­shire, New Mex­ico, North Car­olina, Ohio, Penn­syl­va­nia, Vir­ginia, and Wis­con­sin — has Pres­i­dent Obama lead­ing Gov­er­nor Rom­ney 47–45 per­cent. Among women in those states, Obama leads Rom­ney 52–42 while among men, he trails 41–50. This “gen­der gap” is a con­sis­tent 12-​​point advan­tage among females in Col­orado, Ohio and Vir­ginia (50–38, 51–39, 52–40, respec­tively), while the advan­tage among women is “only” seven points in Florida, at 51–44. Even though the so-​​called War on Women was hot back in Feb­ru­ary and March 2012, the gen­der gap has stayed con­sis­tently high for four months, indi­cat­ing that the meme has taken hold on pub­lic consciousness.

Repub­li­cans charged that the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion was forc­ing reli­gious insti­tu­tions to cover con­tra­cep­tive ser­vices against their will. (As I’ve writ­ten before, this is actu­ally an updat­ing of laws passed by Con­gress in 1964 and 1978, and reaf­firmed by the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­nity Com­mis­sion in 2000. Fed­eral employ­ees were merely putting the old exist­ing rule into the con­text of brand-​​new Obamacare.)

In Feb­ru­ary, seven states’ Attor­neys Gen­eral sued the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion (the Depart­ments of Health and Human Ser­vices, Trea­sury, and Labor). Led by Nebraska Attor­ney Gen­eral Jon Brun­ing, it also included the states of Florida, Michi­gan, Ohio, Okla­homa, South Car­olina and Texas. Indi­vid­ual plain­tiffs were also included, who claimed they were harmed by the pro­posed rule.

A Fed­eral Dis­trict Court rul­ing in Omaha, Nebraska, released Tues­day, smacked the plain­tiffs pretty hard. (more…)