Friday, June 15, 2007

"Women with Needs"

Hillary is running very strong among poorer, less educated women, proving that class is more important than race. The Hillary campaign calls those people "women with needs," which means that they are people who do not have medical care, whose kids are going to lousy schools, who are working two or three jobs to live, and whose sons and daughters are more likely to be in Iraq. The problem with such women with needs is they are less likely to register and to vote than their wealthier conterparts, male and female.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How did you come up with your description of Hillary’s “women with needs”? Given your definition, that’s a mighty small and declining segment of the population.

For example, according to the Current Population Survey, 5.2 percent of employed people had multiple jobs in 1970. Multiple job holding peaked in 1996 at 6.4 percent and has steadily declined since, to 5.2 in 2006.

There were 7,576,000 multiple job holders in 2006 – 6, 321,000 white, 818,000 black, 249,000 Asian and 598,000 Hispanic. Most were married (4,136,000) with a spouse present. Most had one full-time and one part-time job (3,981,000). There were 1,676,000 with two part-time jobs, 1,564,000 whose hours varied on both their primary and secondary job and 310,000 people with two full-time jobs. Women make up forty-four percent of multiple job holders, 3.3 million.

So the typical female multiple job holder is white, married with a spouse present, with a full-time and a part-time job. That may well describe a school teacher with a fulltime job during the school year and a part-time job in the summer. That’s hardly a “woman in need”, but certainly one with a high probability of being a Democrat.

More likely Hillary’s “woman in need” is one who dropped out of high school, is unmarried, has one or more children, if employed has a part-time job and is extremely unlikely to have a son or daughter in Iraq. I have no doubt “Hillary is running very strong among” these women, but you didn’t hazard a guess as to why.

The Hall Institute of Public Policy said...

This came from a well-publicized poll several weeks ago. See Chris Matthews Hardball, which also featured the poll several weeks ago.