We have heard the threat from conservatives on the Right and from Barack Obama supporters on the Left: if you overlook us or cut us out of the process we will exact revenge in November. Now it’s Hillary Clinton’s turn. She and her longtime supporter Ann Lewis are telling the Democratic establishment to give Clinton her due or plenty of women (who make up a majority of Democratic voters) will sit out 2008. An AP story, noting that Democratic women on the campaign trail are getting peeved about efforts to bring the race to an early end, includes this:
“These women are the volunteer infrastructure of the Democratic Party who’ve been proud to support Democratic officials for what they believe and stand for,” Lewis said. “They are very angry that people they’ve worked for so hard would be so dismissive of Hillary and, by extension, of them and what they value.”
Another Democratic woman activist chimes in:
Women have always been asked to step aside if it was somehow for the greater good. In this case, Clinton, and a lot of her female supporters, clearly feel that she would make the better president and that it would not be for the greater good for her to step aside.
You don’t even have to be a Democratic partisan to agree with this common sense observation:
If you’re a Clinton supporter, if you think she’s the better candidate, are you more or less likely to defect if you feel she’s had a fair chance, the whole thing was fought out, everyone got to vote in every state, or if she somehow got pressured out?
The threat of Clinton, and especially female, defectors is a sobering one for Democrats. In 2004 John Kerry beat George W. Bush 51% to 44% among women. Without a healthy majority of women voters casting votes for Kerry, the race would not have been close. Clinton wants the Democratic Party elders (who might be thinking up schemes to end the race before she has played every card in her hand) and those superdelegates to keep that in mind. And if they aren’t careful, she might just ride a wave of female anger to some impressive primary wins.
