Change The Ratio: The XX Voting Bloc
It’s barely two months old, but 2012 has already been incredibly interesting - and specifically, interesting for women. From an instant bestseller focusing on the Obama presidency as a partnership with the First Lady to the massive Komen backlash to the sudden and furious contraception debate, the power and influence and voice of women have suddenly been impossible to ignore.
I say “suddenly” because, well, it hasn’t been so impossible in the past. Even in 2008, in a historic race with the first-ever viable female presidential candidate and a (sometimes scarily viable) female vice-presidential candidate, the race was less about issues relating to women as a whole than these women, and what they represented and how they challenged us and the national paradigm. But we didn’t see the raw flexing of collective muscle that much - except in the case of the PUMAs, older women and Hillary supporters who felt they’d been rendered invisible, and were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Suddenly this demographic group came together, and swung around a pretty hefty political chip: their vote.That chip, mostly ignored over the ramp-up to 2012 (hi, GOP race!), has now come sharply into focus. Women as a raw demographic unit exercise incredible power across every element of American life. They control the lion’s share of household spending, drive product, move merch, and unleash markets. They are the engine of the online social explosion - and they put their money there, too. So it only makes sense that in 2012, that raw demographic power would bring its heft to electoral politics.
In 2012, far more than in 2008, there is social media - an amped-up, globe-spanning Facebook and Twitter; the incredible instant window of Instagram; even a budding political tool in Pinterest. In 2012, our social networks are so far developed as to regularly supplant the distribution tools we relied upon in 2008. And in 2012, those social networks are making the difference for women, flexing political might with a fist that swings larger, comes faster and hits harder than ever before.
There’s more.
