Fer the wimmin

Unlike previous presidential campaigns, officials say, Clinton will take women’s issues out of their own silo. For instance, Clinton will make expanding paid leave for new mothers part of her economic platform by emphasizing its cost to families. And she’ll carry over the global women’s agenda she began at the State Department to incorporate women’s rights into her foreign policy platform...

To become the nation’s first female president, Clinton needs strong levels of support from all women, though her immediate challenge may be to improve her standing among white women. Older, working-class white women, many of whom remember the battle for an Equal Rights Amendment, have long formed the backbone of her base of support. However, in an August Quinnipiac poll, Clinton's favorability among white women was 35%, 9 points lower than with woman as a whole and a 10-point drop from April when she launched her campaign.

However, in matchups with her potential Republican opponents, she polled at the same level among white women as President Obama fared in 2012 during his successful re-election campaign.

"Some of these women may have defected because of the effect of very negative media coverage’’ over her email use, said Dianne Bystrom, director of a women and politics program at Iowa State University.

There’s also another factor at play, based on 2008 post-mortem analyses, she said. "White women voters are harder on women candidates and hold them to higher expectations than male candidates." Just as black voters were initially hesitant to support Obama, "we don’t want the first woman president to be a failure,’’ said Bystrom.

Obama relied on a strong showing among women in the past two election cycles. Clinton hopes to match the 55% of female voters who supported Obama in 2012.