Democratic strategists should read Chris Kromm’s Facing South post “Are Women Key to Democratic Chances in the South?” discussing the gender gap as a wedge for Dems to regain some clout in the region. As Kromm notes in evaluating a recent Associated Press story on the topic “War Turns Southern Women Away from GOP”:

…the AP piece makes the classic mistake of equating “Southern women” with “white women.” Last year, Texas became the country’s fourth “majority minority” state, and over 40% of the populations of Georgia and Mississippi aren’t white. Women of color, who will soon be half the population of these states, have never been strong supporters of Bush or the Republican Party.
That being said, the AP rightly observes that a defection of white Southern women from the GOP could be a key factor — maybe the leading factor — in determining the outcome of the mid-term elections, and that foreign policy is a leading cause of their disappointment

As Shannon McCaffrey writes in the The Associated Press article:

“In 2004, you saw an utter collapse of the gender gap in the South,” said Karen Kaufmann, a professor of government at the University of Maryland who has studied women’s voting patterns. White Southern women liked Bush because “he spoke their religion and he spoke their values.”
…Republicans on the ballot this November have reason to worry. A recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that three out of five Southern women surveyed said they planned to vote for a Democrat in the midterm elections. With control of the Senate and House in the balance, such a seismic shift could have dire consequences for the GOP.

Kromm points out that the gender gap has been “most volatile” in the south, and he quotes from Dr. Karen Kaufman’s study in the Journal of the American Political Science Association:

Although the gender gap between White Southern men and women was a full 11 percentage points in 2000, it fell to only 5 points in 2004. Even more striking, the presidential vote gap in the South hit its lowest point in 40 years. Compared to White Southern men, Southern women chose Bill Clinton over Bob Dole by a 17-point margin in 1996 and preferred AlGore to George W. Bush by 9 percentage points in 2000. In 2004, however, Southern women favored Bush by a 2-point margin over Southern men. The collapse of the Southern gender gap was not mirrored else where. Outside of the South, the male-female divide in the vote actually increased slightly from a 9-point difference in 2000 to a 10-point difference in 2004.

The “write off the south” strategy favored by some Democratic strategists may soon be outdated, if it isn’t already. Clearly, demographic trends in southern states favor the Democrats and they have much to gain by a stronger commitment to turning out people of color — especially women — in southern elections.