Mitt Romney's Still Having Trouble Winning Over Women

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Despite rumors that his luck with woman has changed, Mitt Romney has continued to fail at closing the sizable gender gap among voters with only a week to go until the election. The Huffington Post's poll wizard Mark Blumenthal and politics reporter Sabrina Siddiqui crunched a whole host of the most recent numbers and found that Romney's fortune among women voters has changed little since his post debate surge at the beginning of October, despite rumors that he'd finally made a breakthrough with the demographic.

That first debate did give Romney a bump among women voters, but that bump has disappeared. "That poll we conducted right after the first debate suggested that his debate performance did have an impact on the race, and that impact was probably more substantial among women than it was among men," Michael Dimock, associate director at the Pew Research Center told The Huffington Post. "The entirety of the polling over the course of this year suggests to me that the gender gap is likely to look very similar to the last few election cycles, with women somewhere between 6 and 8 points to favor Obama, and fairly consistent with where we've been since 1980."

Indeed, Pew's latest poll numbers released on Monday show that likely 50 percent of women voters favor Obama versus just 44 percent for Romney. Giving the issue due diligence, Blumenthal and Siddiqui synthesized the data from seven other recent polls of likely women voters and found the difference in the number of women that have said they Romney between September and now is negligible when you take the margin of error into account. In other words, Romney is right back where he was with women voters before the first debate. 

This doesn't necessarily mean that Obama's clinched the women vote. While he maintains his lead on Romney, there are plenty of people out there that think he's walking on thin ice. As the candidates' efforts move to winning votes to getting out the vote, though, he won't have to walk far.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.