Luck Be the Ladies?: The frat prez goes after the dames.(a "Winning Women" initiative by the Republican Party)

When members of the Republican National Committee meet in Boston later this month, they will be briefed on how to woo women voters. The presentation will include a startling electoral map of last November's results, showing that if only men had voted for president, George W. Bush would have carried 43 states-including New England and every state west of the Mississippi. Al Gore's alpha males in Illinois and New York would have accounted for over half of his modest 101 electoral votes.

This male-only map might prompt dark GOP thoughts about the wisdom of the Nineteenth Amendment, but it reveals a deeper problem for Democrats: the abandonment of their party by men. The Republicans have carried the women's vote in three of the last six presidential elections, winning as much as 56 percent in 1984, but Democrats haven't won more than 43 percent of the male vote in the past 20 years. Republicans have been made to feel that they have intractable women problems, but they have been able to bridge a gender divide that remains a treacherous gulf for the Democrats.

In November, Bush's support among men was 10 points higher than among women, and so Republicans are embarking on their quadrennial drill to make the party more female-friendly. Under the direction of Ann Wagner, the new co-chairman of the RNC, the committee is launching a "Winning Women" initiative, with grassroots outreach and a jazzy website to win more Venus voters to the GOP. The veteran Missouri activist is optimistic about President Bush's ability to close his 10-point gap. She believes that the opportunity for a "Bush-branding" of the GOP-a remolding of the party in the image of its likable leader-will make it more attractive to women.

Bush's support among women needs to grow by only the tiniest margin to ensure his reelection. In four states that Bush lost narrowly, a minuscule increase in his support from women-between 0.0011 percent and 0.0086 percent-could have won him 32 extra electoral votes.

Wagner's upbeat take on the gender divide might be chalked up to the need to rally the party faithful, but her view enjoys bipartisan support. Across Capitol Hill from the RNC, the Democratic Leadership Council is sounding an alarm to its own party about the flip side of the GOP's relatively manageable gender gap. The latest edition of the DLC magazine includes an article by William Galston on the Democrats' "White Male Problem": While women have been fickle voters over the past 20 years, backing Reagan twice and the senior Bush in 1988, Galston points out that political and policy developments of the past generation have consistently pushed white men away from the Democratic party, as the antigovernment sentiment of these men has shifted them toward ideological conservatism. Al Gore received only 36 percent of the white male vote, and GOP congressional and gubernatorial candidates also won the white-male vote by 20-point margins. Galston, a former Clinton White House staffer, explains that "the gender gap is more a reflection of men leaving the Democratic party than of women joining it."

Galston faults the "high-profile extremists" on the left for exacerbating the party's problems by tagging white men as "racist and patriarchal oppressors." The rhetoric has been costly. "Republican strength among white men more than offsets Democrats' dominance of the African-American vote," Galston reports. And the ...