A breathless AP story by one Shannon McCaffrey has this to say:

President Bush’s once-solid relationship with Southern women is on the rocks. “I think history will show him to be the worst president since Ulysses S. Grant,” said Barbara Knight, a self-described Republican since birth and the mother of three. “He’s been an embarrassment.” In the heart of Dixie, comparisons to Grant, a symbol of the Union, is the worst sort of insult, especially from a Macon woman who voted for Bush in 2000 but turned away in 2004.

It turns out that Barbara Knight is the only former Republican female Bush supporter identified in the story who says she now plans to vote Democratic. It turns out that on careful examination, Ms. Knight appears hardly Republican at all. It further turns out that this entire story appears contrived and cockamamie.

This story is allegedly about GOP support in the south falling in the midterm election, but it utterly fails make its case. The idea proffered by the story is that “voters like Knight could be spoilers” in the upcoming election — but she can’t be a spoiler, since she says she voted against Bush in 2004, when Bush beat Kerry 58 – 41 in a GOP landslide in Georgia (a fact nowhere mentioned in the piece). She is, in effect, a Democrat voter in a very Republican state, and has been so for several years. (If this “self-described Republican since birth” is a white woman, her appearance in the story should be even more of an embarrassment to the AP, since white women voted 76% for George Bush in 2004 in Georgia, when Ms. Knight says she voted against him.)

And it’s even worse than all that. In Georgia in 2004, fully 97% of Republicans voted for George Bush, according to CNN. So in finding Barbara Knight, AP found one of the miniscule 3% of Republicans who voted against George Bush in 2004. Some Republican indeed!

The story did find another woman who said she voted for Bush but now plans to vote against the GOP congressional candidate in 2006, but nowhere does the story say that she is a Republican. Shs is Sandy Rubin, a teacher from Macon (this Sandy Rubin?) who looks for all the world to be a Democrat, from the things she had to say:

Rubin said the GOP’s focus on issues that appeal to social conservatives, such as gay marriage and abortion, have turned her off. “I care about job security and education. The things I hear the Republicans emphasizing in their campaigns are not things that affect me or my family,” said the 39-year-old mother of two.

So the AP story found one “Republican” woman who voted against Bush in his 2004 landslide over Kerry, and another woman, never identified as a Republican, who is said to have voted for Bush at some unspecified time. This is evidence of a turn against the GOP in Georgia?

We’d like to point out one more bit of misleading reporting in the piece. Another element that the story line is built on is this: “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.” The story never reported, however, that this poll, whatever its merits, is not in fact all that “recent.” The poll is apparently this one, conducted a month ago by AP-Ipsos, not necessarily what we would consider recent in the political world.

Still, this AP story has the merit of fitting the action line, which is that there is a tidal wave of defections against the GOP this fall as “War turns southern women away from GOP,” even if it failed to produce any evidence for its case. Well done, AP!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 1:03 am and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, Polling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.