Women could put Obama over the top in November

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Actually, not just over the top. There's a long, long way to go, to be sure, but women could hand Obama a landslide.

As USA Today reports:

President Obama has opened the first significant lead of the 2012 campaign in the nation's dozen top battleground states, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, boosted by a huge shift of women to his side.

In the fifth Swing States survey taken since last fall, Obama leads Republican front-runner Mitt Romney 51%-42% among registered voters just a month after the president had trailed him by two percentage points.

The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney's support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.

But why would women be shifting in such large numbers to the president? Oh, right, because Republicans are waging war on them.

Ultimately, it'll be the economy, stupid, that will determine how these swing states -- Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin -- go, but, looking at that list, there's no reason Obama should be able to win all of them.

And if women in particular see it as a choice between a likeable president who is effectively managing an improving economy (and cares about issues like health care and education) and a privileged rich douchebag who advocates plutocracy and belongs to the party of theocracy -- a contrast that will become much clearer over the course of the campaign -- well, you have to give Obama the decisive edge.