1988 REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION : Closing Gender Gap Considered by Many to Be Crucial for Bush

NEW ORLEANS — After a particularly heated platform session on reproductive rights, a tearful Maine delegate told Washington, D.C., delegate Nancy Thompson: “I don’t want to come back. This isn’t my party.”

While some in the GOP refuse to acknowledge any such creature as a gender gap, many loyal Republican men and women here are concerned that ignoring that creature--and the 10-million registered-voter advantage women now hold over men--could cost George Bush the election, just as some say it cost the GOP a Senate majority in 1986.

“There’s a very, very large gender gap we are now facing,” New York Rep. Bill Green warned Tuesday at a “women’s vote” panel sponsored by the National Women’s Political Caucus, “and (it) appears to me to be the major threat George Bush’s campaign faces.”

The subject was brought into especially sharp focus Tuesday by the panel, by a Planned Parenthood brunch for scores of delegates and officials who fear the platform’s opposition to abortion could hurt the party in November, and by Bush’s choice of Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle as his running mate.

Fumed New Mexico delegate Marjorie Bell Chambers, who has held many GOP posts over the years: “The men on the (Bush) campaign staff are the most male men I’ve ever met. The only time they pay attention to us (women) is when we scream and yell--and you’re not going to hear that here.”

Massachusetts state Rep. Cile P. Hicks was also skeptical. “I hope the party is listening. I hope we don’t have to lose an election before they get the message.”

Males Predominate

If the polls outside the Superdome show Bush’s support among women flagging, the numbers inside do not look much better. While women’s faces populate the podium, the GOP’s own figures show women delegates outnumbered more than 2 to 1 by men, at 68.4% to 31.6%. In 1984, in Dallas, 45% of the convention delegates were women.

Gender gap problems range beyond the ERA, beyond abortion, beyond child care, to the core of economic issues that Republicans have claimed as their own.

Though the party is handing Bush the torch of Reagan prosperity, some Republicans at the convention concede that women have not necessarily felt that torch’s warmth.

“Women in numbers which are too large to be comfortable are not supporting George Bush,” said Illinois Gov. James R. Thompson. “I think it has to do in some respects with the fact that women as a class are not participating in economic recovery to the same extent that men are. It reflects economics, not gender.”

‘Engine for Change’

Green said the gender gap could be Bush’s “engine for change”--but one made no easier by a platform opposing ERA and abortion. “The key issue is whether he will make that effort.”

A convention official denied “a conscious effort to include women” in extra numbers on the podium. But the visibility of women--among them temporary convention chair Elizabeth Hanford Dole and national committee co-chair Maureen Reagan--showed the TV audience a diversity it saw in abundance at the Democratic convention, where fully half the delegates were women, as required by party rules.

Bush’s choice of a good-looking Indiana senator as a running mate was viewed by some as an attempt to whittle away the gender gap.

“He fills the gender gap, he runs well in Indiana among women,” said Indiana delegate Rex C. Early. His wife, Barbara, declared: “I’m not saying he isn’t good-looking, because he really is. And that helps. But it’s not the only reason women vote for him.”

But Quayle’s personal appeal may be two-edged.

“If this is a way of getting the women’s votes, at best it’s cynical,” said The Times’ political analyst William Schneider. “The best example I can think of is in 1960, women voted for Nixon over Kennedy.”

In opposing abortion and the ERA, Iowa Rep. Jim Leach said at the Planned Parenthood brunch, the GOP is “backing off from what I consider to be old-fashioned traditional Republican values, such as individual rights.”

But Leach cautioned that the “flip side” is that the Democrats “have a male gender gap.”

Democrats have taken women “for granted,” says New York City Council Minority Leader Susan Molinari, and “I owe no one an apology for being a Republican woman and a Republican feminist.”

On the convention floor, no single attitude--or explanation--prevailed.

“I’m not sure whether it’s a holdover from the old chauvinist image of the Republicans,” said New York alternate Miriam Annunziato, “or if there are just not enough (women) around who are interested.”

“I don’t think it’s a gender gap, I think it’s all playing politics,” said pro-choice guest and state Rep. Mary Ann Lewis of New Hampshire, whose state has the lowest percentage of women delegates of the 50 states, 17%.

“Maybe in the Western states it’s easier because women traditionally worked side by side with men on farms in the frontier,” said Katherine Carruthers, wife of New Mexico Gov. Garrey E. Carruthers, whose state has 52% women delegates.

In Idaho, with 55% women delegates, state chairman Blake Hall said he wanted the delegation to be “as close to 50-50 as possible--that was assuming we could find enough qualified men.”

Idaho delegate Mary Hartung attributes the showing to women who start by stuffing envelopes and walking precincts. “Women are willing to do those things. Housewives are used to doing these nitty-gritty jobs.”

Price of Politics

For all the problems, real or perceived, and for all that some feel slighted in their priorities, women here accept trade-offs as the price of politics--and eventual victory.

South Dakota’s House Speaker Debra Anderson said: “I don’t want to leave the impression that Republicans can ignore issues like child care and parental leave--we can only ignore them at our peril . . . but we are not one monolithic beast out there. We do not all vote the same way.”

New Jersey alternate Connie Myers was not “real happy” about the ERA and abortion exclusion, “but it in no way detracts from my being a Republican. . . . I still believe the Republican Party will give more opportunities to women.

“It’s tough but I don’t think everybody will be 100% happy.”