Can Mitt Romney win back American women? No chance

Mitt Romney may have performed well in the first presidential debate of the 2012 US election, but he still has no shot of winning the race, writes Indu Chandrasekhar.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman scorned is a woman you won't win back. In terms of the US election, this translates to: if you can't win over female voters, you might as well go home.
Such is the plight of Mitt Romney. He may have performed well in the first presidential debate, armed with a truckload of (occasionally dubious) facts and a look of blithe incredulity every time President Obama spoke, but he didn't dare stray near the elephant in the room: women. And this is why he will ultimately lose.
Mitt Romney knows he has alienated the majority women voters, and he has no idea how to win them back. The most recent polls show 56 per cent of likely women voters support the current president, while 40 per cent support Romney. This divide surely had a helping hand from Todd Akin's comments about "legitimate rape". The Republican contender tried to distance himself from Akin's remarks, but the damage has been done.
(Akin continues to sabotage his case, recently accusing his opponent Claire McCaskill of not being 'ladylike', and justifying his vote against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act by saying "I don't think the government should be telling people what you pay and what you don't pay…it's about freedom.")

But Romney's comments about 'the 47 per cent' have been the most damaging for his reputation with women. He accused those who 'don't pay tax' of being spongers, victims "dependent upon government…who believe that they are are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it". But a large bloc of the Republican party's traditional voting base is part of this 47 per cent – poor whites, often not university-educated, but proud that they can get by without the government dragging them along. And the women of this group take particular offence to Romney's assumptions.
Poor but house-proud, these women don't ask for handouts because not even the men in their lives can give them. For the single mothers in this group, it's doubly galling to have a pampered man such as Mitt Romney (the richest ever self-made man to run for president) say you can't take care of yourself.

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