dotty lynch, pollster who saw the gender gap, dead at 69
Dotty Lynch, Pollster Who Saw the Gender Gap, Is Dead at 69
Dotty Lynch, who was the first woman to be chief polltaker for a presidential campaign and one of the first to recognize the potential benefit of developing campaign themes aimed specifically at winning women’s votes, died on Sunday in Washington. She was 69.
The cause was complications of melanoma, her husband, R. Morgan Downey, said.
Ms. Lynch’s career spanned dozens of election campaigns between 1972 and 2012 and included stints at both ends of the political campaign bus.
She was a consultant to the presidential campaigns of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, Edward M. Kennedy and Walter Mondale, and the political editor who designed independent campaign polls and interpreted their results (off camera) for Dan Rather, Lesley Stahl and Bob Schieffer at CBS News, where she worked from 1985 to 2005.
For Mr. Hart, who appointed her as his chief pollster at the start of his 1984 bid for the Democratic nomination, Ms. Lynch devised what came to be known as the first national political campaign with its own “women’s strategy.”
She based the approach on what was then a newly minted concept in political circles: the existence of a gender gap in voting patterns. Ms. Lynch and others, analyzing exit polls from the 1980 and 1982 national elections, had discerned a wide disparity between male and female voters on fundamental issues like war and peace, help for the needy and economic growth: Women, who tended to be more peaceable, more amenable to government help for the needy, and more likely to favor bottom-up rather than top-down strategies for economic growth, were more likely to vote Democratic and could not necessarily be expected to vote the way their husbands did, as old-school political operatives had always thought.
To capitalize on the gap, Ms. Lynch encouraged Mr. Hart to campaign in settings where there were lots of women, to prominently feature women in his television commercials, and to pay homage in his speeches to the economic and political power of women. (Mr. Hart’s campaign for the 1988 nomination collapsed after he was photographed with a woman in a bathing suit on his lap.)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/us/dotty-lynch-pollster-who-saw-the-gender-gap-is-dead-at-69.html?_r=0