If men had been the only voters in Missouri, Montana or Virginia, we’d have a Republican Senate. It’s time for the Dems to listen to what women were voting for in the 2006 elections.

Post Election Polls: Men Were Angry At Bush, Women Wanted Change
By Ellen Goodman

Allow me to use my grandmother-of-two voice. This is a bit more low key and benign than Nancy Pelosi’s famous “mother-of-five voice.” Toddlers and tryptophan tend to mellow me out.

Nevertheless, during this holiday interregnum between the election and the installation of a new Congress, a grandmaternal word or two to the Democrats may be in order.

There’s already been a surfeit of talk about the role of women in this election. Alas, this was not The Year of the Women Redux, although Speaker-elect Pelosi has broken the “marble ceiling” and has the bruises to show for it. Yes, there will be more women in Congress than ever before, but so far the percentage has only gone up from 15.4 to 16.4485981. Hold the applause.

This was, however, the year women provided the Democratic margin of victory. If men had been the only voters in Missouri, Montana or Virginia, we’d have a Republican Senate. This is also the year in which women drove the agenda.

Pollster Celinda Lake, who coined the terms “soccer mom” and “security mom,” hasn’t found the right moniker yet for women in 2006. She tries out two of them — “change moms” and “had-enough women” — and then settles for an explanation: “Women solidified around change a year ago and didn’t budge.”

They were the first to think the war was going sour and first to believe the economy was going downhill. And, at the family heart of the matter, a majority of women unhappily concurred that their children were going to be worse off than they are.

For the rest of the story, click here.