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Opinion: Sexism not the key to Hillary Clinton’s defeat, a poll of women finds

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A group of Hillary Clinton supporters wants the Democratic national platform to include a line decrying ‘pervasive gender bias in the media,’ but a new poll of attitudes among women about the ’08 campaign does not lend much support to the push.

The survey, a joint endeavor by well-known Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway and Democratic counterpart Celinda Lake, found that ‘despite all the talk about sexism in the presidential campaign, the majority of women voters laid the blame for Hillary’s loss squarely on her and her strategists’ shoulders; they largely reject gender as a cause of her demise.’

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The precise numbers: 34% said she lost ‘because of the kind of campaign she ran’; 31% said because of ‘who she is and what she stands for’; 21% said ‘because she is a woman.’

The poll, conducted for Lifetime Networks as part of its ‘Every Woman Counts’ effort to spur political participation by women, also found Barack Obama with a lead over John McCain among female voters -- but with 10% of that bloc of the electorate still ‘firmly undecided.’

Obama was backed by 49% of those polled; McCain by 38% (the margin of error for the survey, conducted during the last week of July, was plus-or-minus 4.4%).

Obama’s 11-percentage-point advantage matches the margin by which Al Gore carried women voters over George W. Bush in the 2000 election, according to exit polls. Bush, in turn, won male voters by 11 points (Gore won the popular vote because women turned out in greater numbers than men).

In 2004, the edge among women voters for the Democratic ticket headed by John Kerry shrunk to 3 percentage points; Bush, meanwhile, again carried the male vote by 11 points.

-- Don Frederick

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