hose footsteps making all the difference in the presidential election this past month don't all sound alike.
There's the click of high heels, the scrunch of sandals, the clip-clop of flats, the clunk of steel-toed welder's boots, the near-silent tread of soccer-mom sneakers and nurses' slip-ons, and the crepe-soled whisper of women who are on their feet on the job eight hours straight, before they get home to chores there before they slide on the old slippers.
It's the movement of female votes that brought Al Gore from way behind to marginally ahead. If the election were limited to white men, George W. Bush could quit today and still win. White males have voted predictably Republican in presidential elections for three decades, in the South some years by 2-1.
But yawning wide under the unsteady gait of the Texas governor is Gender Gap. His year-long trail-ride campaign, with his saddlebags laden with $100 million in contributions, runs the risk of plunging over that looming precipice. He had the women's vote, tentatively and tenuously, till mid-August. Now it is bleeding away, like a river through a broken levee, and Bush seems unsure as to how to repair the damage.
It was women who made Bill Clinton in two elections, and women whose coolness to Prince Albert threatened to deny Mr. & Mrs. Gore the chance to move in over the store. So what happened over the last month? Women moved. To Gore.
That much is clear. The ''why?'' is a little more obscure. Savvy Republican veterans like Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming senator who spent 18 years in D.C., kept murmuring all along that women don't like the GOP's lining up against abortion. Bush is for exceptions in rare cases (rape, incest, saving the mother's life), but the platform won't even go that far.
Bush went to great and largely successful lengths to make his a softer-kinder-cuddlier convention. Lots of happy female and minority faces. But he's trying to undo the damage done since 1994's savage Newt Gingrich revolution.
The GOP fought family leave, raising the minimum wage (more women than men make the bare minimum), and the Democrats have generally out-bid the GOP congressional leadership on education, health care, and prescription drugs, the issue that looms like the iceberg-that-sank-the-Titanic of this election.
Was it The Smooch? Gore's bear-hug-and-passionate-kiss of Tipper en route to the podium for his big convention speech still resonates. ''No kiss?'' demanded Oprah Winfrey when Al ambled onto her set. ''I was hoping for something.'' So was Al, and he got it, when the talk-show diva, with her 22 million viewers, let Al purr and flirt. Dubbaya goes on Oprah next week, but he starts from way behind with the women's vote.
How far behind? Say about 20 points worth in the Zogby poll, or 18 points in the ABC/Washington Post count. Gore's lead among women varies from state to state. In the South and West, Bush does better. But in pivotal electoral vote hotspots like Illinois, where Gore has an overall 15-point lead in the Zogby tally, Bush leads among men, but trails by 25 points among women.
And marital status matters. The Voter.com Battleground poll has Gore and Bush deadlocked nationally at 41-40, but had Gore ahead among women by nine and Bush up with men by 8. That survey charts a marriage gap - Bush ahead by nine with marrieds, Gore up by 14 among singles. The conventional wisdom is that mothers are more angry at Bill Clinton for his Monica dalliance than are single women and that parents are more upset with the current president than nonparents.
Both campaigns will tailor their ads and schedules to the battleground states - those eight or nine running from New Jersey to Illinois and down to Missouri. The Lieberman factor is apparently helping Gore with women, as well as in Florida, where Bush spent two days this week hoping to hold onto a state he thought was a sure thing in July.
It's clear that Bush cannot win New York (trailing by 25 points in the Marist poll) and Illinois seems to be slipping from contention (Gore up by 15 in the Zogby poll.) It remains to be seen whether Hillary Clinton's seesaw Senate race in New York will get a lift from Gore's surge among women. Hillary is doing nowhere near as well with her gender she - and I - thought she would.
That could still change. If it does, she's in.
David Nyhan's e-mail address is nyhan@globe.com.
