Barack Obama, Women Voters | featured news

Sorry, fellas, but President Barack Obama's re-election makes it official: Women can overrule men at the ballot box. For the first time in research dating to 1952, a presidential candidate whom men chose decisively - Republican Mitt Romney - lost. More women voted for the other guy.

With the presidential contest in Virginia teetering on a knife's edge, Mitt Romney is counting on the economic concerns of suburban women to lock up a state that's almost a must-carry for him. Joanie Smerdzinski, 34, is one of them. She voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and still finds him more likable than his Republican rival. "I mean, would I want to hang out with Romney? No," said the political independent, who also disagrees with Romney's opposition to same-sex marriage.

What gender gap? Less than two weeks out from Election Day, Republican Mitt Romney has erased President Barack Obama's 16-point advantage among women, a new Associated Press-GfK poll shows. And the president, in turn, has largely eliminated Romney's edge among men.

President Obama's campaign is trying to tie Republican rival Mitt Romney to embattled candidate's comments about rape. In a new video, the Obama campaign asks, "Mitt Romney's solution to extremism against women? Promote the extremists."

In a boisterous speech in Fairfax, Va., today, President Obama made a renewed push for support among female voters, reiterating his commitment to women's health care and introducing a new diagnosis for what he cast as Mitt Romney's "backtracking" and "sidestepping" on issues like contraception and abortion: "Romnesia."

President Obama touts antidiscrimination legislation and attacks Mitt Romney for targeting Planned Parenthood, while Romney says women have suffered under Obama... Picking up where their contentious debate left off, President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney battled Wednesday for the support of female voters, underscoring their potentially decisive role in settling the fiercely competitive race.

President Barack Obama on Monday sought to woo women voters at a taping of the daytime talk show "The View," by flirting with his wife and bearing gifts for the hosts, but he could not escape tough questions on the economy that have dominated the election.

"We've had the old Romney-Ryan plan before - the top-down, give wealthier folks more tax breaks and somehow that's going to trickle down - it didn't work, it led to this economic disaster that the president inherited. We tried that, it failed, the Obama plan is much better for North Carolina," Dem. Rep. Jennifer Weiss, of Wake County, said.

President Obama's latest television ad is designed to appeal to an important demographic: Women. Entitled "first law," the commercial emphasizes the first bill Obama signed as president, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

While President Obama may win the women, Hispanic and youth vote, the turnout will likely be lower and the spread smaller, which could cost him the election.