Soccer Mom Nonsense
Soccer, when I was growing
up in the '70s, was a still an esoteric sport. To find matches, we of the
Menomenee Boys Club had to travel a long way from the genteel precincts of the
North Side of Chicago. Generally, our opponents came from ethnic enclaves in
the distant suburbs. On almost a weekly basis, we were humiliated by teams of
Polish, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian extraction whose members had been playing
since just after birth. Their mothers, who surrounded the field, terrified our
mothers by abusing the referees in thick Slavic accents. We believed they
locked their boys in the sausage shed as punishment for missing shots.
The
social complexion of the game has changed. No longer a mere bridge between
limousine liberals and the once-captive nations, soccer has become as
mainstream as Little League baseball. Indeed, the sport is now so populist that
in the opinion of all the experts, it is "soccer moms" who will determine the
outcome of next month's election. According to a lead story in the New York
Times , published the day of the first presidential debate, soccer moms have
become "the most sought-after voters of the campaign season." Following the
debate, the buzz on NBC was all about this emergent group and how the
candidates had tried to woo it. The idea is that while most other demographic
segments are largely committed, soccer moms make up a volatile, and hence
crucial, constituency.
Who exactly, we must ask, are these soccer moms who hold
the nation's fate in their hands? "They can be found," a CNN correspondent
informs us, "shuttling the kids to practice in minivans, nervously pacing the
sidelines, juggling the demands of family and career." Well naturally, but what
sort of women take their kids to soccer practice? According to one South
Carolina paper, soccer mom is "a well-heeled super-parent whose primary mission
in life is to do too much for her children. She got on a waiting list early for
the right day-care center, sent junior to Montessori, started violin lessons at
5, private school the same year and, the next year--soccer." According to the
Rocky
Mountain
News , however, soccer mom is "financially
stressed." Opinion is similarly divided on her employment status. In the view
of the Cleveland
Plain
Dealer , soccer mom is a career
woman who has "temporarily taken up child rearing." According to the
Buffalo
News , however, she is "balancing the demands of work and
family." The consensus seems to be that soccer moms are some subset of
middle-class, white suburban women. They "care about their kids" (as opposed,
presumably, to urban "rap moms" who do not), and they are incredibly busy. If
you can't find a soccer mom for your story, don't worry. Part of the shtick is
that she hasn't got time to talk to reporters.
Nexis, the
journalist's friend, allows us to trace the historical evolution of the term.
The first reference to a "soccer mom" that turns up is from 1982, and involves
the tawdry tale of a Ludlow, Mass., man who absconded with $3,150 raised for
the benefit of a local soccer league. There's very little more until a Susan
Smith-type tragedy in 1991, when a soccer mom in California got so stressed out
that she shot her two daughters and then tried, unsuccessfully, to kill
herself. The application of the term to politics goes back only to last year,
when a Democratic candidate for the Denver City Council last year described
herself as a soccer mom--and won. Credit for this year's coinage apparently
goes to Republican consultant Alex Castellanos, who made ads for Phil Gramm
during the primaries and now works for Bob Dole. (See a sample of his work in
this week's Varnish
Remover.) "The working soccer mom is the swing voter of this election,"
Castellanos told the Wall
Street
Journal , back before the
Dole campaign signed him up full time. "And she is not going to trust a guy who
argues for the need to own an assault weapon. She'll trust a guy who can feel
her pain."
If the phrase "soccer moms" has rapidly become
part of the political lexicon, it may be because it is cleverly positioned at
the intersection of several different trends--the rise of soccer as a
middle-class pastime, the demanding lives of working women, the diversification
of the suburbs, the popularity of the Dodge Caravan, and so on. Yet there is
something intrinsically misleading about the category, and indeed about all
such categories. The outcome of the 1994 congressional election was supposedly
determined by the media's ideal voter of that year, the Angry White Male, who
loved guns and beer while hating government and liberals. What, one wonders,
happened to Angry White Male? Did he die in a hunting accident? Did he go on
Prozac? What about the Perot voters of 1992, who are, by definition, the
largest swing-voting block in the country? Why aren't they deciding the
election? The notion that there is a single demographic group that determines
each election, then recedes back into the anonymity of the general populace, is
useful for political consultants and reporters. But as the impermanence of such
categories suggests, they are usually clichés that obscure as much as they
reveal.
"The
soccer mom is this year's hula hoop," says Harrison Hickman, a Democratic
pollster. Hickman points out that married women in general tend to be very
pro-incumbent, which somewhat undermines the argument that voting for Bush in
1992 and Clinton in '96 represents some sort of tectonic shift. But even in
1992, married women split 40-40-20 for Clinton, Bush, and Perot respectively.
In Hickman's view, the soccer mom segment is either "a group that's so small as
to be meaningless or so large that differences between them are more important
than similarities among them." Narrowly defined as married, college-educated,
suburban women with school-age children, soccer moms constitute only 4 percent
or 5 percent of the electorate. Broadly defined as suburban white women with
school-age kids, they add up to 11 percent or 12 percent. But then, as Hickman
points out, that 12 percent covers both working-class women who live in
two-bedroom ramblers and professionals in Westchester County with inherited
wealth. As voters, these women have little in common from election to
election.
Of course both these groups--the Roseannes and the Murphy
Browns, you might say--are currently leaning heavily for Clinton. The gender
gap has turned into a gorge this year, with women in all categories favoring
the president by a 26-point margin, according to the most recent
NBC/ Wall
Street
Journal poll. Among soccer moms--this is
actually a category in the poll--Clinton is ahead by 29 percentage points. If
the election were very close, such a bulge might make a difference. But as Guy
Molineaux of Hart Research points out, "This year the gender gap has gotten to
the point where all groups are trending Democratic--soccer moms, bowling moms,
you name it." Molineaux also points out that in polling, it is a truism that
higher up the socioeconomic ladder, women tend to vote more differently from
their husbands. So it's hardly a surprise that soccer moms are somewhat more
pro-Clinton than bowling moms.
Another pollster, Mark
Mellman, points out that the big swing between Clinton's victory in 1992 and
the Republican triumph of 1994 was among men, not women. And the same seems to
be true of the swing back toward the Democrats this year. Soccer moms, whoever
and however many they are, are less flighty--and thus less crucial to the
election--than their husbands.
This year's conception of the
crucial swing voter, in other words, seems especially muddled and misleading.
But it doesn't matter much. By the next election season some other cliché will
have emerged, and we won't have soccer moms to kick around anymore.
