Luck Be the Ladies?: The frat prez goes after the dames.

When members of the Republican National Committee meet in Boston later this month, they will be briefed on how to woo women voters. The presentation will include a startling electoral map of last November's results, showing that if only men had voted for president, George W. Bush would have carried 43 states-including New England and every state west of the Mississippi. Al Gore's alpha males in Illinois and New York would have accounted for over half of his modest 101 electoral votes.

This male-only map might prompt dark GOP thoughts about the wisdom of the Nineteenth Amendment, but it reveals a deeper problem for Democrats: the abandonment of their party by men. The Republicans have carried the women's vote in three of the last six presidential elections, winning as much as 56 percent in 1984, but Democrats haven't won more than 43 percent of the male vote in the past 20 years. Republicans have been made to feel that they have intractable women problems, but they have been able to bridge a gender divide that remains a treacherous gulf for the Democrats.

In November, Bush's support among men was 10 points higher than among women, and so Republicans are embarking on their quadrennial drill to make the party more female-friendly. Under the direction of Ann Wagner, the new co-chairman of the RNC, the committee is launching a "Winning Women" initiative, with grassroots outreach and a jazzy website to win more Venus voters to the GOP. The veteran Missouri activist is optimistic about President Bush's ability to close his 10-point gap. She believes that the opportunity for a "Bush-branding" of the GOP-a remolding of the party in the image of its likable leader-will make it more attractive to women.

Bush's support among women needs to grow by only the tiniest margin to ensure his reelection. In four states that Bush lost narrowly, a minuscule increase in his support from women-between 0.0011 percent and 0.0086 percent-could have won him 32 extra electoral votes.

Wagner's upbeat take on the gender divide might be chalked up to the need to rally the party faithful, but her view enjoys bipartisan support. Across Capitol Hill from the RNC, the Democratic Leadership Council is sounding an alarm to its own party about the flip side of the GOP's relatively manageable gender gap. The latest edition of the DLC magazine includes an article by William Galston on the Democrats' "White Male Problem": While women have been fickle voters over the past 20 years, backing Reagan twice and the senior Bush in 1988, Galston points out that political and policy developments of the past generation have consistently pushed white men away from the Democratic party, as the antigovernment sentiment of these men has shifted them toward ideological conservatism. Al Gore received only 36 percent of the white male vote, and GOP congressional and gubernatorial candidates also won the white-male vote by 20-point margins. Galston, a former Clinton White House staffer, explains that "the gender gap is more a reflection of men leaving the Democratic party than of women joining it."

Galston faults the "high-profile extremists" on the left for exacerbating the party's problems by tagging white men as "racist and patriarchal oppressors." The rhetoric has been costly. "Republican strength among white men more than offsets Democrats' dominance of the African-American vote," Galston reports. And the party's harridans aren't helping to win over female voters: In a recent Gallup poll, only 25 percent of all women labeled themselves "feminist." Another survey, by pollster Kellyanne Conway, found 41 percent of women calling themselves "conservative," and only 21 percent "liberal."

Conway, president of the Polling Company, explains that the traditional Democratic fare served up for the benefit of women voters doesn't satisfy their concerns. A recent New York Times poll on issues most important to the public found women more concerned with missile defense and foreign policy than abortion and gun control. While Republicans can boost their support from women by appearing competent and concerned, Conway maintains that the Democratic party is a tough sell to male voters because its fundamental economic policy is at odds with men's views on taxes and spending. "The Democratic senators facing reelection who voted for the tax cut know that men aren't easily sold and are more punitive at the ballot box than women."

Furthermore, says Conway, George W. Bush now enjoys a geographic asset of particular value with women voters: He's living in the White House. "One of the top non-issue issues that affect the gender gap is that women stick with what they know, so they are more pro-incumbent than anything else." Conway explains that Reagan's 56 percent support from women in 1984, with a woman busy making history on the Democratic ticket, is attributable to the power of incumbency with female voters. A GOP strategist notes, "If women stay in crummy marriages because it's what they know, we ought to be able to count on them to stick with a positive presidency."

If Republicans are helped because women know that Bush is in the White House, once they realize what he's been doing there he should be in even better shape. The majority of women attending a GOP-convened focus group last month didn't realize that a tax cut they welcomed had been approved. Karlyn Bowman, the polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute, explains that the country as a whole has tuned out Washington: When asked what the patients' bill of rights meant, only 12 percent of the public knew that it allowed suits against HMOs. And women-as is usual when it comes to national politics-are among the most detached citizens. Says Bowman: "I can't think of any issue where women are more attentive than men."

As both parties begin working on the gender divide for the next round of elections, men paying attention poses a bigger problem for Democrats than women's inattention does for the GOP. In November, only 19 percent of white men saw Al Gore as sharing their view of government; the majority of men disagree with liberal Democrats on foreign policy and defense, and oppose additional gun-control measures. Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg's postelection analysis found that other cultural issues-particularly Gore's strident abortion-rights position and apparent support for gay civil unions-also drove white men toward Bush.

In order to win enough male voters to compete with the GOP, Democrats have to get men to ignore virtually all their party's positions on the issues. Given the appeal his incumbency has to women, all Bush has to do is be president. There's no doubt which side of the gender gap any reasonable person would want to be on.