Who are the voters leaving Obama for McCain?

WASHINGTON: Alaska Gov. Sarah Palins addition to the Republican ticket last month is credited with electrifying the Conservative party and drawing women voters away from Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama.

After a brutal Democratic primary fight drove a wedge between women voters and Sen. Obama during the critical primary election period, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is working to repair the damage and stem the recent shift of white women voters to the Republican ticket.

Barack and I may have started out on two separate paths, but we are on one journey now, she told an enthusiastic crowd this weekend in Ohio.

White women played a big role in Clintons decisive victory over Obama in the Ohio primary, backing her 67 percent to 31 percent, according to exit polls. And many of those women are now expressing their unhappiness with Obama who did not choose Clinton as his vice presidential candidate by crossing over to the GOP.

Palin is credited with exciting Republican women, but her impact on the GOP ticket is more than a chick thing.

According to new data provided by the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, Palins support among GOP men is slightly stronger than among women.

The Greenberg survey also reports a huge marriage gap among women. More married women view Palin favorably (49 percent) than unfavorably (37 percent). But that trend flips among divorced, widowed and never-married women: 32 percent to 38 percent.

More worrisome for Obama is the polls finding that he is underperforming with older white women, typically a natural Democratic constituency. According to the Greenberg data, McCain currently leads among white married women 55 percent to 42 percent.

The Democrats have also been energized by the Palin Phenomenon. On Sunday, the Obama campaign announced a new fundraising record by raising $66 million in August.

Much of that, officials said, came from 500,000 new donors, bringing the total number of people don! ating to the Illinois senators White House bid to more than 2.5 million. McCain reported his own fundraising record of $47 million in August, which many attribute to Palins arrival on the scene.

But there is another significant member of the Palin family who has created his own appeal to American voters. He is Todd Palin.

The husband of Sarah Palin is a member of the steel workers union, a registered independent voter and has championed the need for vocational education in his home state.

He works the night shift in the North Slope oilfields, fishes commercially in icy waters and flies around snowy Alaska in a floatplane, and he has won four cross-state snowmobile championships, which covers over 3,200 km in the bitter cold of the Alaskan winter.

At home, he navigates between hardworking mans man and hunky Mr. Mom to the five Palin children and is apparently comfortable in his role as support spouse to wife Sarahs powerful career.

Republicans are hoping that the Palins seemingly middle-America wholesomeness may force some voters, including union-types and blue collar workers who traditionally aligned with Democrats, to rethink their vote this November for the GOP ticket.

And theres another interesting blip on the political radar screen, and thats the powerful effect of political misinformation. According to experiments conducted by political scientist John Bullock at Yale University, new experiments have shown that misinformation can influence people even those who recognize it as misinformation. A variety of psychological experiments showed that political misinformation primarily works by feeding into peoples preexisting views.

So the e-mails you may have seen that Obama is a Muslim and was sworn in the US Senate with is hand placed on the Quran and that photo of Palin brandishing a rifle while wearing a US flag bikini are false ... but some people just want to believe them.

Lastly, there is one segment of people who want Obama as president despite the Palin Phe! nomenon and thats the Europeans.

A new poll sponsored by the German Marshall Fund that test attitudes toward the two candidates is sure to add fuel to the election fire. To the surprise of no one, Europeans are much more favorably inclined toward Obama than McCain. Nearly 7 in 10 Europeans felt favorable to Obama in the poll.

Good thing for McCain that Europe does not get to vote this November.