Wal-Mart sponsored a set of bipartisan post-State of the Union focus groups of “Wal-Mart moms” in in suburban Philadelphia and Kansas City this week. The sessions were conducted by the Democratic firm Momentum Analysis and the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies.
According to National Journal, the Wal-Mart mom demographic “refers to mothers who are mostly between the ages of 18-44, mostly white, with two-fifths to half having finished college. Their partisan affiliation tends to be evenly split. As a group, they voted for Obama in 2008, went Republican in 2010, but returned to Obama in 2012. They make up just under a fifth of the voting population.”
Here is what the National Journal reports the mom’s thought about Obama’s minimum wage proposal:
The top worry is that a higher minimum wage could raise consumer prices, such as bread and gas. And, anyway, who can live on $9 an hour? many asked.
Those are two great common sense questions Democrats must answer if they are going to make any political gains with this issue. These Wal-Mart moms also expressed some common sense doubts about Obama’s gun control agenda too:
On gun control, they agreed that background checks could work to prevent violence, but they were also skeptical about additional gun-control regulations.
“It’s not the guns that are killing people; it’s the people that are killing people,” said one Kansas City mother.
For all the talk of a permanent Obama-voter realignment, it seems Democrats are still far from establishing that their liberal policies will actually help anyone.
