In raising more than $20 million over the first three months of this year, Mitt Romney showed a special touch with the fairer sex — the ones who keep house, anyway. More than $2.5 million of his donations — 12 percent of his total — came from donors who identified themselves as “homemakers,” a Phoenix analysis shows.
Try not to picture Romney as Max Bialystock shtupping old ladies for checks.
That $2.5 million was double the homemaker-donated amount raised by the runner-up in the category, Rudy Giuliani. John McCain was the only other presidential candidate in either party who topped a million. The Democrats, suffering from a significant homemaker gap, all together couldn’t match Romney’s total.
This is no great shocker. Romney previously raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from homemakers for his Commonwealth PAC, primarily from wives of the financial executives and CEOs backing him.
But it’s not just that homemakers give to Romney. It’s that business women don’t. Romney’s long list of donors reveals a remarkable dearth of working women willing to put their hard-earned cash into Romney’s coffers.
Roughly 7100 individuals gave between $1800 and the $2300 maximum allowed by law, accounting for about two-thirds of Romney’s $20 million total. About two-thirds of those big donors were men.
Of the 2400 women, 1060 listed themselves as homemakers. Another 392 listed no occupation at all. Add those who listed themselves as retired, students, or volunteers — and those whom the Phoenix was able to identify as having listed their husbands’ jobs — and the list is down to just 698 women with jobs among Romney’s big donors.
Of those, 82 work for their husbands, and another dozen run their family charitable trusts. Another 173 are self-employed; the most common occupations among them are interior designer, investor, designer, consultant, and artist. Another five work for Romney’s campaign.
Just 426 of Romney’s 7100 big donors, then, are women who work for someone other than themselves, their husbands, or . . . Romney. Many of them have jobs unlikely to leave them with $2300 to spare. And fewer than 250 are employed in finance, management, legal, real estate, or medical positions — unlike the majority of Romney’s male donors. Maybe they’re not his kind of woman. Or maybe he’s not their kind of man.
