Video: Polls show wide gender gap

>> talked about the latest polls showing president obama opening up leads in three key swing states . we have ohio, pennsylvania, florida but digging deeper in to those numbers, a substantial gender gap in those states. in ohio, president obama has a 25-point lead with women and mitt romney leads by 8 points among men. in pennsylvania, president obama has a 21-point lead among women and romney holds a 1-point lead with men and then in florida president obama a 9-point lead with women and mitt romney leads by 3 points among men. but with all that focus on women , there's an article in politico arguing that white men may be the key in this election. that article is the work of senior political writer louis romano who joins me now. after decades, you say after taking a backseat to women and latinos, middle class white men are finding themselves front and center again and potential game changers for this election.

>> well, that's right. they're being courted by both sides. i don't think that they were necessarily ignored before. but everybody had sort of their demographic and republicans never had to worry about losing them. democrats knew that they would never get much more than 40% and still sort of where they are but what they can't do is lose any. so they're each trying to desperately hold on to what they have. otherwise they can't win. arguab arguably, some experts think that romney needs to get it up to 65% to pull off the election because he doesn't have anywhere else to go. latinos really aren't going to support him and women , he's not made great inroads with women and men, white men are the ones who have been hit worse with the economy so each side is hoping that the bottom doesn't fall out with white men.

>> louis, back historically, president obama got 41% of the white male vote in '08 and swung back to the traditional republican support for the 2010 midterms. when's the big influencer for them now?

>> you know, i think again it's the economy. i think that these are the men, these are largely middle class men. we are not talking about -- i mean, the republicans are always going to win the white wealthy men. the swing voters here are the middle class men and those are the ones that have been hurt the hardest and not ideological. they're the guys that were the reagan democrats . they just a want and this economy has really, really hurt them. i think that they were looking at romney as maybe somebody, you know, that could bring them out of this. i think recent events and mistakes on romney 's part hurt him with them, specifically the 47% comment he made in florida a few of the guys in iowa said they were leaning towards romney and shook them up, that he was a guy that was too wealthy and he was never going to have middle class interests.

Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/newsnation/49183517/

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