You’re right about that split. But single women don’t want someone to take care of them, they just want someone who can at least acknowledge their challenges.
Take equal pay, a huge issue with women in the workplace. Came up in the debate. Obama said yeah we need to help ensure that. Romney was lost, never committed that he was for helping women with equal pay. Even if he believes there is no role for the feds in equal pay, he should have supported it in a stronger way.
Next up is education, another women issue. Romney said if you need money go to your parents. That was highly publicized and too late for him to set the record straight. A stupid, stupid remark.
The pocketbook candidate lost single women on those two pocketbook issues. Abortion had little to do with it.
The problem is that Romney’s answer about equal pay in the debate, about job flexibility so that women could take care of children and other family members, is actually much of the reason why there is a pay gap between men and women. Women choose jobs that have shorter hours and give them for flexibility. So Romney actually was speaking to the problem in a far more sophisticated way that advocating a mandate, but the narrate has been so controlled by the left, I’m guessing few people got that. You apparently didn’t.
As for paying for college, he spoke to that, too, including talking about the policies that they had in Massachusetts to help kids go to college but, again, it didn’t fit the media narrative where the only write answer was that the government should just pay for it all.