WASHINGTON, D.C. - Gayle Garvin, a small-business owner from Centertown, Mo., sits at a flash point of the 2008 presidential race: the so-called gender gap.

That decades-old political gulf, which sends soccer moms and NASCAR dads in opposite directions at election time, has moved front and center with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's splash on the political scene as the first woman nominated to the vice presidential slot on a Republican ticket.

"I think she's pretty special," said Garvin, a reliable Democrat who said she supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary but is now giving the McCain-Palin ticket a serious look.

Palin's candidacy has sparked a fresh debate on everything from abortion to women's work-family balance.

But for Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, the most pressing question is why women and men have voted differently and whether that gap will close or widen in the countdown to Nov. 4.

McCain's choice of Palin, a self-described "hockey mom," was clearly aimed at upending the gender math of the last three presidential elections: women favored the Democrat, men the Republican. And even before that, a larger percentage of women than men voted for Democrats.

Other demographic divisions are bigger. The race gap, for example, and the marriage gap, too.

But the gender split gets more attention for two simple reasons:

Women voters outnumber men. By one estimate, women could cast 7 million to 9 million more ballots than men in this election.

Women make up a disproportionate number of those coveted swing voters, often deciding on a candidate in the closing weeks of the campaign.

The gender gap emerged in the 1980 election pitting Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter.

Before then, men and women had voted similarly for the most part. But in the wake of the women's movement and a Republican candidate who emphasized military might and criticized the welfare state, a division occurred. Women split their vote almost evenly, while men went strongly for Reagan.

At the time, some political experts thought the split between the sexes was a one-time blip, but it has become a permanent part of the political landscape, with men and women parting ways, to different degrees, in every presidential election since then.

"It hasn't gotten bigger in magnitude, but it's gotten to be more widespread and evident," said Susan Carroll, a professor at Rutgers University and senior scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics. "It just shows up everywhere."

The gap is, of course, two-sided, and it has fluctuated with changes in men's political concerns as well as women's.

A month ago, the gender gap among white voters in particular looked like it might eclipse that of the 2004 contest. A Gallup analysis of voter interviews showed that white men supported McCain 55 percent to 35 percent, while women were evenly divided.

Enter Sarah Palin.

Her impact on the race remains to be seen, although she certainly captured the attention of women voters last week.

Oddly, the subjects that swirled around Palin's initial political foray, from abortion to teen pregnancy - which might otherwise be tagged as women's issues - are unlikely to factor into women's final decisions, political experts say.

"Social issues have not driven the gender gap at all," said Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Abortion, for example, is a question that divides men and women in similar ways.

Garvin said abortion was at the "bottom of the barrel" for her this election. "There are so many more important things," she said, adding that she is "sick of the war" and worried about her economic security as she nears retirement.

Those two issues top voters' lists nationwide for both sexes in this election.

But while men and women share the same concerns, they view the issues through different prisms.

For example, since the late 1970s, women have often been more pessimistic about the economy.

"Maybe they feel more vulnerable or maybe it's having to go grocery shopping every week," said Barbara Norrander, a political science professor at the University of Arizona.

Whatever the explanation, Norrander said, the result is that women are more attracted to Democratic economic plans, which tend to favor lower-income citizens. The same holds true on so-called "compassion issues," relating to government help for the poor.

"Women worry about preserving the social safety net more than men," said Carroll, noting that women are more likely to be both recipients and providers of public assistance. "Both sexes see problems with big government, but … women want to fix it and men want to get rid of it," she said.

The most long-standing difference in gender politics centers on the use of force. Women are less likely to support everything from the death penalty to military action, another factor in their political alignment with Democrats.

Given that backdrop, Carroll and others say, Palin's candidacy is unlikely to wipe out the political divisions between men and women. The ability of McCain and Obama to woo women will depend more on their economic plans and strategies for Iraq than on Palin's gender, they say.

But Garvin, a dog-show judge who runs a small kennel in Centertown, isn't so sure.

Clinton's loss "really knocked me down," she said, adding that she was "really ticked" at Obama for passing over Clinton as his running mate.

"I am very undecided," she said.

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