By Lindsay Beyerstein

Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman was booed at a major women’s event on Tuesday after she refused to call off negative ads for the final week of the campaign. Her opponent, Democrat Jerry Brown pledged to stop running negative ads if Whitman agreed to do likewise. Of course Whitman won’t stop the negative ads. She’s trailing in the polls and her best shot is to depress Democratic voter turnout.

Whitman has spent over $140 million of her personal fortune on this race and she won’t say how much more she’s going to spend before the end. The Brown campaign has spent less than $30 million so far. Yet Brown has doubled his lead over Whitman in the past month despite being heavily outspent.

Whitman and her senatorial counterpart Carly Fiorina promised to attract female voters to the Republican party, but so far they seem to have had limited success with California’s heavily Democratic, strongly pro-choice female electorate. Cathleen Decker of the Los Angeles Times crunched the latest polling numbers and found striking gender differences, likely female voters were markedly more likely to support Brown and Boxer than their male counterparts:

Overall, men sided with Brown by 3 points but women backed him by 21 points. In the Senate race, the poll found men siding with Fiorina over Democrat Barbara Boxer by 2 points, while women sided with Boxer by 17 points.

A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California came to similar conclusions, with women backing Brown by 14 points more than men did and Boxer by 16 points, while men backed Fiorina.

It’s no surprise that female voters are breaking for Boxer and Brown, given their records on key women’s issues.

Jerry Brown has been a staunch defender of reproductive choice and women’s health care throughout his career. He has been endorsed by several major feminist organizations. Meg Whitman claims to be pro-choice but she has never held public office and she refuses to respond to interview requests from PPAC so we only have her spoken words to rely upon.  In this new video you can see why we can’t trust Meg Whitman when it comes to something so important to the vast majority of Californians, access to safe legal abortion.

Further, Whitman has pledged to slash billions from the California budget if she’s elected, but she won’t say what programs she would cut. She won’t rule out cuts to California’s family planning program, even though the program has been shown to cut teen pregnancy and save the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year in medical and social service costs.

Sen. Barbara Boxer is pro-choice, whereas her Republican opponent Carly Fiorina is staunchly opposed to abortion. Boxer supported health care reform, which is on track to provide affordable health insurance for the 6 million Californians without insurance today by 2014. Fiorina says she’d vote to repeal health care reform, which would be a huge setback for Californians in general, but especially for women.

The differences between the Democratic and Republican candidates in these races could not be more stark. By now, most voters have already made up their minds. It’s clear where the women of California stand. Now, the only question is whether millions of dollars worth of negative ads can demoralize enough voters to tip the balance for the Republicans.