Gallup reports today that 39 percent of female registered voters in swing states believe abortion is the most important issue in this election.

This raises a few possibilities:

• Women are ridiculous.
• Gallup’s sample is ridiculous.
• Women like Romney’s position on abortion (unlikely in large numbers).
• My head explodes trying to understand how this poll can possibly be true at the same time that the same polling organization says Obama leads Romney by single digits among women.

The same Gallup poll asks respondents which issues will most impact their vote in November (or in October with all the early voting spreading like a fungus across the country). Among women — and I realize that birth control is not the same as abortion, but abortion wasn’t asked about — birth control came in a very distant fifth after unemployment, foreign affairs, healthcare, and the federal debt and deficit.

So, if the same poll gives a result that says abortion is by far the most important single issue to women but that a similar issue is not close to being the most important vote-influencing issue, it becomes rather difficult not to conclude that there may be some merit to the first bullet point above (perhaps along with the second and fourth.)

Please don’t tell my wife I said this.