Mark Penn, a senior strategist and pollster for Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign, made news recently by suggesting that Clinton could win up to 24% of the votes from Republican women in Election 2008.

Recent Rasmussen Reports polling data from match-ups against top Republican candidates offers some support for that claim—it shows Clinton attracting an average of 18% support from Republican women.

However, there is another side to the gender gap story. The same surveys show that while Clinton is attracting 18% of Republican women, she is losing an average of 20% of Democratic men to the Republicans.

These results come from recent national telephone surveys matching Clinton against Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Two polls matching Clinton against each Republican candidate were included to compile these averages.

In any individual survey, there are a relatively small number of Republican women or Democratic men in a sample (roughly 125 to 160 of each for the surveys used in this comparison). Small sample sizes mean higher margins of error and more volatility. So, it is sometimes useful to aggregate the data to get a reliable sense of the data.

In the eight match-up polls included for this analysis, Clinton’s best performance showed her picking up 25% of Republican women. Her weakest performance was just 10% of Republican women. Those points are roughly equidistant from the average result of 18%.

As for Democratic men, Clinton’s best performance in the surveys was to lose just 15% of support from Democratic men. Her worst was to lose 29%. Five of the eight match-ups produced results within four points of the average. One result was below that range and two were above.

On five of the eight match-ups, Clinton lost a larger percentage of votes from Democratic men than she gained from Republican women. The opposite was true for the other three match-ups.

Clinton has consistently benefitted from an overall gender gap in Election 2008 polling. She does extraordinarily well among women in national polling for the Democratic Primary, New Hampshire, Iowa, and other states.

This week, Rasmussen Reports released state polling data that bears out the same gender gap trends in Ohio, Michigan, and North Carolina.

Another Rasmussen Reports survey shows that most Americans say they are willing to vote for a woman for President. However, they are less sure about their peers. This is especially true among senior citizens.

The surveys used for this analysis were conducted on September 24-25 (Clinton v McCain and Romney), October 8-9 (Clinton v Giuliani and Thompson), October 10-11 (Clinton v McCain and Romney), and October 22-23 (Clinton v Giuliani and Thompson).