MONTCLAIR – Just about every poll shows Democrats doing better with women voters than Republicans.

And that’s something Mikie Sherrill sought to exploit yet again Friday with a press conference featuring more than a half dozen female state legislators. The locale was an art gallery and framing shop on Valley Road, a quintessential Montclair setting to be sure.

Sherrill’s point was simple: She backs issues important to women while Republican Jay Webber doesn’t.
Some of this is clear-cut; some of it is not.

Let’s start with the simple part.

Sherrill and the legislators, who included state senators Loretta Weinberg, (Bergen County), Nellie Pou (Passaic County), Nia Gill (Essex County) and Linda Greenstein (Mercer County), condemned Webber for opposing Planned Parenthood.

This is not in dispute.

Webber long has opposed funding Planned Parenthood because of its support for abortion. In fact, during the Republican primary, Webber made an issue out of the fact a foundation run by one of his opponents had donated money to Planned Parenthood.

Clearly, any District 11 voter who cares a lot about supporting Planned Parenthood is not going to vote for Webber.

But the other issue is a bit more complicated.

Sherrill and her supporters blasted Webber for opposing equal pay for women. Webber did, in fact, vote that way earlier this year in the state Assembly.

But the Republican has consistently maintained that he supports equal pay and that the bill in question was bad legislation. Webber buttresses his point with a supportive editorial from the New Jersey Law Journal (not normally a conservative publication).

His explanation is that current law already mandates pay equality and that the bill in question refers not to equal pay for equal work, but to equal pay for similar work. And that, Webber says, will lead to litigation and end up benefiting only lawyers.

His obvious problem is that detailed explanations don’t fit on bumper stickers. He really is running uphill on this issue and it’s hard to see that changing. You get the impression Sherrill is not going to stop using it.

Weinberg strongly disputed Webber’s contention that the bill voted on this year was not really needed.

She called it the strongest pay equality bill in the nation and wondered if Webber had even read it.

Weinberg, as always, was in a feisty mood. In extolling Sherrill’s virtues, she took an unprovoked swipe at outgoing Rep. Rodney P. Frelinghuysen.

“He took one look at Mikie Sherrill … and he dropped out,” she said.

For the record, Frelinghuysen said he wasn’t running again in late January. That was after about a year of weekly demonstrations, some attended by Sherrill, outside his Morristown office.

A just released poll by the New York Times and Siena College has Sherrill leading Webber by 11 points, 49-38.

That margin seems too big.

“I don’t believe it. We’re in a really tight race,” Sherrill said.

Webber presumably would agree.