Republican pollster Neil Newhouse and Democratic pollster Margie Omero are going shopping at Walmart. For voters.

The pair told attendees at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast this morning that a key demographic in 2012 will be a group of voters they call “Walmart Moms.”

The successors to Soccer Moms and Hockey Moms, Walmart Moms are female voters with children 18 or younger who shop at the discount retailer at least once a month.

According to Newhouse and Omero, these women make up 14 percent of the electorate.

Walmart Moms are more interested in microeconomic issues such as college affordability than macroeconomic concerns such as the debt ceiling. The literature the pollsters distributed at the breakfast said, “It will be important for candidates to clearly communicate how their policies or ideas will personally impact these women and their households for the better.”

Newhouse, a pollster for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, also talked about his candidate’s polling doldrums: Romney has consistently scored in the mid-20s in recent national polls but has been unable to move beyond that barrier.

“All things come in due time,” Newhouse said. “The campaign has just begun.”

But he expressed confidence in GOP enthusiasm going into the election year.

“The bottom line is, Republicans can’t wait for this election,” he said. “I look at ’12 as a continuation of the ’10 election, just like ’08 was a continuation of ’06. In ’12, Republican voters are anxious to turn out President Obama.”