White Women Will Probably Support Trump Again the Midterms

F or the past two years, the American left has been haunted by a number: 53. It is the percentage of white women who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential ballot. In the sectors of the left where the effigy and its implications have go a perennial theme, the number is treated both as disappointing and darkly unsurprising, a reflection of the conventional wisdom that white women would rather choose the racism espoused by the Republican party than join in the moral coalition represented past men of color and other women. On the left, this number tin can elicit exasperation, rage, and even suspicions nigh the moral legitimacy of the feminist project. It casts doubts on the political convictions of liberal white women, colors leftist perception of female-coded liberal political projects like the Women's March, and has prompted long-overdue calls for increased political leadership by women of color.

The real story of white women voters is both more than grim and more than complex than the 53% figure reveals. The truth is that the 53% of white women who voted for Trump in the final presidential election was actually an improvement on fifty-fifty worse numbers from previous cycles. White women supported Mitt Romney at 56% in 2012, and supported George West Bush past 55% in 2004. Fifty-fifty these robust showings by Republican white women were down from their previous highs: Ronald Reagan won a staggering 62% of white women in 1984. All of these totals were lower than those for white men, who continue to support Republicans at alarming rates, but they were solid majorities even so.

Preliminary results from this week's midterm elections seem to suggest that the tendency is standing, with Republican candidates slowly losing the support of suburban white women across the country. According to the Wall Street Journal, white women's overall support for Republicans slipped from the infamous 53% in 2016 downwardly to l% in 2018. CNN'southward polling places white women'due south support for Republicans just lower, at 49%. As the Republican party has shifted its rhetoric away from drab Romneyite fiscal conservatism and towards the sadistic racism that is Donald Trump's stock and trade, there is some evidence that growing numbers of white women are turning away, repulsed.

This shift makes white women at one time one of the largest voting blocs in the nation and also one of its most divided, least ideologically coherent demographics. No other race and gender group is so split. In that location is a battle on for the soul of America, between the peevish, racist cruelty of Trump and his supporters and a vision of inclusion, justice, and decency forwarded past an increasingly diverse coalition on the left. Much of that battle is existence waged in white women's hearts, with the left hoping that more and more of them will break with their historical loyalty to white supremacy and embrace a kinder, more than sustainable model for the future.

But white women are non leaving the Republican party as fast as i might hope. If some white women are defecting from their traditional Republican loyalties, others – half – are staying. The trend of white women's shift to the Democratic party, while real, besides seems to exist happening much more slowly than the most hopeful analyses predicted. Last month the New York Times ran a story on what it claimed was widespread support for the Democratic Texas Senate hopeful Beto O'Rourke among white evangelical women. The story contained accounts past white women who were disgusted by the Trump administration's internment of refugee children at the border, and who had resolved to vote for Democrats. It suggested that the support of these white women could be decisive for Democrats hoping to make gains in a changing southern state. Instead, white women in Texas supported O'Rourke'southward Republican opponent, the reptilian Ted Cruz, by 59%.

Supporters of Senator Ted Cruz applaud wearing 'Cerise Wave' gloves at a campaign rally in Victoria, Texas, on three Nov. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters

What is incorrect with white women? Why do half of them and then consistently vote for Republicans, even every bit the Republican party morphs into a monstrously ugly organization that is increasingly duplicate from a hate group? The most likely answer seems to be that white women vote for Republicans for the same reason that white men do: because they are racist. Trump, with his raucous rallies and his bloviating, combative style, has offered his supporters an opportunity to savor the pleasures of being savage. Information technology is probable that the white women who voted for him in 2016, and who will vote for him again in 2020, notice this racist sadism gratifying. Information technology is fun for them.

But there is something else at play, something more complicated, in white women'south relationship to white patriarchy. White women's identity places them in a curious position at the intersection of ii vectors of privilege and oppression: they are granted structural power by their race, but excluded from it by their sex activity. In a political system where racism and sexism are both so securely ingrained, white women must cull to be loyal to either the more powerful attribute of their identity, their race, or to the less powerful, their sex activity. Some Republican white women might lean into racism not only for racism's sake, but also every bit a means of avoiding or denying the realities of how sexist oppression makes them vulnerable.

In her volume Correct Wing Women, the feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote that bourgeois women often conform to the dominant ideologies of the men effectually them every bit part of a subconscious survival strategy, hoping that their conservatism will spare them from male hatred and violence. Information technology doesn't work, she says. They suffer sexist oppression anyhow. Simply the strategy continues. "Almost women cannot afford, either materially or psychologically, to recognize that any burnt offerings of obedience they bring to beg protection volition not gratify the angry piffling gods effectually them." Participating in racism does not exempt white women from sexism, equally much as they might hope that information technology will. It merely corrodes their souls in the process.

Some of this persistent sexism can exist seen in the Trump campsite's treatment of the white women who have interfered with their consolidation of power. It is there in the chants of "Lock her upward" that yet punctuate Trump'southward rallies; it was seen in the mocking and hounding of Dr Christine Blasey Ford, and in the theatrical sexism that Brett Kavanaugh displayed at his confirmation hearing. It was there in Trump's continued relationship with Rob Porter, the wife-beating White House aide whom the president connected to call even afterward pictures of his wife'south swollen, dilapidated face up were made public. White women who keep to vote Republican have thrown these other white women under the motorcoach, forth with the millions of non-white women who have been made to suffer under Republican administrations – those who accept had their water poisoned, their correct to vote eroded, their children confiscated and caged at the border, or killed by law with impunity. Writing of the immoral bargain struck by rightwing women, Dworkin says: "In effect, she ransoms the remains of a life … by promising indifference to the fate of other women."

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian United states of america columnist

newtonwask1996.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/09/white-women-vote-republican-why