When will White Women voters change their voting calculus — Gender or Ethnicity? — updated
Does the current Roy Moore change the voting selection pattern for White Women voters?
Roy Moore is the latest example of Republican, Democratic, White, Minority, faith based, non-faith based male sexual abusers of Women, Children & Men, which has come to light in 2017.
In the latest Alabama Senate Special election poll, Roy Moore maintains the support of 57% of the White Female voters. This in spite of the his being accused of pedophilia and sexual assault against 9 women. Now, this is in the backdrop of the growing sexual assault scandals around the country (Lauer, Trump, Conyers, Franken, Blanton, O’ Reilly, Cosby, Weinstein, Boiling, etc.) but is the first election that will test this voter groups loyalty to ethnicity over gender, especially when the candidate is an actively accused sexual abuser.
Even in the 2017 Virginia Gubernatorial election, 51% of the White women voting consumer base chose Ed Gillespie in spite of the negative racial overtones of his campaign, so the trending isn’t great so far.
While these abusers currently get met with public rebuke and immediate condemnation across all sectors, there is one sector that takes a defensive posture to protect these abusers, Trump Republicans specifically & Republican/Conservative in general. They look first at the political ideology first, the alternative second, the source of the accuser third & the length of time between the assault and the public acknowledgement of the assault. After they have reviewed all of that, they take the side of the accused, in this case Roy Moore, in the 2016 general election Donald Trump, and go into one of the following buckets:
1. The source isn’t legitimate, it’s a political attack from the mainstream media, Hillary Clinton, President Obama, etc.
2. Where are the evidentiary facts of the case & resulting trial? I need trial records to provide it to me.
3. Why did they wait, if they were really assaulted they wouldn’t wait?
4. Well if he did it, it’s better than an immoral Democrat who is pro-choice or believes the LGBTQ community should have equal rights?
5. Well, it happened a long time ago, he’s a good man & I forgive him & can move on, why can’t the women he assaulted move on?
6. It happened in the bible, so it’s ok.
7. Only Democratic/Liberal/Moderate men commit sexual assault or abuse, our men aren’t capable of doing that.
This is sad, repugnant and disgraceful. The men who support this posture shouldn’t be considered men, they have lost the right to be considered as men, in my opinion? But for the purposes of this article, I would like to focus on White female voters. The reason, because without fail, a majority of White Women voters stay with the Republican Party & Republican candidates, despite issues as cited above. There have been a number of articles posted on why White Women voters stay with Republican candidates like Trump & Moore, when other Women voting ethnicities overwhelmingly vote against this type of behavior and attitude. Most have taken the concept that this is a new concept, but a review of exit polling data by the American National Election Survey going back to 1952, shows the following:
A majority of white women have supported the Republican candidate in nearly every election since 1952. , white women have only voted more Democratic than Republican twice in the 17 U.S. Presidential elections since 1952 (in 1964–65% of White women voting for LBJ and 1996–44% with Clinton/Dole/Perot & 52% Clinton-Dole only of White women supported Clinton) From Goldwater Girls in 1964, the 14-point margin Mitt Romney held among white women in 2012 to the 10 point margin (Edison Exit Polling with underreported Asian & Latino American findings reported) to 16-point margin (Latino Decisions & AAPI exit polling adjusted with Edison) swing for Donald Trump, this is a voting bloc that, for more than half a century, has shored up its identity in ethnicity, not gender.
There’s historical context to support the solidarity that many, but not all White Women see with the protections of whiteness over solidarity with other women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the famous suffragette who worked with Susan B. Anthony to secure the 19th Amendment, embraced white supremacy in service of getting white women the vote and often incorporated anti-black racism into her speeches: “What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?” . The passage of the 19th Amendment secured the legal right to vote for all women, but it — like many other constitutional protections — was largely an abstraction for black women until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 meaningfully protected that right for black Americans. As a surprisingly prescient New York Times op-ed in 1984 put it, in trying to understand why White Women voted for Ronald Reagan versus the Mondale ticket with Senator Geraldine Ferraro, then came to this conclusion: “Even though the attitudes on public policies of a majority of American women are generally more progressive than men’s, it should not be assumed that women are motivated in elections by a cohesive ideology that arms them against demagoguery.”
The progressivism of women in general & White Women directly hasn’t really changed, so, is will there be a change coming? Is there an opportunity for get White Women to vote away from this majority alliance with misogynistic, sexually abusive, demeaning and outdated behavior? Possibly. The Virginia Gubernatorial election offered a possible opportunity. The blanket protection of Roy Moore by Alabama Republicans and the Conservative Mainstream Media Entertainment Complex can be a defining moment. One measured outcome and two underlying outcomes can make the shift
· White women with college degrees — a group that split evenly in the 2013 Virginia governor’s election — favored Northam by 16 points over Gillespie in preliminary exit polling, 58 percent to 42 percent. Northam’s margin is more than twice as wide as the margin Hillary Clinton won those voters by last year, 50 percent to 44 percent.
· White Women in urban cities & Counties/precincts with 35% or higher non-white adult population
· White women under the age of 40
Despite a lack of comparable exit polling data, in analyzing the counties where Ralph Northam over-performed, he did better than projected in majority white precincts in Urban cities and Counties with a dense Non-White population. This performance was driven by White female voters residing in these communities and white younger women. Will these women lead the shift against protecting your tribal sexual abusers and send a wake-up call to the Republican Party & Married White Women & White Women without a College Degree & in Rural communities, who are the backbone of the White Women Republican base? The Alabama Senate results will be a window into what may happen with this group of voters in 2018 and 2020.