Politics: Most White Women Are Very Happy With Trump & White Supremacy
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Most White Women Are Very Happy With White Supremacy
Your racial privilege is showing
BY KRISTIN IVERSEN · NOVEMBER 07, 2018
Save
PHOTO BY JOE RAEDLE/ GETTY
Last night's midterm elections had many powerful and inspiring moments. Democrats now have resounding control of the House of Representatives—a fact that has Donald Trump apoplectic with fear at the potential for investigations into his corruption. And, Floridians voted for an amendmentthat would restore voting rights to people previously convicted of felonies, who had finished serving their sentences. With that amendment's passage, over one million people were granted the right to vote.
Then also, last night was a huge night for women congressional candidates, with more than 30 new women elected to Congress. Of particular note are the women of color, including progressive candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. The first Muslim woman was elected to Congress, and then quickly followed by the second Muslim woman's election, with the victories of Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Plus, Veronica Escobar and Sylvia Garcia became the first Latina women elected to Congress from Texas, and Deb Haaland of New Mexico and Sharice Davids of Kansas will be the first Native American women to serve in the House.
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And this is to say nothing of the fact that Democrats flipped sevengubernatorial seats, kicking out Republican horror-shows like Wisconsin's Scott Walker, and defeating Trump-endorsed troglodytes like Kansas' Kris Kobach. And, with the election of Jared Polis in Colorado, America now has its first openly gay male governor.
But that doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of low moments. Republicans further solidified their control of the Senate, including with a devastatingly close race in Texas between Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke. And two closely contested governor's races seem to have ended with Republican victories, with Ron DeSantis narrowly defeating Andrew Gillum in Florida, and Brian Kemp maintaining a slim lead over Stacey Abrams in Georgia (Abrams has rightly not yet conceded, hoping for a runoff in early December). These three races were all closely watched, as they all featured truly progressive Democratic candidates who were running for traditionally Republican seats in states that had all strongly backed Trump in 2016. That the outcomes were so close is actually a solid validation of the fact that many voters were drawn to the polls, who had felt disillusioned in 2016, and wanted to put a stop to the policies of the Trump administration.
And yet, what also became clear, once the breakdown of the votes was released is that white people did not change the way they voted, with the majority of white men and women voting Republican in those three races, with the disparity being most striking in the Georgia gubernatorial race.
As seen in Mona Elhatawy's tweet, above, white men voted for 71 percent Cruz, voted for 69 percent DeSantis, and 73 percent voted for Kemp, while white women voted for 59 percent Cruz, 51 percent voted for DeSantis, and 76 percent voted for Kemp. These numbers are stunning all around—not because they're surprising, exactly, but because it is still difficult to process just how completely fine the majority of white people are with maintaining a system of white supremacy, one whose very mission is to subjugate and disenfranchise any person who does not share their skin color.
And while it is essential to hold white men responsible for their unconscionable votes, the outcry over white women's votes in these races has been much louder, with many people—including Elhatawy—noting the ways in which white women serve as "foot soldiers of the patriarchy," and reliving the shock of the 2016 election, in which it was revealed that a majority of white women had voted for Trump.
The last two years have been filled with exhortations about the importance of female unity, and rallying cries aimed at all women, as if an entire gender were a monolithic entity, whose goals are all the same. Women are universally told to embrace their rage, assuming, incorrectly, that all women are mad about the same things. "Women's issues" are talked about as if they affect all women equally, but the fact is that there are countless women who are working against the interest of other women when it comes to things like access to health care and reproductive freedoms. If any further proof is needed to show that women don't automatically have the interests of other women at heart, consider the fact that fewer white women than white men voted for Abrams.
America's institutional patriarchy cannot be separated from its systemic white supremacy, and white women are the clearest example of which horrific system takes precedence over the other, as, again and again, millions of white women prioritize their status in a racist society. All the people who express surprise over the fact that these white women are voting against their own interests are ignoring the fact that white supremacy is in their interests; its continued primacy strengthens their place in the existing racial hierarchy, and they're betting that ceding power to white men will still benefit them more than would ceding power to people of color. It is a despicable gamble, of course, one which serves to oppress countless others and perpetuate a system of gross inequality.
But it's not an uninformed one; it would be wrong to say these women suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, or are naive as to what they're endorsing. These women are making calculated choices and placing themselves and their immediate needs over the needs of others. These are the women who perform a specific type of femininity—long blonde hair perfectly curled, as if wrapped around the hot barrel of a just-fired gun—knowing the kind of protection they'll get from the white men who are just itching to patrol a border they couldn't even find on a map. These women are Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway, and they have all decided that they are secure enough in the continued existence of the power they have that they don't mind ensuring that other women, that men of color, that immigrants, that anyone different than them, will suffer. For now, anyway, the calculations these women have made have paid off; they have their power, they have their protection. But, as any gambler knows, eventually, the house always wins—and, after last night, the House is filled with a bunch of newly powerful women of color, and we can't wait to watch them start winning.
https://nylon.com/articles/white-women-voters-elections
Your racial privilege is showing
BY KRISTIN IVERSEN · NOVEMBER 07, 2018
Save
PHOTO BY JOE RAEDLE/ GETTY
Last night's midterm elections had many powerful and inspiring moments. Democrats now have resounding control of the House of Representatives—a fact that has Donald Trump apoplectic with fear at the potential for investigations into his corruption. And, Floridians voted for an amendmentthat would restore voting rights to people previously convicted of felonies, who had finished serving their sentences. With that amendment's passage, over one million people were granted the right to vote.
Then also, last night was a huge night for women congressional candidates, with more than 30 new women elected to Congress. Of particular note are the women of color, including progressive candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. The first Muslim woman was elected to Congress, and then quickly followed by the second Muslim woman's election, with the victories of Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Plus, Veronica Escobar and Sylvia Garcia became the first Latina women elected to Congress from Texas, and Deb Haaland of New Mexico and Sharice Davids of Kansas will be the first Native American women to serve in the House.
ADVERTISING
inRead invented by Teads
And this is to say nothing of the fact that Democrats flipped sevengubernatorial seats, kicking out Republican horror-shows like Wisconsin's Scott Walker, and defeating Trump-endorsed troglodytes like Kansas' Kris Kobach. And, with the election of Jared Polis in Colorado, America now has its first openly gay male governor.
But that doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of low moments. Republicans further solidified their control of the Senate, including with a devastatingly close race in Texas between Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke. And two closely contested governor's races seem to have ended with Republican victories, with Ron DeSantis narrowly defeating Andrew Gillum in Florida, and Brian Kemp maintaining a slim lead over Stacey Abrams in Georgia (Abrams has rightly not yet conceded, hoping for a runoff in early December). These three races were all closely watched, as they all featured truly progressive Democratic candidates who were running for traditionally Republican seats in states that had all strongly backed Trump in 2016. That the outcomes were so close is actually a solid validation of the fact that many voters were drawn to the polls, who had felt disillusioned in 2016, and wanted to put a stop to the policies of the Trump administration.
And yet, what also became clear, once the breakdown of the votes was released is that white people did not change the way they voted, with the majority of white men and women voting Republican in those three races, with the disparity being most striking in the Georgia gubernatorial race.
As seen in Mona Elhatawy's tweet, above, white men voted for 71 percent Cruz, voted for 69 percent DeSantis, and 73 percent voted for Kemp, while white women voted for 59 percent Cruz, 51 percent voted for DeSantis, and 76 percent voted for Kemp. These numbers are stunning all around—not because they're surprising, exactly, but because it is still difficult to process just how completely fine the majority of white people are with maintaining a system of white supremacy, one whose very mission is to subjugate and disenfranchise any person who does not share their skin color.
And while it is essential to hold white men responsible for their unconscionable votes, the outcry over white women's votes in these races has been much louder, with many people—including Elhatawy—noting the ways in which white women serve as "foot soldiers of the patriarchy," and reliving the shock of the 2016 election, in which it was revealed that a majority of white women had voted for Trump.
The last two years have been filled with exhortations about the importance of female unity, and rallying cries aimed at all women, as if an entire gender were a monolithic entity, whose goals are all the same. Women are universally told to embrace their rage, assuming, incorrectly, that all women are mad about the same things. "Women's issues" are talked about as if they affect all women equally, but the fact is that there are countless women who are working against the interest of other women when it comes to things like access to health care and reproductive freedoms. If any further proof is needed to show that women don't automatically have the interests of other women at heart, consider the fact that fewer white women than white men voted for Abrams.
America's institutional patriarchy cannot be separated from its systemic white supremacy, and white women are the clearest example of which horrific system takes precedence over the other, as, again and again, millions of white women prioritize their status in a racist society. All the people who express surprise over the fact that these white women are voting against their own interests are ignoring the fact that white supremacy is in their interests; its continued primacy strengthens their place in the existing racial hierarchy, and they're betting that ceding power to white men will still benefit them more than would ceding power to people of color. It is a despicable gamble, of course, one which serves to oppress countless others and perpetuate a system of gross inequality.
But it's not an uninformed one; it would be wrong to say these women suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, or are naive as to what they're endorsing. These women are making calculated choices and placing themselves and their immediate needs over the needs of others. These are the women who perform a specific type of femininity—long blonde hair perfectly curled, as if wrapped around the hot barrel of a just-fired gun—knowing the kind of protection they'll get from the white men who are just itching to patrol a border they couldn't even find on a map. These women are Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway, and they have all decided that they are secure enough in the continued existence of the power they have that they don't mind ensuring that other women, that men of color, that immigrants, that anyone different than them, will suffer. For now, anyway, the calculations these women have made have paid off; they have their power, they have their protection. But, as any gambler knows, eventually, the house always wins—and, after last night, the House is filled with a bunch of newly powerful women of color, and we can't wait to watch them start winning.
https://nylon.com/articles/white-women-voters-elections
The interesting thing about this for him to have all of that white vote and still almost dead even with Stacy Abrams hast to tell you something
White women see Donald Trump and they see their fathers, their husbands, their sons. They are loyal to them and if they have to lead other groups of women to their destruction and demise to safeguard the space their men have created for them they have and will.
The midterm election shows white women are finally starting to abandon Trump
Women of color have backed Democrats for years. In 2018, more white women started to join them.
By Anna North Nov 7, 2018, 1:20pm ESTSHARE
Two years ago, 53 percent of white women voters cast their ballots not for the first woman presidential nominee from a major party, but for a man who had been caught on tape bragging about his ability to grab women “by the pussy.”
Political scientists said this should come as no surprise, since women have never been a reliable voting bloc. Women — especially white women — vote their party, not their gender.
But a lot has changed since 2016.
White women stayed loyal to Republicans in some key races, helping to reelect Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas and send Ron DeSantis to the governor’s mansion in Florida. But across the country as a whole, about 49 percent of white women voted for Democrats in House races, while another 49 percent voted for Republicans, according to exit polling by CNN.
In 2016, by contrast, just 43 percent of white women voted for Democratic House candidates, while 55 percent voted for Republicans.
Half of white women is hardly a landslide, but the shift contributed to a history-making night for Democrats, who scored the highest margin of victory ever among women voters in a midterm election, with 59 percent of women across the country voting for Democrats in the House.
White women, especially those with college educations, have been moving away from Republicans for several years, Susan Carroll, a professor of political science and women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, told Vox. And while the reasons are many, “it seems pretty clear that it’s a response to the politics of the Trump administration and the Republican Party.”
For some white women who voted Republican or stayed home in 2016, President Donald Trump’s degrading comments about women may have made the difference. For others, maybe it was the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. For still others, maybe it was the leadership of women activists and candidates of color.
Whatever the case, after two years of a Trump presidency, some white women have gotten to a place where many women of color have been for some time: disgusted with Republicans and ready to turn out in force for Democrats. The question is how long they’ll stay there — and whether more white women will join them.
This year, women supported Democrats in unprecedented numbers. White women were a big part of the shift.
In 2016, it came as a shock to some that a majority of white women voters were willing to support a man who talked about grabbing women’s genitals — and who’d been accused of actually grabbing and kissing women without their consent. But some parts of Trump’s message — in particular, his demonization of immigrants and Muslims — appealed to some white women just as much as they appealed to white men.
Shortly after the election, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times talked to women of all races about their reasons for voting for Trump. A number said they were disturbed “by an America that seems to have embraced multiculturalism and political correctness without question,” she wrote. “They said they did not understand the Black Lives Matter movement, wondered why Democrats seemed so fixated on transgender access to bathrooms and tended to be enraged at the way veterans are treated and violence directed at the police.”
Meanwhile, history suggested that some groups of white women might break for Trump. As Vox’s Tara Golshan reported in 2017, white women without college educations had been skewing more conservative for decades.
And women are no more single-issue voters than men are. While they may not have liked Trump’s comments on the Access Hollywood tape, many said theyended up making their voting decisions on the economy and terrorism. Kellyanne Conway, now a senior counselor to Trump, said after the election that women “voted the way voters have always voted: on things that affect them, not just things that offend them.”
In 2018, at least some white women may have decided that the policies of the Republican Party, with Trump at its head, affect them after all.
This year saw the largest-ever share of women voting for Democrats in a midterm election, according to the Washington Post. The surge was mostly due to the shift among white women, as well as among independent women. (56 percent of independent women voted for Democrats in 2018, compared with just 48 percent in 2016.)
White, college-educated women in particular swung heavily left in 2018, with 59 percent voting for Democratic House candidates, compared with just 49 percent in 2016.
Women of color, meanwhile, voted for Democrats at high rates, just as they did in 2016. Ninety-two percent of black women and 73 percent of Latina women voted for Democratic House candidates this year, compared with 94 percent of black women and 69 percent of Latina women in 2016.
White women didn’t deliver for Democrats everywhere. In Texas, a full 60 percent voted for Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, helping carry him to reelection. In Florida, 51 percent of white women voted for Republican Ron DeSantis for governor.
Still, the combined effect of white women and women of color was significant: When Democrats assume control of the House in January of next year, it will be, in large part, because women put them there.
From health care to the Kavanaugh hearings, white women had lots of reasons for abandoning the party of Trump
Just as white women had plenty of reasons for supporting Trump in 2016, they’ve had plenty of reasons to pull away from him and his party since. There’s Trump’s demeanor and his repeated insulting comments about women, Carroll notes. Anyone who thought the Access Hollywood tape might be an isolated occurrence quickly learned otherwise when Trump took office.
His policy positions, like his support for getting rid of Obamacare, may also be a problem for many women. “Women are primary caregivers in many cases, and faced with dealing with rising health care costs and caring for folks who have health problems in their families, whether they be children or elderly parents,” Carroll points out.
The #MeToo movement and the Kavanaugh hearings may also have played a role, Carroll said, in turning women away from the Republican Party as a whole. During the hearings, women voters could clearly see that there were no women on the Republican side of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Republicans had to bring in an outside prosecutor to ask questions. “That was just a public display, I think, of some of the problems that the Republican Party has in terms of women,” Carroll said.
Those hearings, during which Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford calmly shared her recollections and Kavanaugh raged at the injustice of the allegations against him, didn’t unite all women. In a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted after the hearings, 69 percent of Republican women said the nominee should be confirmed. And as Alexis Grenell pointed out in an op-ed at the New York Times, a white woman, Republican Sen. Susan Collins, cast a crucial vote to place Kavanaugh on the court.
But the hearings, coming after nearly two years of frequent misogyny from Trump, had an effect. In the same Politico/Morning Consult poll, 36 percent of voters said they were more likely to back a senator who opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation, compared with 27 percent who said they’d be more likely to vote for someone who supported it. Among Democratic women, 61 percent said they’d be much less likely to back a pro-Kavanaugh candidate.
These attitudes may have been at play on Tuesday, as fewer than 40 percent of women voters supported Kavanaugh’s confirmation, according to CNN. Kavanaugh wasn’t always a winning issue for Democrats; 62 percent of North Dakota voters who said Heidi Heitkamp’s vote against Kavanaugh was an important factor in their decision to vote for her opponent. But across the board, the women who turned out on Tuesday disapproved of Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, women voters on Tuesday had a far more unfavorable view of Trump than men did, according to ABC exit polls. Fifty percent of male voters approved of his job performance, compared with only 39 percent of women.
Women likely also helped elect the wave of women candidates who won on Tuesday, including historic firsts like the first Muslim women in Congress. Fifty-three percent of women voters said it was very important to elect more women to office, compared with just 37 percent of men, according to ABC.
For some women who felt unimpressed with their options in 2016, 2018 was a chance to voice a growing sense that their government wasn’t listening to them.
“With everything that’s going on right now, with Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford, it’s not a matter of if I believe her or not, it’s a matter of it is,” said Kim Boudreau Smith of Birmingham, Michigan, whom I met on a canvassing outing with state legislature candidates Mari Manoogian and Mallory McMorrow in October.
Smith hadn’t voted for Trump or Clinton in 2016 — “it wasn’t feeling right,” she said — but she was excited to vote for women this year. “I’m tired of the masculine leadership,” she told the women running to represent her.
White women have joined with women of color — for now
For a lot of white women, the last two years have been about getting to where many women of color already were. At the Women’s Convention, put on by Women’s March organizers in Detroit last year, a panel called “Confronting White Womanhood” struck a chord — it was so popular that panelists had to put on a second session to accommodate all the women who’d been unable to fit into the first. As Hannah Smothers of Cosmopolitan reported, the panel discussed the pitfalls of “white saviorism” and the history of white women’s involvement in violence against black men.
After the 2016 election, “things feel more dire, particularly for white people,” panel organizer Heather Marie Scholl told Smothers.
“We haven’t often felt that,” she added. “Communities of color have, but it’s new for us.”
White women have long had an incentive to align themselves politically with white men. As Grenell wrote at the Times, “white women benefit from patriarchy by trading on their whiteness to monopolize resources for mutual gain. In return they’re placed on a pedestal to be ‘cherished and revered,’ as Speaker Paul D. Ryan has said about women.”
But, Grenell notes, that position on the pedestal comes at a cost: “White women are expected to support the patriarchy by marrying within their racial group, reproducing whiteness and even minimizing violence against their own bodies.”
To some degree, the events of 2017 and 2018 made that cost clear. Maybe it was the Obamacare repeal efforts, Trump’s comments about women, the Kavanaugh hearings, or the Trump administration’s rollback of reproductive rights. Some were surely helped in their decision by the leadership of women of color, like the activists who stepped in to head the Women’s March or the many women of color running for office around the country, from Stacey Abrams to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Whatever the case, white women finally decided that the drawbacks of standing with the white men of the Republican Party outweighed the benefits.
Of course, it’s not clear how long the coalition of women voters forged in this election will hold together. “Confronting White Womanhood,” like a lot of activism focusing on white women in the past two years, wasn’t just about getting white women to vote around issues that affect them. It was about convincing them to show up and fight for the rights of people of color even when their lives as white women weren’t directly impacted — yet.
Even with a Democratic majority in the House, the agenda of the Trump administration, from restricting voting rights to demonizing immigrants to overturning Roe v. Wade, isn’t going away. Much of this agenda stands to affect people of color more directly than white women — even if, as was the case with Kavanaugh, they eventually feel its sting.
In the past two years, at least some of these white women have mobilized. The question for Democrats in 2020 and beyond is what it will take to mobilize the rest — and to keep them in action even when they’re not the ones most at risk.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-poli...term-elections-turnout-women-trump-exit-polls
Women of color have backed Democrats for years. In 2018, more white women started to join them.
By Anna North Nov 7, 2018, 1:20pm ESTSHARE
Two years ago, 53 percent of white women voters cast their ballots not for the first woman presidential nominee from a major party, but for a man who had been caught on tape bragging about his ability to grab women “by the pussy.”
Political scientists said this should come as no surprise, since women have never been a reliable voting bloc. Women — especially white women — vote their party, not their gender.
But a lot has changed since 2016.
White women stayed loyal to Republicans in some key races, helping to reelect Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas and send Ron DeSantis to the governor’s mansion in Florida. But across the country as a whole, about 49 percent of white women voted for Democrats in House races, while another 49 percent voted for Republicans, according to exit polling by CNN.
In 2016, by contrast, just 43 percent of white women voted for Democratic House candidates, while 55 percent voted for Republicans.
Half of white women is hardly a landslide, but the shift contributed to a history-making night for Democrats, who scored the highest margin of victory ever among women voters in a midterm election, with 59 percent of women across the country voting for Democrats in the House.
White women, especially those with college educations, have been moving away from Republicans for several years, Susan Carroll, a professor of political science and women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, told Vox. And while the reasons are many, “it seems pretty clear that it’s a response to the politics of the Trump administration and the Republican Party.”
For some white women who voted Republican or stayed home in 2016, President Donald Trump’s degrading comments about women may have made the difference. For others, maybe it was the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. For still others, maybe it was the leadership of women activists and candidates of color.
Whatever the case, after two years of a Trump presidency, some white women have gotten to a place where many women of color have been for some time: disgusted with Republicans and ready to turn out in force for Democrats. The question is how long they’ll stay there — and whether more white women will join them.
This year, women supported Democrats in unprecedented numbers. White women were a big part of the shift.
In 2016, it came as a shock to some that a majority of white women voters were willing to support a man who talked about grabbing women’s genitals — and who’d been accused of actually grabbing and kissing women without their consent. But some parts of Trump’s message — in particular, his demonization of immigrants and Muslims — appealed to some white women just as much as they appealed to white men.
Shortly after the election, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times talked to women of all races about their reasons for voting for Trump. A number said they were disturbed “by an America that seems to have embraced multiculturalism and political correctness without question,” she wrote. “They said they did not understand the Black Lives Matter movement, wondered why Democrats seemed so fixated on transgender access to bathrooms and tended to be enraged at the way veterans are treated and violence directed at the police.”
Meanwhile, history suggested that some groups of white women might break for Trump. As Vox’s Tara Golshan reported in 2017, white women without college educations had been skewing more conservative for decades.
And women are no more single-issue voters than men are. While they may not have liked Trump’s comments on the Access Hollywood tape, many said theyended up making their voting decisions on the economy and terrorism. Kellyanne Conway, now a senior counselor to Trump, said after the election that women “voted the way voters have always voted: on things that affect them, not just things that offend them.”
In 2018, at least some white women may have decided that the policies of the Republican Party, with Trump at its head, affect them after all.
This year saw the largest-ever share of women voting for Democrats in a midterm election, according to the Washington Post. The surge was mostly due to the shift among white women, as well as among independent women. (56 percent of independent women voted for Democrats in 2018, compared with just 48 percent in 2016.)
White, college-educated women in particular swung heavily left in 2018, with 59 percent voting for Democratic House candidates, compared with just 49 percent in 2016.
Women of color, meanwhile, voted for Democrats at high rates, just as they did in 2016. Ninety-two percent of black women and 73 percent of Latina women voted for Democratic House candidates this year, compared with 94 percent of black women and 69 percent of Latina women in 2016.
White women didn’t deliver for Democrats everywhere. In Texas, a full 60 percent voted for Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, helping carry him to reelection. In Florida, 51 percent of white women voted for Republican Ron DeSantis for governor.
Still, the combined effect of white women and women of color was significant: When Democrats assume control of the House in January of next year, it will be, in large part, because women put them there.
From health care to the Kavanaugh hearings, white women had lots of reasons for abandoning the party of Trump
Just as white women had plenty of reasons for supporting Trump in 2016, they’ve had plenty of reasons to pull away from him and his party since. There’s Trump’s demeanor and his repeated insulting comments about women, Carroll notes. Anyone who thought the Access Hollywood tape might be an isolated occurrence quickly learned otherwise when Trump took office.
His policy positions, like his support for getting rid of Obamacare, may also be a problem for many women. “Women are primary caregivers in many cases, and faced with dealing with rising health care costs and caring for folks who have health problems in their families, whether they be children or elderly parents,” Carroll points out.
The #MeToo movement and the Kavanaugh hearings may also have played a role, Carroll said, in turning women away from the Republican Party as a whole. During the hearings, women voters could clearly see that there were no women on the Republican side of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Republicans had to bring in an outside prosecutor to ask questions. “That was just a public display, I think, of some of the problems that the Republican Party has in terms of women,” Carroll said.
Those hearings, during which Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford calmly shared her recollections and Kavanaugh raged at the injustice of the allegations against him, didn’t unite all women. In a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted after the hearings, 69 percent of Republican women said the nominee should be confirmed. And as Alexis Grenell pointed out in an op-ed at the New York Times, a white woman, Republican Sen. Susan Collins, cast a crucial vote to place Kavanaugh on the court.
But the hearings, coming after nearly two years of frequent misogyny from Trump, had an effect. In the same Politico/Morning Consult poll, 36 percent of voters said they were more likely to back a senator who opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation, compared with 27 percent who said they’d be more likely to vote for someone who supported it. Among Democratic women, 61 percent said they’d be much less likely to back a pro-Kavanaugh candidate.
These attitudes may have been at play on Tuesday, as fewer than 40 percent of women voters supported Kavanaugh’s confirmation, according to CNN. Kavanaugh wasn’t always a winning issue for Democrats; 62 percent of North Dakota voters who said Heidi Heitkamp’s vote against Kavanaugh was an important factor in their decision to vote for her opponent. But across the board, the women who turned out on Tuesday disapproved of Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, women voters on Tuesday had a far more unfavorable view of Trump than men did, according to ABC exit polls. Fifty percent of male voters approved of his job performance, compared with only 39 percent of women.
Women likely also helped elect the wave of women candidates who won on Tuesday, including historic firsts like the first Muslim women in Congress. Fifty-three percent of women voters said it was very important to elect more women to office, compared with just 37 percent of men, according to ABC.
For some women who felt unimpressed with their options in 2016, 2018 was a chance to voice a growing sense that their government wasn’t listening to them.
“With everything that’s going on right now, with Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford, it’s not a matter of if I believe her or not, it’s a matter of it is,” said Kim Boudreau Smith of Birmingham, Michigan, whom I met on a canvassing outing with state legislature candidates Mari Manoogian and Mallory McMorrow in October.
Smith hadn’t voted for Trump or Clinton in 2016 — “it wasn’t feeling right,” she said — but she was excited to vote for women this year. “I’m tired of the masculine leadership,” she told the women running to represent her.
White women have joined with women of color — for now
For a lot of white women, the last two years have been about getting to where many women of color already were. At the Women’s Convention, put on by Women’s March organizers in Detroit last year, a panel called “Confronting White Womanhood” struck a chord — it was so popular that panelists had to put on a second session to accommodate all the women who’d been unable to fit into the first. As Hannah Smothers of Cosmopolitan reported, the panel discussed the pitfalls of “white saviorism” and the history of white women’s involvement in violence against black men.
After the 2016 election, “things feel more dire, particularly for white people,” panel organizer Heather Marie Scholl told Smothers.
“We haven’t often felt that,” she added. “Communities of color have, but it’s new for us.”
White women have long had an incentive to align themselves politically with white men. As Grenell wrote at the Times, “white women benefit from patriarchy by trading on their whiteness to monopolize resources for mutual gain. In return they’re placed on a pedestal to be ‘cherished and revered,’ as Speaker Paul D. Ryan has said about women.”
But, Grenell notes, that position on the pedestal comes at a cost: “White women are expected to support the patriarchy by marrying within their racial group, reproducing whiteness and even minimizing violence against their own bodies.”
To some degree, the events of 2017 and 2018 made that cost clear. Maybe it was the Obamacare repeal efforts, Trump’s comments about women, the Kavanaugh hearings, or the Trump administration’s rollback of reproductive rights. Some were surely helped in their decision by the leadership of women of color, like the activists who stepped in to head the Women’s March or the many women of color running for office around the country, from Stacey Abrams to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Whatever the case, white women finally decided that the drawbacks of standing with the white men of the Republican Party outweighed the benefits.
Of course, it’s not clear how long the coalition of women voters forged in this election will hold together. “Confronting White Womanhood,” like a lot of activism focusing on white women in the past two years, wasn’t just about getting white women to vote around issues that affect them. It was about convincing them to show up and fight for the rights of people of color even when their lives as white women weren’t directly impacted — yet.
Even with a Democratic majority in the House, the agenda of the Trump administration, from restricting voting rights to demonizing immigrants to overturning Roe v. Wade, isn’t going away. Much of this agenda stands to affect people of color more directly than white women — even if, as was the case with Kavanaugh, they eventually feel its sting.
In the past two years, at least some of these white women have mobilized. The question for Democrats in 2020 and beyond is what it will take to mobilize the rest — and to keep them in action even when they’re not the ones most at risk.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-poli...term-elections-turnout-women-trump-exit-polls
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Strength in numbers and that voting for the candidates that represent our better interests matter.
Water is wet
This is why they will always be the gum on the bottom of their male counterpart's shoes.
Fuck dem crakkkas
This is exactly why I have been on some fuck a feminist shit since 2016. How can you say you are oppressed by patriarchy/misogyny and then vote every time for the cartoon villains of patriarchy/misogyny? 
That said, I have NO issues with black women trying to do something specifically for them and them alone.
That said, I have NO issues with black women trying to do something specifically for them and them alone.
Swear it's like people just fell to earth.
White women been eating good off white supremacy for centuries. Good luck trying to get white women to go against their own best interests.
White women been eating good off white supremacy for centuries. Good luck trying to get white women to go against their own best interests.
But you can say that about EVERYONE.
there are blacks, orthodox Jews, and homosexuals you are Republican and support trump
The issue is that PUBLICALLY they pretend to hate him...
Which not only detrimental but dangerous
And the NEED to be called out and held accountable.
Especially white women who are playing both sides
Not enough apparently
Of course they are. They are hedging their bets because they know white men can't stand they asses either.
The ONLY ace in the hole is that white men need a white women to produce more white men.
If not, I'm almost certain white men would be shooting them chicks in the street.
*two cents*
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You ain't lying...
Trump won the election saying he could shoot someone and not go to jail...
Bet that was his male cohorts wet dream come true.
White people are patriarchal and value their men like most groups on this planet. Blacks are a matriarchy and from birth teach their sons and daughters that patriarchy from their men is evil and isnt worthy of being followed.
White women AIN'T SHIT and white women know that most of all that's why they move and shake the way they do.
They treat and TREATED the civil liberties of 60's until now- the same civil liberties we fought, died, AND ARE STILL DENIED...
...as pocket change. Walking around money.
She's gonna make sure white men can still pay the mortgage, she just need some coin to buy HERSELF something nice once and a while.
And if a couple niggas gotta get shot in marches to make it happen so be it.
How ANY man who is not white, knows this country's history, and not find white women's snake like actions revolting ain't paying attention.
*two cents*
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There is nothing wrong with matriarchy conceptually...
The problem is implementing matriarchy in one culture while every other culture is practicing patriachry and constructed a system that abides by it.
We literally are not play by the same set of rules...by design. Thank you Lyndon B Johnson.
*two cents*
I have said for years.....the most racist human breathing is the white woman and its not even close.
Fuck CAC bitches.
/thread
Alot of learning and growing...fuck outta here....People always make excuses for white women..Especially,how white women gotten black men killed.
They want it back how it used to be,more than white men.Funny,how white women always say they've been treated so badly throughout history yet treated black men,women and children so horribly.
Notice,how nobody ever calls out white women out on their treatment of black people except for us.