Saturday, November 12, 2016

That's Real White Of You Donald, Con't

Never forget that given a choice between electing America's first woman president with a long list of accomplishments and a serial sexual harasser who has never held political office that white women overwhelmingly chose Trump.

The Clinton campaign and many commentators suggested that Clinton’s attempt to break the nation’s “highest, hardest glass ceiling” would draw strong support from women across the country. But in interviews, white women who support Trump said his record as a businessman and his policy positions resonated with them more strongly than Clinton’s candidacy as a woman.

Aimee Riley, a 34-year-old orthopedic surgeon from Richmond, Virginia, said she did not want the government to raise taxes on top earners. “I have worked so hard to get out of poverty,” she said. “I was raised to earn my own success, and feel strongly that I deserve every dollar I will now earn as a surgeon.”

In her everyday hospital work, Riley said, she saw many people “who think they deserve a handout and aren’t willing to do the work they are capable of”. Trump is “business-minded and not handout-minded, and I think this will instill a sense of effort and hard work in our country”, she said.

Like other Trump supporters, white women emphasized the importance of having a president who would nominate the right kind of supreme court justice. “I was delighted to vote for Donald Trump, because he’s a pro-life advocate,” said Laurie Jones, 45, outside a polling station in New York City. Jones was accompanied by her seven-year-old daughter.

Jones, a nutritionist who lives in downtown Manhattan, hoped that Trump’s selection of supreme court justices would be able to overturn Roe v Wade and return the question of abortion rights to the state.

“I voted for Trump because America has struggled with simple economics and needs a change,” said Lizzie Whitmire, 35, a Catholic mother of two from Dallas. “I also want someone who is angry about terrorism and radical Islam.”

After the publication of a video that showed Trump boasting about how he could get away with kissing and groping women because he was famous, followed by accusations of sexual assault from 12 different women, the received wisdom was that Trump had lost the female vote.

But white women who voted for Trump downplayed his behavior to different degrees. Some said they believed he fundamentally respected women. Others said they did not, but thought his sexism would not undermine his ability to carry out the change they wanted.

Jones called Trump an “imperfect person, like all of us”. She said: “I do believe he does like women. He cares for his daughters and wife and female employees. He does respect women.”

Trump got 45% of white women with college degrees, and two-thirds of white women without them. And he STILL lost the popular vote.  But that was enough to give him electoral college wins in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania (and very nearly Minnesota.)

And in the end they voted for the sexual criminal because "he was one of ours and would hurt those people instead."  That's precisely why they voted for him, to hurt people of color, to hurt LBGTQ people, to hurt Muslims (and let's be honest, Jews).

If this was a "change" election, Republicans in charge of the House and Senate and state legislatures would have been nuked too.  No, this was a "Go back to 1955" election.

And white women led the way.  The Republican War on Women has been won by the GOP, and now the real pain begins.

Or, to put it simply:

And that's why she lost the Midwest and the election.  Period.

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