Originally published at: Everyone Wants to Win Working-Class Voters. But Have They Realized Many Are Women? - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th. Meet Chabeli and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy. Congressional candidate JoAnna Mendoza can quickly rattle off prices from the grocery store in the small town of Eloy, Arizona, where she grew up. A couple of months ago, a pound…
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Maybe folks should ask Doug Wilson, Pete Hegseth’s pastor, about the role of women in politics and society? Just sayin’.
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Yes, 53 % of white women supported Trump 3 times. They don’t belive in reproductive freedom or care that a man is a rapist or misogynist.
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“53% of white women” is not a particularly useful metric unless it is cross-tabbed against education level, age group, religious affiliation, and family or individual income. Yes, “white women”, like “white men” (another broad & unuseful label) supported Trump–but the whole point of the article is that the parties fail to recognize that class and what used to be called kitchen-table issues are crucial.
And we know which party’s leadership is even more wildly skewed toward privileged and older white men.
That’s the point. There is an opportunity here.
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Misogyny is ubiquitous in American society, rich and poor, men and women, white, black, brown. Aren’t we all a ‘work in progress’ when it comes to racism and misogyny? There’s still no excuse for unfairness, unkindness, or indifference but I believe there are millions of people trying to do better by their neighbors, and I’m with them.
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Amen!
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Hear, hear…..I’m so glad Joan C. Williams’ book has surfaced. I just came across it in the library last week and it confirms a lot of the way I think about our great divide. I would add, at the risk of becoming persona non grata once again, that we open our big tent to folks who do not believe people can change their sex. The GOP doesn’t give a rat’s ass about transgender people but they do know how to get us to dig in our heels and defend what most working class folks find odd to say the least. It may not be the primary issue but it is, as I’ve said a gazillion times, emblematic of the condescension they feel from us. (I can feel people loading their bullet points as I type.)
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Oh, okay. I’ll make sure to remember this white-splaining next time someone around here asks why Latinos voted for the criminal in the past under the rubric of “voting against their own self-interests.” I just love the exception carving that Democrats and Democratic supporters do in order to squirm their way out of unpleasant things.
I don’t need to be lectured with “well, ackshually” when confronted with a cold, hard fact.
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Dis you?
“well, ackshually”? Every single person on these boards knows that Latino men and white women “voted against their own interests.” I’m looking for a deeper and more sophisticated reading.
But you’ll probably hear that as “white-splaining.”
So: piss off, pumpkin.
plonk
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For a very long time, the way to convince women voters was to convince the men in their lives. I imagine, the less educated the women were, the more likely their votes simply followed the votes of their father or husband - something that appealed to hierarchical, conservative male politicians.
“Just get the men and their wives will follow” - because every adult woman is married - right? As the world (less married people) and the GOP (more obviously abhorrent towards non-males) changed, it makes sense that this would become a less effective strategy. The votes of women are tied to their fathers/husbands way less often than they used to be - but big mechanisms take a long time to change strategies.
This is an assumption on my part, but it makes sense that voters who turn out a smaller % of the time - like working class folks - are more likely to get ignored, simply because the signal in their votes is harder to see and interpret for politicians. It’s understandable that people who feel they aren’t being heard are less interested in going through the effort to vote the next time - but the only way that changes is for disaffected, blue collar folks (esp. women) to vote more. Nice of the right wing nutters to provide the motivation.
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“Working class people, and especially women, like Mendoza, have rarely had a seat at the political table,…”
That is because they are actually working, not sitting around board meetings and the like. Plus it takes money to get a seat at the political table which they don’t have to spare, not to mention time. Remember they are also raising a family.
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You’re not persona non grata to me, but I will take issue with your comment. First, Dems are happy to open their big tent to folks who believe people cannot change their sex. I am sure that more than a few working-class (and other-class) MA Dem primary voters who believe that voted last week for Ed Markey (an outspoken supporter of transgender rights ) instead of Seth Moulton (who once thought he could pander to voters by making an issue of his opposition to transgender girls in girls’ sports). These voters had lots of reasons for preferring Markey, not least that he is much more progressive than Moulton on kitchen table issues. Which, as the article argues, is what matters most to most working class voters. The voters who get all worked up about things like transgender rights, whatever their class, are out of Dems’ reach anyway, at least for now.
What exactly are you proposing? That Dem pols abandon their support of transgendered people’s rights, either by saying nothing about the issue (even if asked) or by explicitly opposing their rights? A lot of good that would do. It would only undermine support for them among voters who care about that issue while the Repubs would just continue their culture war games, painting all Dems with the same broad brush and telling lies about them. I’ve read elsewhere that voters generally, including many Repubs and Repub-leaning independents, are tiring of the Repubs’ preoccupation with “culture war” issues. Dem candidates don’t need to abandon their support of transgender rights to keep or win over working-class voters who may disagree with them on that issue. As the article suggests, they need to speak plainly and convincingly about the issues, particularly the kitchen table ones, that these voters care most about.
Finally, I gotta say that I find it condescending for “us” (I am quoting you) to assume working-class voters are more likely than other voters, to any significant degree, to turn away from Dem pols who not only believe people can change their sex but also support transgender rights.
ETA: mch (known as “axel” for the last few weeks) is back! Google/Chrome was finally willing to verify my main email account.
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“And so it is fitting to honor this Labor Day by asking you all to do more of it.”
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“If Democrats pay attention, future cycles may have more candidates like Kaela Berg, a flight attendant and single mom who ran for a highly contested seat representing Minnesota’s 2nd congressional district in the U.S. House. Before she lost her primary in August,…” (emphasis mine)
I fully agree that all working class voters need more representation in government. But does anyone else find this argument confusing? Is the goal to win, or lose, these elections?
The eternal dilemma of the Democratic Party since they went full multicultural in the 1960’s.
I do not have a solution to this problem.
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It may solve itself with demographic decline of Whites in the US, but it’s going to take a while. If one considers Hispanics to be non-White (and Trump surely does), then Wiki says :
Non-Hispanic White Americans under 18 in the U.S. are already a minority as of 2020, and it is projected that non-Hispanic Whites overall will become a minority within the US by 2045.
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I’ve never non grata’d (sp? fuck you english anyways, or what ever language that is, probably Russian) your persona.
The interwebs, social media, monopolistic legacy media condescends. We’re just here for the ride.
It was a machismo thing soy boy.
They FAFO’d.
Dipshits.