Yesterday, in Time magazine, Eric Cortellessa explained that the
electoral strategy of the Trump campaign was to get men who don’t usually
vote, particularly young ones, to turn out for Trump. If they could do that,
and at the same time hold steady the support of white women, Trump could win
the election. So Trump has focused on podcasts followed by young men and on
imitating the patterns of professional wrestling performances. At the same time, he
has promised to “protect women…whether the women like it or not,” and lied
consistently about crime statistics to keep white suburban women on his side
by suggesting that he alone can protect them. Today in Gastonia, North
Carolina, for example, Trump told the audience: "They say the suburban
women. Well, the suburbs are under attack right now. When you're home in your
house alone and you have this monster that got out of prison and he's got,
you know, six charges of murdering six different people, I think you'd rather
have Trump." The crime rate has
dropped dramatically in the past year. Rather than keeping
women in his camp, Trump’s strategy of reaching out to his base to turn out
low-propensity voters, especially young men, has alienated them. That
alienation has come on top of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that recognized the
constitutional right to abortion. Early voting in
Pennsylvania showed that women sent in 56% of the early ballots, compared to
43% for men. Seniors—people who remember a time before Roe v. Wade—also showed a significant split. Although the parties
had similar numbers of registrants, nearly 59% of those over 65 voting early
were Democrats. That pattern holds across all the battleground states:
women’s early voting outpaces men’s by about 10 points. While those numbers
are certainly not definitive—no one knows how these people voted, and much
could change over the next few days—the enthusiasm of those two groups was
notable. This evening, a Des
Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll conducted by the highly respected Selzer
& Co. polling firm from October 28 to 31 showed Democratic presidential
nominee Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa 47% to 44% among
likely voters. That outlying polling result is undoubtedly at least in part a
reflection of the fact that Harris’s running mate is the governor of a
neighboring state, but that’s not the whole story. While Trump wins the votes
of men in Iowa by 52% to 38%, and of evangelicals by 73% to 20%, women,
particularly older women, are driving the shift to favor Harris in a
previously Republican-dominated state. Independent women back
Harris by a 28-point margin, while senior women support her by a margin of
more than 2 to 1, 63% to 28%. Overall, women back Harris by a margin of about
20 points: 56% to 36%. Seniors as a group including men as well as women are
also strongly in Harris’s camp, by 55% to 36%. A 79-year-old poll
respondent said: “I like her policies on reproductive health and having women
choosing their own health care, and the fact that I think that she will save
our democracy and follow the rule of law…. [I]f the Republicans can decide
what you do with your body, what else are they going to do to limit your
choice, for women?” The obvious driver for
women and seniors to oppose Trump is the Dobbs decision. The loss of abortion care has put women’s
lives at risk. Within days after the Supreme Court handed the decision down,
we started hearing stories of raped children forced to give birth or cross
state lines for abortions, as well as of women who have suffered or died from
a lack of health care after doctors feared intervening in miscarriages would
put them in legal jeopardy. As X user E. Rosalie
noted, Iowa’s abortion ban also has long-term implications for the state. It
has forced OBGYNs to leave and has made recruiting more impossible. As people
are unable to get medical care to have babies, they will choose to live
elsewhere, draining talent out of the state. That, in turn, will weaken
Iowa’s economy. That same process is
playing out in all the states that have banned abortion. It seems possible that
the Dobbs decision ushered in the end of the toxic American
individualism on which the Reagan revolution was built. When he ran for
president in 1980, Ronald Reagan set out to dismantle the active government
that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted
infrastructure, and protected civil rights. Such a government was akin to
socialism, he claimed, and he insisted it stifled American
individualism. In contrast to such a
government, Reagan celebrated the mythological American cowboy. In his
telling, that cowboy wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone
to provide for and to protect his family. Good women in the cowboy myth were
wives and mothers, in contrast to the women who wanted equal rights and jobs
outside the home in modern America. That traditional image of American women
had gotten legs in 1974, when the television show Little House on the Prairie debuted; it would run until 1983. Prairie dresses
became the rage. Reagan’s embrace of
women’s role as wives and mothers brought traditionalist white Southern
Baptists to his support. Those traditionalists objected to the government’s
recognition of women’s equal rights because they believed equality undermined
a godly patriarchal family structure. They made ending access to abortion
their main issue. At the same time that
the right wing insisted that women belonged in their homes, it socialized
young men to believe in a mythological world based on guns and the domination
of women. In 1980 the previously nonpartisan National Rifle Association
endorsed Reagan, their first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate,
and the rise of evangelical culture reinforced that dominant men must protect
submissive women. When federal marshals
tried to arrest Randy Weaver at his home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in August 1992
for failure to show up in court for trial on a firearms charge, right-wing
activists and neo-Nazis from a nearby Aryan Nations compound rushed to Ruby
Ridge to protest what right-wing media insisted was simply a man protecting
his family. The next February,
when officers stormed the compound of a religious cult in Waco, Texas, whose
former members reported that their leader was sexually assaulting children
and stockpiling weapons, right-wing talk show hosts—notably Rush Limbaugh and
Alex Jones—blamed new president Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno,
for the ensuing gun battle and fire that killed 76 people. Reno was the first
female attorney general, and right-wing media made much of the idea that a
group of Christians had been killed by a female government official who was
unmarried and—as opponents made much of—unfeminine. When he ran for office
in 2015, Trump appealed to those men socialized into violence and dominance.
He embraced the performance of dominance as it is done in professional
wrestling, and urged his supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies.
The Access Hollywood tape in which he boasted of sexual assault did not
hurt his popularity with his base. He promised to end abortion rights and
suggested he would impose criminal punishments on women seeking
abortions. And then, in June 2022,
thanks to the votes of the three religious extremists Trump put on it, the
Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision,
stripping women of a constitutional right that the U.S. government had
recognized for almost 50 years. Justice Samuel Alito
suggested that women could change state laws if they saw fit, writing in the
decision that “women are not without electoral or political power.” Indeed,
since the Dobbs decision, every time abortion rights have been on
the ballot, voters have approved them, although right-wing state legislators
have worked to prevent the voters’ wishes from taking effect. In this moment,
though, it is clear that women have electoral and political power over more
than abortion rights. The 1980 election was
the first one in which the proportion of eligible female voters who turned
out to vote was higher than the proportion of eligible men. It was also the
first one in which there was a partisan gender gap, with a higher proportion
of women than men favoring the Democrats. That partisan gap now is the
highest it has ever been. The fear that women
can, if they choose, overthrow the patriarchal mythology of cowboy
individualism that shaped the modern MAGA Republican Party is likely behind
the calls of certain right-wing influencers and evangelical leaders to stop
women from voting. For sure, it is behind the right-wing freak-out over the
video voiced by actor Julia Roberts that reassures women that they do not
have to tell their husbands how they voted. The right-wing version
of the American cowboy was always a myth. Nothing mattered more for success
in the American West than the kinship networks and community support that
provided money, labor, and access to trade outlets. When the economic
patterns of the American West replicated those of the industrializing East
after the Civil War, success during the heyday of the cowboy depended on
access to lots of capital, giving rise to western barons and then to popular
political movements to regulate businesses and give more power to the people.
Far from being the homebound wives of myth, women were central to western
life, just as they have always been to American society. In Flagstaff, Arizona,
today, Democratic presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz told
a crowd: “I kind of have a feeling that women all across this country, from
every walk of life, from either party, are going to send a loud and clear message
to Donald Trump next Tuesday, November 5, whether he likes it or not.” |
