Another word for Karens
How insulting is this?
Is the article as insulting as the tweet? Pretty much. What’s the argument? That the fact that a slim majority of white women usually vote Republican=white women vote Republican.
Exit polling indicates that Trump’s support had increased among White women, with some major polls putting it at 55 percent.
…White women are not a swing voting bloc. In the past 18 presidential elections, they have repeatedly voted for the Republican candidate, breaking only for Lyndon B. Johnson and for Bill Clinton’s second term.
That is, a slim majority of them have. What about white men? Oh look, a swan.
This is because, as a political force, White female rage has long been better at enforcing patriarchal norms than dismantling them. Why? Quite frankly, White women benefit from the status quo, while change would require burning down that system and building a new one — one where they and their children might lose the shared superiority and protection they get by being attached to powerful White men.
But why are we singling out white women? What about those white men? Oh look, a swan.
Sociologist Joseph O. Jewell has described the role White women played in maintaining institutional racism in the late 19th century; his work examines specific instances of what he calls “social mothering” in San Francisco and New Orleans, when White mothers pushed policies that established school segregation.
Of course; and, white men?
Little has changed. Indeed today, that logic is more insidious: To many White women, equality means dominating the system like men rather than dismantling it to make it fair for everyone.
Speaking of men…what about men? Why are we just focusing on women?
Because Amy Cooper, Lyz Lenz explains.
Of course, all women, conservative and liberal, at all levels of society, face real discrimination and sexism — but that makes donning the mantle of victimhood while perpetuating the patriarchy an even more cynical game.
But it’s not at all cynical to call a slim majority of white women “white women” and to forget to check how many white men vote Republican.
As we continue to sift through the wreckage of the Trump years, a process that should not stop on Jan. 20, the Democratic Party should stop wasting so much time on the lost cause of suburban wine moms and start listening to the voices that form the core of the party’s base.
Or to put it another way – people who are already comfortable and safe are more likely to vote Republican, so the Democratic Party should stop wasting so much time on the lost cause of prosperous white people and start listening to the voices that form the core of the party’s base. That makes sense; singling out white women not so much. (Referring to them as “wine moms” even less.)
White women put Biden over the top in Georgia; there are not enough voters of color in Georgia to win statewide races by themselves…
Also the woke do not form the core of the Democratic party’s base at all… If that was true Biden wouldn’t have been the nominee. This lot is just every bit the sore winner that Trump was in 2016.
I’d guess it’s focusing on women because it was expected women would turn hard against the sexist Trump, and they didn’t. There wasn’t the same expectation for men.
(I personally didn’t share that expectation. We fully knew of Trump’s sexism in 2016. The women marching in pink pussy hats were people who had already voted against Trump, not people who had suddenly seen the light after the election.)
As you say the article weirdly treats the white female voting block as a binary that Democrats have lost. If they surrendered and stopped courting this voting block, and if they then starting getting 40% of white women instead of 46%, it would be catastrophic for the party. This isn’t an electoral college of sex/race blocks where you get all the white women electors or none of them.
And in this election, where so much of the voting was mail-in, exit polls are going to be somewhat less accurate, especially since it’s plain from the way the results came in and the sudden shifts that those mail in votes skewed heavily Democratic, while the in-person, day-of voting skewed heavily Republican (and I can say this even though I voted in-person day of and did not vote Republican, because, unlike the people writing these articles, I know how statistics work, and that my statement did not mean that every in-person day of voter voted Republican).
It seems like every election, win, lose, or draw, the punditry is standing by with some argument as to why the Democratic party needs to throw women under the bus. I suppose it could be seen as a step up that this year, it’s only white women they want to throw under the bus.
Hang on, exit polls are of those who voted, in person, on polling day.
As we have seen, the majority of in-person Trump votes were Rethuglicans because they listened to their master’s voice telling them to shun postal votes.
This is yet another example of a linguistic pet peeve. English is fairly non-specific in its casual use. We use short constructions that are ambiguous and rely on context to distinguish between possible interpretations. (Most natural languages do this.) What grinds my gears is when people use those ambiguous phrases in contexts that don’t provide distinguishing information.
“All P are Q.” If this is true, we can say that P are Q.
“Some P are Q.” If this is true, we can say that P are Q.
And so on when anywhere from a tiny minority to an overwhelming majority of P are Q.
…Exit polling? In an election where the majority of voting took place before election day, and not in person? That’s a fatal blow to the reliability of exit polling to begin with, yet it is even worse when considering that the early voting / in-person voting is based on a political divide, with in-person voting skewing Republican. With that in mind, the fact that only 55% of white women voted Republican makes me think that the majority actually voted Democrat, but this was overturned in exit polling by the Republican bias of in-person votes.
When this point came up in conversation a while back I remembered a long Twitter thread (which of course I can’t find now, or find the source of–which is too bad, I often save unrolled threads but now can’t find this one) which concluded that a lot of what we’re seeing in white women’s voting and political behaviour is the result of reproductive coercion.
Given the sloppy data (exit polling) and the hefty margin of error, there’s doubt about how bad the ‘wine mom’ vote really was. BUT, it is still absolutely chilling that anything CLOSE to a majority of any category of Americans could vote for Trump a second time. That amorphous block of ‘white women,’ is full of subsets like Christian Nationalists, far-right Catholics, Q-anon believers, Fox News fans etc. etc.
Absolutely. And it is absolutely chilling (to me) that a substantial majority of my family could vote for Trump even a first time, let alone a second. Not to mention, my neighbors, since more than 60% of my county voted Trump, and almost the entire population of this county lives in my city.