President-elect Donald Trump. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Never underestimate the fury of women degraded, disrespected and subjugated by patriarchal jerks, they said.
The gender gap in the 2024 presidential election had grown into a chasm that could tip the election, they said. The disgraced ex-president who ended half a century of reproductive freedom in the country – with a running toll of unbearable suffering and preventable deaths among young women – faced a comeuppance with female voters, they said.
In the first presidential election since abortion rights were ripped away from women by the U.S. Supreme Court, women voters would retaliate, they said. Women wouldn’t reward Trump – the braggart accused of sexual assault and harassment by dozens of women and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll – with four more years in the White House, they said.
But they – the pundits and pollsters – were wrong. While a majority (53%) of American women did vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, there were holes in that support. Only 35% of non-college-educated white women voted for the female candidate, compared to 57 % of college-educated white women.
Initial exit polls in Ohio showed Trump with a slight lead in women voters, with a distinct racial divide. White women voted for the Republican presidential ticket by 57%, according to early data, while Black women backed Harris by 95%. Ultimately, Trump won Ohio by a bigger margin than he did in 2020 and Cleveland.com reports his support grew in almost every county in the state.
The much-ballyhooed gender gap in the 2024 election was big, but historically unremarkable. Pundits and pollsters now theorize that concerns about the economy mattered more to women than the promise of subjugation by patriarchal jerks with a Project 2025 to-do list. Maybe that’s right, but inflation is falling, grocery food prices are finally retreating, gas prices are down, wages are up, we’re at almost full employment and the stock market is at record highs.
But the reality of an objectively strong economy has been flipped on its head in politically polarized America. Trump ran on “alternative facts” of a sky-is-falling economy certain to get worse under his opponent. Harris ran on strengthening an improving economy for those living paycheck to paycheck with a focus on price gouging, affordable housing, healthcare, etc.
Identity politics won, not substantive policy to lower the still high cost of living on Main Street. It didn’t matter that sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists urgently warned that Trump’s proposals to slap huge tariffs on imported goods, deport millions of migrant workers and erode the Fed’s independence would drive consumer prices sharply higher. A majority of citizens drowning in rent hikes, utility bills, car payments, insurance spikes and more bought what the he was selling.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
They gambled on a known grifter and pathological liar who never stopped lying about winning an election he lost. Some, I suspect, just wanted an excuse to return their crude outlaw to Washington. Trump and his soulless running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, gave millions permission to rage against everything and everyone they hated.
Trump directed their enmity toward the defenseless. He put a target on transgender people trying to live their lives in peace and hard-working legal migrants revitalizing American communities. There was no bottom to the dehumanization Trump peddled. He added his own “enemy within” list of expendable human beings, closing out his campaign with suggestions that former U.S. Rep Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) should have guns “trained on her face” and if the media gets shot “I don’t mind that so much.”
On the Trump retribution tour, demeaning women was a real crowd pleaser. The degradation continued on Election Day Eve with Trump calling Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi an “evil, sick, crazy, bi…it starts with a B,” and Vance calling the vice-president “trash.” Hurling insults at powerful women was a feature, not a bug of the Trump-Vance enterprise.
Vance’s clear disdain for women who didn’t conform to his ideals of breeders/babysitters was creepy. Trump’s misogyny was vile. Harris was reduced to a prostitute with “pimp handlers” and the “anti-Christ.” Campaign shirts calling the first female vice president a “hoe” sold out. But the candidate who boasted about getting rid of Roe and who suggested his support for a national ban on abortion a few months ago, convinced enough women to believe otherwise. To trust him.
Ohio’s Trumpy senator-elect, Republican Bernie Moreno, belied Trump’s bluster of protecting women “whether they like it or not” with a party-line embrace of national abortion restrictions and insinuations that women, especially those over 50, get over it. Expect more of that as medication abortions (which account for 63% of all procedures) go away first in the Trump-Vance regime followed by national limits on all abortions later.
At the dawn of Trump’s first term, half-a-million women (and men) marched in the largest, single-day protest in U.S history against the threat he posed to reproductive, civil and human rights. We were joined by hundreds of thousands more who protested in sister marches across the country and world. A second Trump term will test the mettle of that opposition.
But never underestimate the fury of women facing dystopian hell. They will regroup, resist and never retreat. This fight for equal and unalienable rights will be epic.
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