GUARDIAN: If Only White Women Didn't Have Any Male Loved Ones, Then Hillary Would be President
09/26/2017
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From The Guardian:

Why Hillary Clinton was right about white women – and their husbands

Conventional wisdom says women will show solidarity at the polls. But new research shows that for white women, having a husband trumped the sisterhood

Lucia Graves

Monday 25 September 2017

… Given the opportunity to make history by electing the first female president, women didn’t take it. And ironically, the women who bore the most resemblance to Clinton – white, heterosexual and married – were less likely to vote for her.

Many had expected Clinton to rally women, the same way Barack Obama rallied black voters in 2008 – and if she had, she would have handily trumped Donald Trump. But while Obama won 95% of the black vote, Clinton won just 54% of women – a percentage point less than her male predecessor atop the Democratic ticket. Among white women in particular, she fared even worse: a slim majority voted for Trump.

Last week, Clinton, who has had a lifetime to contemplate the women’s vote, copped to having a theory. “[Women] will be under tremendous pressure – and I’m talking principally about white women. They will be under tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for ‘the girl’,” she said in an interview as part of a tour promoting her new memoir of the 2016 campaign.

If women didn’t have any male loved ones, then Hillary would be President.

… But social science backs up Clinton’s anecdotal hunch. “We think she was right in her analysis about women getting pressure from men in their lives, specifically [straight] white women,” said Kelsy Kretschmer, an assistant professor at Oregon State University and a co-author of a recent study examining women’s voting patterns.

“We know white men are more conservative, so when you’re married to a white man you get a lot more pressure to vote consistent with that ideology.”

The key distinction, according to Kretschmer’s research, is that single women tend to cast votes with the fate of all women in mind, while women married to men vote on behalf of their husbands and families …

Something needs to be done about the existence of heterosexual reproduction. If only women didn’t have any husbands, sons, grandsons, fathers, grandfathers, brothers, uncles, and nephews, then Hillary would be President.

It’s time for some brainstorming: test-tube babies, cloning, Planet of the Women? C’mon, people, Hillary needs some new disruptive ideas.

That could help explain why, despite the fact that the Democratic party is generally considered to have policies more favorable to women, Republicans have traditionally won the votes of married women.

“Just being married makes women more conservative in their vote choice,” said Kretschmer. …

In fact, since men are the primary breadwinners in the vast majority of American families, their wives may well see equality-focused measures as setting their husbands – and therefore their family – back.

“Some married women perceive advances for women, such as lawsuits to mitigate pay discrimination, as coming at the expense of their male partners,” the authors continue. …

A college-educated woman identifying as a liberal Democrat confided to Kretschmer – not wanting to be identified, as a Trump voter – that she had voted for him over Clinton because her husband’s job depends on the coal industry; she saw Trump as the candidate that would protect it, and by extension her family’s economic interests. Kretschmer called her story “the clearest, most heartbreaking validation of our article that I had ever heard”.

Yet the conventional wisdom going into the election, as one Atlantic story summed it up at the time, was that “the 2016 race has turned the battle of the sexes into an all-out war”: Trump and Clinton had divided not just men and women, according to the narrative, but expressly “men and women who are married to each other”. Or so readers were told. …

If every woman in America came home to just a cat and a bottle of white wine, then Hillary would be President.

Is a lifetime of loveless loneliness too much to ask to make Hillary President? Isn’t dying alone worth it if it would make Hillary President?

[Comment at Unz.com]

 

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