From The Washington Post:

What’s wrong with white women voters? Here’s the problem with that question. by Vanessa Williams | December 22, 2017 The 63 percent of white women who voted for Roy Moore in Alabama’s special election for Senate did not, as has been suggested by some progressives, betray the sisterhood. White women voters were excoriated on social media for their performance in last week’s contest, in which Moore narrowly lost to Democrat Doug Jones. Critics were especially incredulous because Moore, 70, a former state judge, had been accused of making unwanted sexual advances toward teenage girls when he was in his 30s. Black women have been celebrated as the sheroes who delivered the coveted Senate seat to the Democratic Party, after exit polls showed that 98 percent of them voted for Jones. “What’s wrong with white women?” was a common refrain during debates that recalled similar disappointment last year when 52 percent of white women shunned the first female major party presidential nominee in favor of Donald Trump, who had been caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the genitals — and was accused of doing just that by several women during the campaign.

That is, in a way, a misleading statistic. Yes, 52% of white women voted for Donald Trump, but, thanks to the presence of minor party candidates, only 43% voted for Hillary Clinton; 57% of white women voters voted against her.

But the suggestion that something is wrong with women who vote for candidates like Trump and Moore, or for Republicans generally, is misguided and unfair, say some political scientists. It doesn’t take into account that women, who make up more than half of the U.S. electorate, have diverse backgrounds and experiences and have different, and in some cases competing, political priorities. It also ignores the fact that a majority of white women have voted for the Republican presidential nominee in all but two elections since 1952. Kelly Dittmar, a political-science professor and scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics, said the recent criticism of white women voters is “embedded with the biases of more progressive women.” “Some of those expressing concern and confusion about why women identify with the Republican Party are really asking why these women don’t seem to identify with other women who view Republican policies as problematic for women.”

There’s a lot more at the original, but the money line is that the ‘question’ is “embedded with the biases of more progressive women.” For the left, it appears that only white heterosexual Christian men are allowed any freedom of thought; all other ‘groups’ must vote the way the progressives assign them to vote, or there is something wrong with them. Why, it’s as though the progressives do not believe that people other than white heterosexual Christian men are intelligent enough to think for themselves.

The article noted that Jane Junn, a professor of political science and gender studies at the University of Southern California, has claimed that white women are more influenced in their political behavior by race than by their sex. As the Democratic Party specifically, and the left in general, have been basing much of their political appeals on minority populations, they assumed that heterosexual white women would somehow feel as disenfranchised as other minority groups. The problem with that idea is obvious: white women tend to get together with white men to form families, and programs which are made to confer advantage upon people who are not white mean, inter alia, disadvantage to their husbands and boyfriends, and their families.

Which is more advantageous for the white married woman: having a woman in a particular political office, or policies which will benefit their families’ economic well-being?

The opening paragraph of the Post article indicates the problem: it wasn’t that white women voters in Alabama — or the 57% of white women who voted against Mrs Clinton in the presidential election — somehow betrayed the sisterhood, but that so many of the baizuo assumed that just because all white women have vaginas that there is some sort of sisterhood which exists. No one, after all, assumes that, say, all men are a brotherhood simply because all men have a penis; the left quickly segregate men into different groups: whites, blacks, heterosexual or homosexual, married or single, urban or rural, Hispanic, Christian, Muslim, just a whole host of different ‘special interest’ groups. Why, then, ought they to assume that all women are some sort of homogeneous sisterhood?

What the Chinese call the ‘white left’ have set themselves up for failure. They have assumed that they know what’s best for women, and thus all women must vote as the baizuo have determined them must vote. Nora Kelly, writing in The Atlantic, before the election, reported on the efforts of high-powered Washington women getting out the vote for Clinton, and noted the following dynamic:

[F]or many of the women I talked to Wednesday — the government workers, think-tankers, and nonprofit employees — Clinton isn’t just an aspirational figure, though she’s that, too. Rather, they seemed to see Clinton in the late days of the campaign as something of an avatar, a living representation of their own daily striving against a culture and a professional world that privileges men. When they watch her face “Trump That Bitch” t-shirts, suggestions that she is too frail or weak to assume the presidency, and other examples of blatant sexism, they recall their own, similar experiences. And when they see her succeed, it’s edifying.

That shows the problem that the elites have: Miss Kelly drew her conclusion from women similarly situated to herself. How do the experiences of professional women around Washington, DC, match up with the convenience store worker, with her laid-off coal miner husband in eastern Kentucky? Mrs Clinton, who famously ranted “Why am I not fifty points ahead?” claimed that women who didn’t vote for her ‘disrespected’ themselves, because she, and the rest of the left, assumed that having a vagina was an automatic vote for her.

Who knows, perhaps the Post article indicates that at least some on the left might actually get it, might actually understand that their assumptions about how people simply have to vote might not be entirely correct.

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Cross-posted on The First Street Journal.