Mrs. Obama continued: “If we as women are still suspicious of one another, if we still have this crazy, crazy bar for each other that we don’t have for men, if we’re not comfortable with the notion that a woman could be our president compared to … what, then we have to have that conversation with ourselves as women.”

Think about what it really means to suggest having a “conversation with ourselves as women” when the conversation you are having is about how many women didn’t vote the way you think they should have. When you’ve decided that some women didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton because they were “not comfortable with the notion that a woman could be our president” — instead of not being comfortable with this particular candidate.

I didn’t vote for Mr. Trump and I don’t support him now. But I’m not surprised many women did and do.

If Democrats want to know why women voted for Mr. Trump — or more important, why they didn’t vote for Mrs. Clinton — they should stop presuming that their gender decides what lever they pull.

Salena Zito, co-author of the new book “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics,” recently surveyed 2,000 Trump voters in the rust belt. They are the kind of voters, she says, that experts overlooked in 2016 and still don’t get today.

One of them is Amy Maurer, a 43-year-old well-educated suburban mom in Kenosha, Wis, who is on the executive board of the Republican Party of Kenosha County. The Clinton campaign aimed ads at Republicans— even women like Ms. Maurer — keying in on Mr. Trump’s misogynistic remarks.

“It’s not my favorite thing,” she said when I asked her about the way Mr. Trump has talked about women. “It’s kind of like what I told my mother-in-law when she complained that her heart surgeon wasn’t very friendly: If he’s good at what he does, who cares? He’s not there to be your best friend.”