The votes of white women varied widely by region, religious identity, and educational background, among other salient variables.

To lash out at “white women” based on the CNN chart is to express hostility to the 39 percent of white women in Texas who voted for the Democrat yet get stereotyped with the rest of their cohort, while ignoring the 71 percent of white men, 39 percent of Latino men, 34 percent of Latino women, 16 percent of black men, and 4 percent of black women who voted for the Republican.

The principle at work: Let us judge them not on the content of their votes, but by the candidate who was backed by a majority of the people who share their skin color. In this way, Democrats turn on their own allies.

Peter Beinart: The growing partisan divide over feminism

Some conservatives insist that performative, hyperbolic white-woman bashing is broadly representative of the Democratic Party and the political left. It is not. This rhetorical mode is widely seen as wrongheaded. In my experience, it elicits eye-rolling from most residents of deep-blue neighborhoods and from most Democrats in all racial groups. It is the work of a tiny, largely white, mostly privileged vanguard.

The extent to which that narrowness surprises you, as Wesley Yang once wrote in another context, “is a measure of how successfully the toxic rhetoric of warring elite cliques has gaslighted you into submitting to a narrative that is brazenly false.” Indeed, this mode of discourse is alienating to many who voted for Democrats, and obviously isn’t winning any converts, for reasons The Stranger’s Katie Herzog adeptly explains.

Still, this accusatory mode can’t simply be ignored. On social and digital media, where algorithms optimized for engagement boost views that are unusually anger-inducing, accusatory, and tribally divisive, it is overrepresented. The percentage of Democrats who buy its assumptions is tiny, yet it has the power to shape perceptions of the coalition, to derail its internal arguments, and to lead many astray about the truth.

As a non-Democrat, that final drawback is the one that bothers me the most. Set aside the moral case against disparaging groups in sweeping, stereotyped ways and its tactical foolishness. Blaming “white women” for progressive electoral losses causes people to lose touch with reality.

After all the ballots were cast in the 2018 midterm elections, the Pew Research Center reported on exit-poll results showing a gender gap in voting that was “at least as wide as at any point over the past two decades.”

Overall, 59 percent of women voters cast ballots for Democrats in House races. But that one-dimensional statistic is misleading in some ways. So exit polls broke down results based on race and education, too.

Conor Friedersdorf: Too much stigma, not enough persuasion