Hillary Clinton will not be our first woman president, a symbolic blow made more painful by the fact that she lost to a raging misogynist and sexual predator. Donald Trump is now set to preside over a unified Republican government deeply antagonistic to abortion rights, marriage equality, and healthcare access. This will almost certainly be disastrous for women, but according to exit polls, 53 percent of white women voted for him anyway.

That’s a departure from pre-election polls, which showed her winning this demographic, but there long have been signs that white women wouldn’t flock to Clinton despite the historic nature of her candidacy. In May, The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein argued that Trump needed white women to beat Clinton—and that he might very well win those votes:



Democrats haven’t done nearly as well among white women. In modern exit polling tracing back to 1972, the only Democrat to win more white women than his Republican opponent was Bill Clinton in 1996. Clinton in 1992 and Al Gore in 2000 also ran about even with white women. But since then, the GOP has carried white women by solid margins: 11 points in 2004, seven in 2008, and fully 14 for Mitt Romney against Obama in 2012.

Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” tape, the sexual assault and harassment allegations against him, and his selection of anti-abortion, anti-LGBT Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate all bothered college-educated white women, but not their working class peers. White women without college degrees—an educational status correlated to lower income—overwhelmingly supported Trump, enough so that he won white women as a category.

That did not have to happen. But the Democratic Party for years has packaged superficial progressivism as real social justice, and the Clinton campaign’s simpering celebrity feminism ultimately proved tone deaf to the vital women voters who were more concerned about their pocketbook than “grab them by the pussy.”

White working class voters aren’t necessarily committed Republicans. As New York magazine reported Wednesday, many had voted for Obama. And there’s evidence they still feel warmly about our sitting president, who has a national approval rating of 56 percent. That’s a startling contrast with Clinton’s approval rating, which dropped to 38 percent in August and hovered around 41 percent in late October. Trump’s approval ratings have been little better, but he still managed to turn out voters. Clinton, meanwhile, suffered from the enthusiasm gap many had warned about for months.