Ladies, Time to Represent

I've been saying for some time that women's votes are pretty important to win as a demographic.

I'm not the only one now.

From The Daily Beast:

The post-debate explosion of nasty proves that that Trump still doesn’t understand that this election isn’t a golf outing with a group of guffawing yes-men, and that women are finally facing the full extent of their electoral power.

Voting is one of the few arenas where the approval of men like Donald Trump doesn’t matter a lick. A voting machine cannot tell the gender of the voter and count it for only 77 percent as much as the vote of a man. A voting machine can’t pass over a female vote in favor of a younger male vote that reminds it of itself at that age. A voting machine can’t throw out the vote of a woman if she refuses its sexual advances. It won’t tell a female voter that she’s a New York City 6 but a Chicago 8. A voting machine doesn’t grope.

Women make up over 50 percent of the voting population in the U.S., and on November 8, any of them can imagine canceling out the vote of any man they’d like as they fill out their ballots. Donald Trump can’t insult them into submission.

From The Week:

It was inevitable that Chris Wallace would bring up the fact that in the last couple of weeks around a dozen women have charged that Donald Trump kissed them, groped them, or watched them undress (the latter in the case of pageant contestants, including at the Miss Teen USA pageant) against their will. So you might have thought that even an operation as obviously incompetent as the Trump campaign would have managed to prepare him for the question with a good response, one that didn't just discredit those charges but also made an attempt to reassure women voters with something more persuasive than his oft-repeated "Nobody has more respect for women than I do."

But he didn't have anything better prepared. Instead, he claimed that their stories have been "debunked" (not remotely true), and said, "I didn't even apologize to my wife, who's sitting right here, because I didn't do anything." It was enough to make you think that he has no idea how that sounds to women voters, like a man who tells them that what he did wrong is actually their fault.

What's most remarkable is that Trump either has no idea that he's bleeding women voters and can't win without them, or he thinks that what he's doing will actually win them back. How else to explain how he acted in Wednesday's debate?

From ABC News:

An ABC News poll released Sunday, and conducted in the days following Wednesday's debate, gave Clinton a 55 percent-35 percent lead over Trump among women. Among college-educated white women, the gap was 62 percent to 30 percent. Likely voters, by a margin of 69 percent to 24 percent, disapproved of Trump's response to questions about his treatment of women. In a Quinnipiac University poll conducted before that debate, Clinton led Trump among women by 52 percent to 37 percent.

Also, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released a few days before the debate showed women favoring Clinton over Trump by 55 percent to 35 percent.

The punditry early on talked a lot about the minority votes that the Republicans were kicking away by boosting an openly racist campaign that Trump ran from his first speech in 2015. While making it so that the Republicans could never regain the Black voting bloc they lost by 2008-2012, and while making it so that the Latino and Asian voting blocs turned away from the GOP in nearly the same percentages as the Black vote, nobody really commented on how sexist Trump was in a way that showed his greatest weakness. I think Nate Silver and his crew at 538 were the only ones who paid serious attention to it.

But I've said it before: Women during most election cycles are the largest voting bloc out there when you set them up as a singular demographic.

And Republicans as a party seem to keep going out of their way to drive women voters away, which gets to be a short-sighted gameplan if you're trying to win popular votes:

The Republicans have been campaigning since 2000 on a short-term agenda of pandering to White voters in general, and they're still going full-storm following that track despite calls from within that they really need to start attracting more diverse groups.  But how far are the Republicans going to get if their platform becomes so anti-woman that the treasured White Vote base gets splintered by gender and White women flee in droves to a more open-minded Democratic candidate?  Are there going to be enough Men voters willing to shift to the Republicans on such a harsh anti-abortion platform?  It's unlikely, because not enough men really think that way.

What Trump is saying about women in general is sexist and tends towards abuse and sheer cluelessness.  But he's not doing this in a vacuum: given the Republican Party's recent history of dismissing women's issues - and given the current attacks against birth control, women's health, and access to abortion - the GOP seems convinced they can win without women as much as they can win without Hispanics or Blacks or college students or lower-income families or pretty much anybody who are not Angry White Males over 50...

There's one other thing to note about alienating women voters: Those vaunted Republican gerrymanders aren't safe from gender votes. They only designed those "safe" Congressional districts based mostly on ethnicity and division of large (urban) population centers. They can't gerrymander against women because they don't live in segregated neighborhoods: Women live everywhere.

And women have experiences. And women have long memories.

And women vote.

I really hope this blows up every Republican safe district and Senate-held seat, that every conceivable competitive spot on the ballot flips to Democrat due to women voters.