The Great American Grope Trick–Why Women Voted for Donald Trump
“Yes we can”, said President Obama, to enraptured audiences. “You can do anything …” Donald Trump later assured, “Grab them by the pussy”. The audacity of grope, every pollster predicted, would be the nail in Trump’s coffin. His flagrant misogyny, combined with the opportunity offered by Hillary Clinton to “shatter the highest and hardest glass ceiling”, was expected to induce a surge in women’s turnout, thus guaranteeing her the position of the 45th President of the United States.
However, the elections did not see any particular increase in the size of the female electorate (only one per cent higher than in 2012). More perplexingly, the white women vote probably tipped the election in Trump’s favour. According to a New York Times exit poll, while 54 per cent of women overall voted for Clinton, against 43 per cent for Trump, 53 per cent of white women opted for him. That ratio even increases to 64 per cent if one isolates non-college educated white women. By contrast, 94 percent of black women and 68 per centof Hispanic women voted for Hillary. Overall, more women had backed Obama in 2012. How can this puzzling variation be explained?
Essentially, as the Washington Post has pointed out, many Republican women voted for Trump with the same motives as men, especially the 62% of non-college-educated voters who, for a variety of reasons, feel dispossessed of their own country. Second, the phenomenon of white women voting for a Republican candidate is not new. Obama got only 42 per cent of the white female vote in 2012, falling 4 points from 2008, while Mitt Romney got 56 per cent.
It would seem that analysts didn’t consider that gender is not the only marker of a woman’s identity. Given the data, it is clear that women’s “white-ness” prevailed over their gender. Trump’s campaign gave voice to a latent racist streak, harnessing fears about “immigrant rapists” invading the United States and its economy which resonate on both sides of the gender divide.
Yet, the forces which drew women towards Donald Trump do not adequately explain either how or why they were able to overcome his verbal abuse, marked absence of pro-women policies and multitude of sexual assault charges. Many justifying mechanisms have been offered to explain this “apparent blindness”. L.V. Andersen has argued that women internalize the sexualized narrative in which they are cast. As one female Trump supporter said, “When you’re heterosexual, you grope, okay? It’s a good thing”. For other women, Trump’s blatant misogyny is testament, as the pledge on the WomenVoteTrump website states, to the fact that he, “tells it like it is…he’s genuine and I think that’s a breath of fresh air;” Some women also see Trump’s comments as mere hyperbole from a man who otherwise fundamentally respects women, including his wife and daughters. Buzzfeed writer Anne Helen Peterson sketched the profile of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, a “sanitized, assuring, classy Trump who makes it less troublesome to vote for her father”. In other words, she provided many women a respectable reason to avoid voting for Hillary.
These mechanisms do not explain women’s motives, but are rallied to justify them. The women who voted Trump were, to a large extent, motivated by a deep-seated dislike for Hillary Clinton, seen as the embodiment of a much-hated establishment. Hillary’s paid speeches to Wall Street, the dubious donors of the Clinton Foundation and the persistent email scandal all gave fodder to Trumps’ depiction of Hillary as a “crooked” liar. Many women interviewed before the election also mentioned Bill Clinton’s past infidelities as a strong motive for rejection. One wonders with amazement how a candidate’s husband’s transgression could weigh against her opponent’s 24 allegations of sexual abuse. Or how a largely inconsequential mistake with the use of a private server could surpass a lifetime of legal and moral controversies, including the unprecedented refusal of a presidential candidate to release his tax returns.
Yet, despite the disproportionate evidence, many women voters remained convinced that there was something“fake” about Hillary herself. David Brooks of the New York Timeshints at what lurks beneath voters’ verbal rationale: “Clinton’s unpopularity is akin to the unpopularity of a workaholic…the professional role comes to dominate the personality and encroaches on the normal intimacies of the soul.” All other presidential candidates, he argues, have non-professional hobbies. Obama plays golf, Trump fondles women.
Perhaps, in a sad irony, Hillary’s defiance of traditional female norms also cost her women’s support. There is still something not-quite-normal about a woman who is intensely ambitious in her own right. If women are the repositories of sentiment, Hillary refuses to lay herself emotionally bare. She is also oblivious to the canons of the fashion industry, contrary to Melania Trump or even Michelle Obama, who, in their own way, meet the implicit standards of what is “authentically” female.
Even as Trump begins to build his administration in the aftermath of an election which has overturned every assumption of what voters value, it is worth asking to what extent political authenticity remains associated with masculinity. A female politician must be naturally feminine, and yet never “play the woman card”. Within this precariously constructed room of the permissible, women may roam freely. But the glass ceiling? That may still be a little too high up.
