The media keeps touting the headline “Bernie beats Hillary in women!” Or some such variation of the idea that Hillary is a dismal failure who can’t even attract female voters the way Obama attracted black voters in ’08. Forgetting that Hillary polled better than Obama in black voters and they only gradually started voting for him in huge numbers after Iowa. Which is perhaps a misleading analogy since…
One: women are actually a majority of the electorate, which some people keep forgetting. I can understand the confusion though since the United States is pitiful in the percentage of gender representation in politics. People who proudly touted the statistic that this current congress features more women than any other in history are perhaps forgetting that women have had the right to vote for 100 years and congress is still not even a quarter female despite more than half the country being women. Despite women’s suffrage being passed nearly 100 years ago (if Hillary is running for re-election in 2020 it’ll be exactly that) there still hasn’t been a woman president and the last one to get remotely close was Geraldine Ferraro as Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984. A damn long time to be left waiting…
Two: gender-politics (and discrimination) are sometimes slippier and harder to nail down than racial politics and oppression. Sexism may be subtler and take strange-bedfellows partnerships like the fact that Bernie Sander’s “progressive,” rabid young fan base (many male) are basically saying the same attacks on Hillary that the GOP has for years. It seems odd that Salon.com and HuffPost are no different in their Hillary attacks than the Washington Post or Faux News. Odd, until you really think about the common thing they’re fighting against. When Mark Ruffalo is saying he’s voting for Bernie “for his daughters” you have to question the self-awareness of a Hollywood liberal male “feminist” who thinks his daughters would want him to say he actively campaigned against the first female president.
Three: Since women are a majority group, their political beliefs are much more diverse and for every woman that likes Sarah Palin, you might find one that loves Nancy Pelosi or neither. In fact, we’ll call the “neither” category “women under 30.”
Four: The only category of women Hillary loses is women under 30. Every other category shows her with an advantage over Sanders, and that gap is enormous with women over 60. As for why women under 30 wouldn’t support Hillary–assuming they aren’t Republicans–well…any attempt at an answer to that is probably just going to get slapped with a label of “sexist.” So I can just hope that this primary is over sooner than later and they still can move closer to Hillary before November.