US Elections Women's Fault/Responsibility

Thanks, Fermat! I'm feeling pretty good this morning. I didn't get everything on my wish list, but the House of Representatives is not nothing! Also encouraged by lots of good ballot measures passing that should make elections fairer in several states in the future.

I found the numbers I wanted yesterday, about evangelical women:

www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-politics/getting-know-white-voters

Meanwhile, among women, if you remove evangelicals, white women with and without a college degree have the same (very low) opinion of the president.

White evangelical women without a college degree give Trump a 68 percent job approval rating, while those with a degree give him a much lower, though still positive 51 percent approval rating. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval among white, non-evangelical women without a college degree is 35 percent, just five points higher than the 30 percent approval rating he gets from white, non-evangelical college-educated women.

Looks like the polls got it right for once. Congratulations to the US Democrat voters on here! (And MD can still shove their article where the son don't shine - first off, women are not collectively responsible for all the ills of the world, however popular that belief may be among a certain subsection of men, and second, it didn't happen this time - women swung something like 20% to the Democrats).

Also, I needed to come back to address some of the earlier comments: it is simply not true that Democrats have no message or only a not-Trump message. Most Democratic candidates haven't mentioned Trump at all in their ads; they figure that stuff is baked in already. (And of course Democrats have no single leader right now; in the US when a party loses the presidential election it doesn't have a new leader until it nominates someone for the next presidential contest...)

Instead they are running on health care above all, including calls for single-payer from many candidates:

thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/414809-juan-williams-healthcare-is-a-big-winner-for-dems

With support for ObamaCare as their top talking point — and some among them even calling for a more extensive, single-payer system — Democrats are projected to capture the House majority.

An October survey from National Nurses United found 225 Democratic House candidates running campaigns with explicit calls for a single-payer, government healthcare plan.

Climate change, increasing the minimum wage and making the tax system less regressive, improving public education, gun safety, campaign finance reform & women's reproductive freedom are themes in Democratic campaigns across the country, even in more conservative districts.

In 2018 Democrats are running teachers, doctors, conservationists, veterans, child advocates, voting rights activists... a huge number of people who never saw themselves as candidates or activists have been energized by the nightmare of the past two years, and they are working their tails off to make CHANGE happen right now.

Women's March Round 2

MB should read Michelle Goldberg in today's NYT:

www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/opinion/midterms-trump-women-liuba-grechen-shirley.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion

The Women's Revolt

...Leading it all, of course, have been progressive women. The Resistance group Indivisible says that women have organized most of its chapters. It was overwhelmingly women who responded to the dystopian pageant of Trump’s inauguration with the largest single-day protests in American history. African-American women mobilized in Alabama to save us all from a Senator Roy Moore. There are 260 women running for Congress, 200 of them Democrats, several of them making motherhood a central part of their political pitch. According to a recent CNN poll, women prefer Democratic control of Congress by 27 percentage points.

...

“I think we’re going to transform not just the party, but transform Congress, transform the way government works,” Grechen Shirley said of all the novice politicians running as Democrats. “When you have more voices at the table, you’ll have a more equitable society.”

tl;dr: Women been resisting.

I'm a white woman who votes in every US election, and it is news to me that my vote counts more than men's votes. Thanks for the education Munroe.

On health care, special mention goes to $%&* Joe Lieberman, who got elected Senator as an Independent after Connecticut Democrats kicked him out of the party (well, voted him out in the primary). He seems repaid all Americans with the special f-u of killing (by threatening to filibuster) the public option that was part of the original ACA and would presumably have done much to keep costs down.

Fermat, yes, that Guardian article is an excellent summary of the Republicans' decades-long project to make the US less democratic (in the small-d sense, not just the big D one). And their efforts work in two important ways: obviously, they literally block would-be Democratic voters, but they also demoralize and depress people who would otherwise turn out to vote D by validating the notion that "your vote doesn't matter anyway." "The system is rigged" etc etc

This is one reason the governors' races and state legislature races are so vitally important. It is up to the states to gerrymander or not, to run free and fair elections or not, to purge 'undesirable' voters or ensure access to all potential voters. So much rides on those state leg elections that aren't "sexy" like a presidential race.

I am encouraged to see many, many Democratic and non-partisan efforts fired up and active in countering voter suppression this cycle. When the ND Indian voter suppression measures were announced, a call went out for donations to help voters get tribal addresses allocated before the election. It raised $100,000 in a couple of hours; $500,000 in a couple of days. Similarly, LOTS of groups are on the ground in Georgia, NC, FL, and elsewhere, all trying to protect the vote. I believe people are waking up to the fact that if their votes didn't matter, the other side wouldn't be trying so damn hard to keep them from voting.

This (on voter suppression and gerrymandering) is interesting if depressing:
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/04/america-minority-rule-voter-suppression-gerrymandering-supreme-court

I'd be interested to know whether this looks like an accurate picture to US Mumsnetters.

Re. the claim that Obama had a supermajority for the first two years of his first term - not actually so. A supermajority requires 60 seats. Due to a combination of the Republicans challenging the election of one Democrat senator (which took months to clear up), illness of another, death of a third (and subsequent election of a Republican), Obama only had a supermajority for just over a couple of months. Most of the failings in the ACA (and my Democrat voting US friends are pretty open that for much of the population it didn't work that we'll and in fact left some of the low income working poor with less cover) were due to horse trading with the Republicans to get something - anything- through both houses.

Am not caught up on America. Reading this thread (and ignoring Bergdof) is it (simplistically) that a vote for Trump will keep/reinstate sex but will worsen/remove health care for poor people?

But a vote for Democrats erodes biological sex even further but keeps healthcare?

No.

I mean first of all, the US system is pretty different from the UK. The President is the leader of his party, but not in the way that a Prime Minister is. The executive branch is separate from the legislative and legislators have more power to act independently of the President (though the craven GOP congress has basically chosen not to, so far).

Trump is proposing, by executive action, to undo the guidance Obama imposed (also by executive action) that forced federally funded schools to re-interpret Title IX's "sex" to mean "gender identity." This was in my opinion a nonsense by Obama (and I supported him generally), so what Trump is saying actually makes sense. Go back to the original intent of the law. In 1972, everyone including legislators understood what sex meant!

Anyway, Trump has the power to do this whether Democrats win one house, both houses, or no houses today. Today's vote has absolutely no impact on what he will do on that matter.

The reason he apparently raised it now was to try to drive up turnout for GOP congressional candidates, painting Democrats as extreme. A few Dems have taken the bait, but overall my impression is that in the face of so many bigger issues flying around right now, this landed with a thud.

As for health care, yes, if the GOP wins they will try once again to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and they have no real plan to replace it.

I agree it probably mostly is Christian fundamentalists in the white women/ black men group voting for Trump. I think it is less a vote for Trump though and more specifically a vote against abortion rights.

It must have hurt voting for someone you know you wouldn't let your daughter alone with, or that would probably be fine with having your black son shot for getting too close to his property.

As for white women, I am trying to put my hands on the stat that shows how much of a factor evangelical Christianity is in that overall 52% white women voting for Trump. (It is huge).

Here are the CNN exit polls from 2016:
www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls

According to this, white women overall made up 37% of the electorate and voted for Trump 52% to 43% (ugh). However, white born-again or evangelical Christians made up a full 26% of the electorate and voted for Trump 80% to 16%.

Look at these numbers alongside the college/non-college numbers and you can see that Trump absolutely got (and still has) strong support from white women who did not go to college and identify as born-again or evangelical Christians.

The issue is not exactly that "white women" need to do better. It's that a significant number of white girls in our country are being raised in religious fundamentalist communities (yes I know not all evangelicals are right-wing, but let's face it, it's most of them) that actively close themselves off from the rest of society, refusing to read "fake news," and often withdrawing from the public school system.

Certainly the women in these communities bear some responsibility for passing patriarchy and bigotry down to the next generation, but to lay the blame chiefly on them when it's the MEN in these groups Mike Pence, for example who benefit from their iron grip at the top of these sex and race power hierarchies, is just nuts.

Bergdof's next series of tweets:

'White women, my eyebrows are not on fleek this morning and it's all your fault. Do better.'

'White women, I saw a really sad looking pigeon today, and it's all your fault. Do better'

Ack.

There is so much this thread that is raising my blood pressure this fine Election Day morning...

First, Munroe can kindly butt out. I know of no American clamoring for a British model to weigh in with diktats on our election.

Second, the poll Trump seems to have been referring to when claiming 40% support from black people is Rasmussen's daily tracking poll one day in October.

Two points on that: Rasmussen is a partisan Republican outfit, and this was a daily tracking poll, not a completed formal poll.

So for a formal poll, callers will be in the field over a period of days to get a large enough sample for statistical significance. And they'll try hard to get enough respondents from each of the groups they're studying to make each sub-category statistically significant. This is impossible to do in one day.

A tracking poll is something different. It takes a daily "temperature" or mood of the public. As that changes over time it can be interesting to watch. But no one who understands polls, or math, would point to the inevitably small sample of a sub-category of respondents in a daily tracking poll and make sweeping claims that they represent the views of that group overall.

I can't find the number of respondents to that poll, so "40%" might mean 2 of the five black people they called that day approved of Trump.

The number is not at all in line black approval in the masses of polls we've had over the past 2 years, and there is no reason to believe there has been some amazing sudden shift because black people now love Brett Kavanaugh and caging children at the border.

Oh, and the Washington Times is part of the right wing news machine, like Fox News. It is not an impartial source.

I will come back later to address some of the Democratic stuff.

Am not caught up on America. Reading this thread (and ignoring Bergdof) is it (simplistically) that a vote for Trump will keep/reinstate sex but will worsen/remove health care for poor people?

But a vote for Democrats erodes biological sex even further but keeps healthcare?

If so, what fucking shitty choice.

1. Premiums went up when Obama was still in office. You must know that, too.
2. 70% of US American voters want Medicare for all but the Democrat politicians are bribed way too well to support it.
3. This is the reason why Democrats did not even introduce Single payer when they had a supermajority.
4. Democrat politicians are paid so well that they'd rather lose than win on this election winner that Single payer is and lose the Big Pharma bribes.
5. The best hope for Dems is 1/2 of 1/3 because they consistently shit on their base for money.

That's why they choose themselves faux 'causes' that do not hurt their donors, like Russiagate and TWAW, while playing along with wars, huge military budget, the exploitation of people by financialized Health Care, the deregulation of Wall Street Obama couldn't even be arsed to reintroduce Glass Steagall with his supermajority - after the melt down of high finance in 2008 gave him every mandate to do so. Because he was bought, too.

I am so over this learned helplessness of Corporate Democrats 'but we can't do this, we need to be cautious'. Newsflash: This shit triangualtion never has and never will win you enough votes to change anything. Obama won because he did not sell himself as the grand triangulator, but because people falsely believed that he would upset the apple cart.

Rent is too damn high. Might as well go homeless, eh?

Premiums are increasing because while the insurance companies negotiated a deal to get paid, Trump cut subsidies. That means average citizens pay those extra costs. If I come off as condescending, it's because I know shit like that. Those extra costs were planned, by Trump, to make you decide homeless is better.

Democrats cannot go in for SP right now because Democrats do not run any part of government, and their best hope for tomorrow is 1/2 of 1/3.

And there's the whole "it's not single payer so I'm gonna stomp my foot" crew still around too.

That is quite condescending, considering those people 'stomp their foot' for no other reason than that people even with Obama care often cannot access health care, because they cannot afford the 10000$ deductable that the plan they were able to afford entails.

With your statement you literally shit on people who are de facto not covered while paying into an Obamacare plan.

Sorry, posted too soon. Democrats can't go for single payer right now. I kinda assume people know it's only one house possible.

M4A is what they're touting for 2020, but then there are the newly stacked with conservative activist judges.

We shall have to see.

Redtoothbrush this is true.

And there's the whole "it's not single payer so I'm gonna stomp my foot" crew still around too.

Plus Trump is the PT Barnum of politics. No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

LillyoftheCentralValley
As long as Democrats do not go all in for Single Payer, Heath Care won't win them much. While helpful for people with preexisting conditions, Obamacare the rising premium costs have pretty much made it unaffordable for others. The way corporate Democrats ignore their base on this is appalling.

Healthcare might be a leading issue.

However there are too many Americans who STILL are angry about their Affordable Care being removed but are adament that they want ObamaCare ditched.

Um, not to diss too much, but health care is the leading issue.

GOP wants to take it away. Democrats want to keep it.

That's why we got the Big Lie about pre-existing conditions. "Of course we want to make sure you get coverage if you have a pre-existing condition. Don't look behind the curtain and see that wizard who voted to take your coverage away 90 times, or that lawsuit we have in the courts to give insurance companies the right to discriminate against sick people right now".

People who pay attention that's always a big if - but people who pay attention even know the GOP is so bad on this issue the insurance companies have opposed what they're trying to do.