Of course Trump nearly winning was the fault of females....

Would the participants of the Woman's March have been largely liberal feminists, or does it generally transcend the various 'camps'?

A few days ago a woke young man in my local progressive FB page used this very stat to order the white women (none who voted for Trump) to 'do better' .

The majority of us told him where he could take that thought.

Given that the author is of Indian origin, it is interesting that according to the NBC News exit poll 39% of Asian-American women voted for Trump. Now exit polls are unreliable to begin with and particularly unreliable for small demographic groups, but using them is what people seem to be doing so there it is.

The Huffington Post opinion piece is poorly reasoned. For instance, the women who marched in the Women's Marches are not the ones who voted for Trump. They are probably almost entirely those who voted for Biden. So it is incorrect to argue that some vast group of white women pretended to hate Trump and then voted for him. The ones who voted for him never did hate them.

I also found it interesting that the article describes even those white women who didn't vote for Trump in pejorative terms (eating brunch in yoga pants), and that those women are assigned the overall responsibility for how other white women voted.

I get that people do that all the time, right-wingers demanding that moderate Muslims somehow monitor and control Islamists or Europeans holding all Americans responsible for the 2016 election outcomes, including all those who worked and voted against Trump. But it is still an annoying thought pattern.

Thanks for the Washington Post link, StandWitch. Really interesting.

I have the impression that few political journalists, and even fewer opinion writers, have a really firm background in mathematics and statistics. This is unfortunate because they have the power, for good or ill, to construct the narratives people use to understand our societies and other individuals in them.

there is a similar piece of idiocy here medium.com/an-injustice/dear-white-women-who-voted-for-trump-75b5ad7742c7

This is from "An Injustice!

A new intersectional publication, geared towards voices, values, and identities!
"

She says "White women, we need to do better. We are part of the problem of white supremacy and oppression. We need to put people of color firmly at the front of our minds and hearts and everlasting privilege and listen and learn to be true allies. "

as if there is any 'we' in 'part of the problem'.

The white women who voted for Trump believe that SHE is the problem. They may be anti-abortion, some will be racist, but it's unlikely that any of them was confused about what Donald Trump represents and accidentally voted for him while secretly yearning for a campfire Kumbaya singalong and social justice for all. No, they voted for Trump because he was the best choice according to their values, which obviously are not those of 'Injustice magazine'.

The biggest common with all these claims is that the idiots shouting about them have no idea if they are true or not. Is there a statistically significant difference between 2020 and 2016?

And this year the exit poll would have been absolute TRASH and only really STUPID people would use them, because we know that Trump ranted like an idiot about mail-in votes being trash for MONTHS, which resulted in election-day voting being hugely Republican-biased, while mail-in ballots had a large Democrat surplus, so they had to make a bunch of adjustments

The claim about white women is most likely false and these people are fucking stupid.

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/10/dont-trust-exit-polls-this-explains-why/

"This year the NEP suggests that just 65 percent of voters were White and 34 percent were White without a four-year college degree. These estimates are dramatically smaller than what other research has found during prior elections. For example, the States of Change project — a series of reports that I co-authored with Ruy Teixeira and Bill Frey — found that 74 percent of voters were White in 2016, and 44 percent were White non-college."

IOW, because we know that white people are most likely to vote Republican, and other races less likely, it follows if you falsely claim that the proportion of the electorate voting that is white is around 14% smaller than it actually is, then you will tend to overstate the extent to which all groups voted Trump, relative to the national total.

The only thing to be true so far is Trump has 47.5% to Biden's 50.8% (this will widen as I understand it as the votes continue to get counted), and to arrive at these numbers you have to essentially adjust raw numbers in accordance with your estimate of voter turn out by group, and the size of that group in the electorate.

A simple example is if you said

64% white non-Hispanic @ 55% Trump from raw data
36% not @ 30% Trump

that comes to 46%. So you adjust that up a little and you claim '56.5% of white voters voted Trump and 31.5% of non-white' to reach 47.5%
But if you use 74% vs 26% for the white/non-white voting electorate, then you end up saying that only 54% voted Trump, which is a full 2.5% lower.

@RufustheSniggeringReindeer I would have said the same of my dear old mum, but then she blindsided us all by voting for Frank Field’s Social Justice Party in the last election. Fed up with the incompetence of BoJo et al, apparently. So there’s hope yet!

The Huff Post article is a strange one. There’s almost zero chance that the actual people she’s talking about will be reading such a liberal publication, so all it will achieve is to make liberal white woman feel guilty by association. Maybe that’s the point? Blaming people for how their neighbours vote is pretty fucking outrageous.

Maybe they see the role differently?

It's also quite different I suspect if you don't really like any of the leaders.
Local candidates are also a factor. I wonder if there are different feelings about the importance of, or different typical levels of engagement with, local representatives, among different groups? That's not really a factor with the American president of course.

My dad has voted tory for ever and will always vote tory, i cant think of anyone i could put as leader of the conservatives who he wouldnt vote for!

That's an interesting comment. I don't think many (any ?) Conservatives would change their vote away from Conservative just because of who the leader was yet obviously many Labour voters did, including me. Conversely I'm sure Blair as an individual turned voters in his favour.

The Huffing Paint is an awful rag.

Exit polls are a bunch of nonsense anyway. It is so flawed that it cannot give any certain % of who voted for who.
It’s just posting people with clipboards outside voting places that then have to stop and question a not random sample of people coming out from voting. So you have many biases at play that skew results

• time of day the exit polls were done
• State, city and neighbourhood chosen for voting place exit polls
• the people willing and with time to stop and do a survey after voting
• the biases of the interviewers in which people they approach to ask
• the assumption that the people interviewed will tell the truth

I have no idea what most Trump supporters - whether male or female - think because I can't remember ever hearing from them. I'm not talking about the supporters who go to rallies and make all the noise, I mean the ordinary, quiet supporters, who I assume form the majority, the ones who say nothing when they're called stupid and racist, keep their heads down and then give the world the finger in the polling booth.

In four years, the only time I can remember anyone in the mainstream media seriously try and get under their skin was in the Ed Balls documentary, which played it for laughs but at least tried to actually engage. Admittedly this was in the UK but I don't get the impression it was much different in the USA. The lack of curiosity astounds me.

The first problem is these people can't see past these id politics categories well enough to understand that people have all kinds of personal interests and beliefs about the world that aren't about their racial, sexual, or sex category. In some cases they don't even care much at all about those categories.

The second problem, however, is there are a lot of people who are convinced that Trump is a sort of demon, and that nothing his platform said, and nothing his polices (or even lack thereof) accomplished, could ever be better for anyone than any policy by even the worst democrat president. Unless you happen to be served by racism and fascism.

From their perspective it's actually logically and materially impossible that anyone could be better served by something Trump did. Which is clearly a superstitious perspective.

And what morris just said

I now split the republican voters into two separate groups

A minority of trump supporters and the majority group of republicans some of who may well hold their nose to vote for trump or see him, for all his (many many many many...) faults, as better than the alternative there are probably more ‘ors’ but i can’t think of any

My dad has voted tory for ever and will always vote tory, i cant think of anyone i could put as leader of the conservatives who he wouldnt vote for!

Can't say I'm scratching my head too much about why women vote for a misogynist. Women have always voted for misogynists, mostly because women, like men, vote on issues such the economy etc.

There was a black female trump voter on the radio last week, she said Trump is an unpleasant personality but at least he doesn't want black babies to be killed, ie be aborted. Huge numbers of women are socially conservative, and see a vote for the Democrats as a vote against their moral or religious values, regardless of the personality of the figurehead on their own side.

By all means, we need to look at why people vote the way they do. But I don't like the idea of holding women more accountable than men. It feels like blame. Ultimately in a free election women can vote with their own conscience, even when their choice appals us.

And 'fuck off Karen' is a way of blaming women (often white women) for the actions of men. The article doesn't use this phrase but as they, it's a dogwhistle.

It's far too simplistic to take one take one facet of a person's personality and equate that to one facet of a politicians policy

Absolutely. One of the reasons Trump won first time round, as we all know, was working class people felt the Democrats had nothing to say to them. It was economics, not feminist credentials they were looking for.

It's far too simplistic to take one take one facet of a person's personality and equate that to one facet of a politicians policy.

Most people dont go around by being a Woman, or Black, or a Lesbian.
Often they're Workers, or Patients, or Mums, or grappling with the endless void, or picking litter in the park, or worrying about what's best for their ailing parents, or all of the above on any given day.

That's the problem with Wokeness, simplistic and reductive and then berates you if you're not.

Conveniently the comments are closed on that article so we can't call her out on it

Not to mention those women who wore the "you can grab me by the pussy" t shirts.

What you mean is it puzzles you when people are for something which you consider is clearly against their best interests.

Well yes, it is in my opinion. But the anti women things Trump has said and done are clear. Yet millions of women not only vote for him, but attend the rallies, wear the caps, shout and scream at people in the street for him, etc.

It always puzzles me when people are for something which is clearly against their best interests

What you mean is it puzzles you when people are for something which you consider is clearly against their best interests.

In the case of Trump the Floridian Latino voters chose him over Biden because of their fear of anything resembling socialism. They might be utterly wrong in seeing Biden as socialist but that was the decisive factor.

I'd like to know why so many women voted for Trump when he is clearly a misogynist. Wouldn't you?

It always puzzles me when people are for something which is clearly against their best interests. Like how my lesbian friend is a Catholic. Or why, when you see these anti abortion protests on TV, there are a lot of very angry, vocal women there.
People are strange.

I'd like to know why so many women voted for Trump when he is clearly a misogynist. Wouldn't you?

What does 'Fuck you Karen' mean?