US Elections Women's Fault/Responsibility

[ShotsFired]

But of course Trump is all women's fault.

Of course.

Fuck off Bergdorf.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wrong kind of women though. Obviously.

Women's March Round 2

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.

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).

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.