Well, was the US presidential election the great betrayal? One headline in the papers today sums up that particular point of view: “White women killed off the first female president”. Well! Loaded or what? How else might you put it: White women fail their daughters? White women let down their own sex? White women Bend the Arc of History the Wrong Way? How about: White women vote on the basis of their economic interests, immigration and foreign policy and on the basis of the actual merits of the candidates? Just a thought.
The notion that women vote as a gender bloc may not survive this election. Thank God. Look at the data. No fewer than 44 per cent of women voted for Trump and 55 per cent for Harris, the precise opposite of the percentages for men. But 44 per cent is not a negligible number, no? It’s tens of millions of Americans. And indeed when you break it down in terms of ethnicity, over half, 52 per cent of white women voted for Trump and 47 per cent for Harris (quite a few dissidents voted for neither), a shift of a mere three points from what Joe Biden managed. So, white women voted in greater numbers for Trump than women of other ethnic backgrounds – 37 per cent of Latino women did so.
This is not, to put it mildly, what anyone predicted, given that the pitch of Kamala Harris was almost entirely to her own sex. If there was one issue on which Harris was perfectly explicit – unlike, say, her views on immigration or the economy – it was abortion; the suggestion from her camp was that she’d be prepared to pack the Supreme Court to secure a return of the Roe v Wade situation.
Now, I got most of my information on the election from the BBC and the British papers, rather than, say, social media. And what the BBC told me time and time again was that young women were going to swing it for Kamala, nay, that older women were also turning out in droves for Kamala, on the issue of “reproductive rights” or “women’s health”. But that’s not how it turned out. Only a fifth of Kamala’s bloc was motivated by the abortion issue, possibly because the matter was being decided by individual states; on Trump’s side it was just six per cent. And nowhere did the BBC and other broadcasters ever suggest that women themselves have different takes on the abortion issue; one in three US women is pro-life but you’d never know that from the coverage.
So, what are we to make of the conspicuous failure of so many women to back the woman in the race? It may be that women, comprising as they do, a majority of the electorate and roughly half the human race, do not vote as a bloc. They do not vote for a woman on the basis she is a woman if she looks, as Kamala did, as if she didn’t know what her policy programme was. They vote for their own economic interests and perhaps also on the basis of other matters such as healthcare provision generally or the conflict in Gaza. In other words, might we take on board that women are not an homogenous group but as diverse as men? The attempt to divide the election on the basis of sex – angry young men versus feisty young women – is not, I think, healthy.
The ridiculous fuss about JD Vance’s observation about “childless cat ladies” was not the galvanising issue the pundits seemed to think. Julia Roberts did a very odd campaign ad for the Democrats just before the election in which she seemed to suggest that women should lie to their husbands about voting for Harris because “the voting booth is one of the few places where women still have a right to choose”. Eh? I should think it an impertinence for anyone in my household to ask me how I vote, though my children always do.
Donald Trump’s pitch to women at one rally, that they should get the lazy slob at home off the sofa – he meant, their husbands — to vote for him, did at least suggest agency on the part of the women concerned. And it’s interesting that in the Congressional elections many women did get elected: a quarter of the US Senate and 29 per cent of the House of Representatives are women.
No party should, then, assume that by dint of running a women they can count on women’s votes. But what’s interesting is that ethnic groups no longer can be taken for granted though more voted for Harris than Trump, especially black voters and especially black women. But over a third of Latino women (37 per cent) voted Republican and over half of Latino men did so. Given that the Democrats had assumed that the Latino vote was in the bag, it’s a big fat no to that. Half of other groups, notably Asians, voted Harris and 45 per cent of them voted Trump. That says something equally important: voters from assorted ethnic groups do not vote as a lump either. They may, in many cases, be motivated by precisely the same issues as everyone else.
Should white women, then, feel guilty at letting the side down? Absolutely not. Vote according to conscience; vote according to self interest. Just do not feel obliged to vote for a dud candidate on the basis she’s a woman.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
