There are so many dispiriting and frightening threads of our national story right now that hope can feel elusive, and panic just another headline away. The coronavirus pandemic has killed thousands, sickened millions, and shattered the American economy, even as President Trump continues to insist it will just go away, and as the national response is crippled by his indifference and incompetence. Meanwhile, the president and the GOP more and more openly engage in direct attacks on democratic governance, perhaps most chillingly in the president’s effort to subvert vote-by-mail and preemptively call into question the results of the November election.
These are sound reasons to be worried — and also why it’s important to pay attention to reports like this one from The Washington Post showing that most Americans clearly do not accept these failures of governance. The Post describes how Republicans face an overwhelming loss of support among female voters as the election approaches; this is reflected both in high-level statistics, such as Joe Biden’s current 23% lead over Trump (in comparison, Hilary Clinton won the female vote by 13%), and in evidence that many women who previously supported the president have now turned against him.
Exacerbating this threat to the GOP is that the president has created an environment in which “many Republican women in Congress were reluctant to criticize Trump or party leaders publicly, fearful of triggering the president’s wrath.” Another helpful way of putting this is that the president’s misogyny would lead him to denigrate and threaten women who called him out on his misogyny; the basic problem keeps Republican women in fear of talking about it — surely an abusive dynamic. (The article also reminds us of the staggering fact that only 13 GOP House members are female.)
And among ordinary Republican-leaning female voters, the pandemic appears to have played a decisive role in undermining previous support for the president:
The exodus of women has been particularly distressing to Republican strategists because many of the women are die-hard conservatives on issues such as abortion and police power who have reached a tipping point when it comes to Trump.
Once willing to overlook controversies because their families were doing well, the security these voters felt with the booming economy is now gone because of the pandemic, the pollsters say. Now they are worried about their children, their elderly parents and their livelihoods — and they don’t see Trump as a leader who can protect them.
In other words, the overwhelming realities of Trump’s misrule — his incompetence, his inability to perform the basic presidential function of protecting the American population against threats — have broken through to millions of women voters. That this is occurring in the face of daily propaganda and misinformation from the White House and right-wing media is remarkable. Particularly heartening is that these realities are reversing previously-held positions about the president: according to Republican focus groups, previous GOP supporters “were shocked by Trump’s performances [at news conferences], belying the image of a successful businessman they though they had voted for in 2016.” Likewise, his “law and order” rhetoric appears to be failing, and GOP strategists see women “increasingly blaming him for the chaos and uptick in racial tensions, as well as the increasingly devastating pandemic,” rather than seeing him as a president who will protect them and the country.
The piece notes that the president recently tweeted, “Suburban Housewives of America. . . Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!” Critics noted the anachronism of the 1950’s-retro “suburban housewives” phrasing, and indeed the tweet is illuminating for the wishful thinking it contains. If only women were all passive homemakers requiring the support and protection of a man! This was hardly the full truth in the 1950’s, and this is even less true today. I wonder if it also provides a clue to a potentially fatal flaw in Donald Trump’s low-brow authoritarianism, which like other far-right movements seeks to impose a clear hierarchy of power in which men rank higher than women. A majority of white women were comfortable enough with the implicit promise of such a worldview in 2016 that they voted for Donald Trump; but after four years of seeing this attitude in action, I wonder if many of them are no longer so ready to say goodbye to modernity and ideals of equal rights.