Why Did Women Vote For Trump?

How Did The Pundits Get It So Wrong?

Political pundits assumed that Hillary Clinton would beat Trump in 2016.

The media reported Trump’s sexist, racist, and hateful remarks, such as:

• Trump discussing how he couldn’t help kissing beautiful women and vulgarly adding that he could “grab them by the pussy”
• Trump’s racist remarks made while working on his book, that “laziness is a trait in blacks” and he doesn’t like blacks to handle his money. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump reportedly said. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

Newspapers and magazines jumped to the conclusion that women would rebel against Trump’s nasty twitter attacks on women and would vote for Clinton.

But the political pundits got it wrong. They believed the gender gap would mean a win for Clinton.

They were partially right. According to the Pew Research Center:

• Black women (and most men) did vote for Clinton.
• And the majority of Hispanic women (and men) voted for Clinton.

And as predicted, white men voted for Trump. But white women split their votes between Trump and Clinton. Why?

Pundits relied on polls to make their predictions. And they had assumed that women would vote as a bloc and that therefore, women would reject Trump.

But now there’s more than just media polling data to investigate. The 2016 American National Election Studies surveys and interviews are available.

In 2018, researchers Setzler and Yanus dove into the data. They wanted to find out if women’s backgrounds influenced their votes for Trump:

Was it women’s political party, marital status, religion, region, class, education or age that affected their votes?

Did white women vote for Trump due to their allegiance to their political party? Or were they voting in concert with their husbands, or based on their religion?

Or, like some men, were women attracted to Trump’s racism, sexism, and authoritarian posturing?

In their research study “Why Did Women Vote for Donald Trump?”, Setzler and Yanus discovered that women that supported Trump:

were not particularly stalwart partisans, and neither were they any more Southern, working-class, evangelical, or white than male Trump voters.

These women weren’t hardline Republicans. So why did they vote for Trump?

For the same reason many men voted for Trump.

Women were attracted to Trump’s protectionist stance. Trump warned that we’d better preserve what we had.

He hammered the message that we had to keep our borders safe before we lost even more to illegal immigrants.

And women embraced Trump’s message that we should be protecting “traditional family values.”

The fear mongering paid off.

Trump women voters were not interested in equality, anything but.

Setzler and Yanus compared non-Trump female voters responses to women who supported Trump. Female Trump supporters:

Had the highest levels of racist resentment and

also had the highest levels of sexism.

So it worked to appeal to racist fears of the “criminal hordes” invading the borders. Not only did men believe it, but women as well.

What did other researchers find out?

Researchers Cassess and Barnes reached a different conclusion after crunching the numbers. In their article, “Reconciling Sexism and Women’s Support for Republican Candidates,” Cassess and Barnes found two critical characteristics of white women who voted for Trump. They were:

1) not college-educated and were

2) in lower income brackets.

Researchers Cassess and Barnes surmised that white women with less education and money (and opportunities) wanted to keep the advantages they had compared to non-white women. Trump liked to emphasize the “threat” that immigrants and non-whites were to “Americans.” Remember Trump’s candidacy announcement, when he said:

Mexico was “bringing their worst people” to the U.S. who were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.”

But what about Trump’s sexist remarks, and his attacks on female politicians? Why didn’t that upset women supporting Trump?

Cassess and Barnes also found that women who voted for Trump were less likely to believe that systemic gender discrimination existed. And they were more likely to support traditional gender roles. If Trump was just one man with a bad attitude toward women, they didn’t feel he was a threat to them.

Instead of the popular refrain that angry, white, working-class males elected Trump, it was a groundswell of women voters who embraced Trump’s racist rhetoric as well.

The political pundits didn’t bother to research how different women vote in our society. They assumed American women would vote the same way. Wrong!

And the notion that women are morally superior to men is obviously outdated. Women can and do harbor racist and sexist views and act on them.

Not only do we have male voters supporting authoritarian, racist, sexist leaders, but we also have American women who do too.

Trump proved that in the United States, appealing to our racism and sexism was the best strategy for winning the Presidency.

In 2016, women were just as likely as men to be swayed by prejudice, hate, and fear.

No one can assume how women will vote in the future.

Instead of trying to convert white women, Democrats need to turn non-voters into voters.

Otherwise, they may end up with more of what they have now in the White House.

Here’s more about how women voted: