This Election Day, white women are the new Red Scare. With Russia’s legitimately sinister but ultimately unsuccessful effort to tamper with our election results already scapegoated in 2016, the new left-wing bogeyman will become white women if the “blue wave” doesn’t prove as all-encompassing as promised.
The Right has a steadfast fall guy, rightly or wrongly, in media bias. We’ve seen the Left, instead, try to reinvent excuses for the past two years. But it initially chose fake news, only to realize that Republicans would effectively hijack it. Then came Russia, followed by the laments of the electoral college.
Leading up to today, two narratives have emerged from the Left. First is the statistically probable one — namely that the blue wave is significantly contingent on suburban white women swinging left, in tandem with voter turnout. On the other side of the coin is the excuse: If Democrats lose, it’s because fragile, complicit white women couldn’t leave the kitchen long enough to vote against their husbands.
This isn’t a straw man. It’s their actual argument. Tamika Mallory, Women’s March organizer and Louis Farrakhan BFF, calls the demographic trend of white women voting for Republicans their “Becky situation.”
“Dear white women: Here’s how to step up for women of color,” wrote Victoria Rodriguez at Mashable. (Spoiler alert: Vote “intersectional,” read: Democrat.)
Pod Save America warned the “47 percent of White Women who didn’t sell us out” to convince the 53 percent who voted for Trump to go blue.
Best yet, Jen Kirkman warned white women, “Vote like your husbands aren’t watching.” Because naturally, all white women still live in a kitchen in Victorian England. Or modern-day Iran.
And as for the white women who don’t follow the blue line? Ex-GOP strategist Cheri Jacobus says they are a part of his “rancid, racist base,” comprising solely of “uneducated white men (and the women who make them their sandwiches).”
In all fairness, corners of the MAGA-lyte Right have engaged in equally patronizing pandering when it comes to courting suburban moms. “I know you hate taking advice from someone who doesn’t buy soy milk and organic bison meat, but if you would have listened to me about the Rumchata shots at the club’s summer party, you wouldn’t have jumped into the water hazard on the 18th hole,” is an actual line in an American Greatness piece calling for suburban women to vote Republican in the midterm elections.
But it’s only the Left condescending to white women while also preparing to vilify them if it loses.
Demographics are not destiny. Some issues, like gay marriage or public funding, cleanly fall along demographic lines based on whom they affect. But for the most part, demographics are not a monolith. White women didn’t support President Trump because of their race any more than black men’s support has markedly increased for him because of theirs. There’s no doubt that the Richard Spencers and Farrakhans of the country view the world through racial lines, but the overwhelming majority of the country doesn’t.
What’s more, Trump isn’t even on the ballot. If you’re upset by him, does that mean you’ll necessarily vote for the local Democratic candidate, who stands for things you normally vote against?
If Democrats truly wished to castigate Trump’s troubling racial rhetoric, they could actually do so in a constructive fashion by jumping on his willingness to enact criminal justice reform, an issue that would undoubtedly benefit tens of thousands of incarcerated people of color and their families. But that would, of course, require working with the other side instead of constantly finding new villains to demonize.
