How the Media Got the Story on Female Voters So Wrong in 2016

[Female reporters] had heads full of academic theory and millennial angst but little life experience with—and virtually no interest in—military wives from South Carolina or Walmart managers from Staten Island, who also happen to fall into the category “women.” Nor did the new luminaries or their bosses seem to notice that the latter group far outnumbered their own rarefied crowd. Luckily for them, when the 2016 election came along, it seemed designed by a goddess determined to make reality conform to their vision of it. Social media had already let loose a seething crowd of loutish young men who enjoy nothing more than taunting the popular girls; their tweets and posts, ranging from the obnoxious to the genuinely threatening, seemed to prove the worst about white male iniquity. The election itself, pitting a credentialed feminist godmother against a rude Alpha male, was the best gift of all. The Hollywood Access tape, in which Trump could be heard boasting of grabbing women’s private parts; the steady march of women who came forward to accuse Trump of abuse; the disgust of some high-level Republican women, from Ted Cruz staffer Amanda Carpenter to New Hampshire senator Kelly Ayotte: the articles could practically write themselves. And so they did: a slew of titles like “Republican Women Are Done with Trump,” (Politico’s Katy Glueck) and “Republican Women Feel Betrayed by Their Party” (Slate’s Michelle Goldberg) popped up like so many weeds after a thunderstorm. Still, even as Trump looked headed for defeat, the experts’ gender-identity politics was leading them astray. Plenty of women were not done with Trump. That’s not to say that they didn’t mind the candidate’s “locker room talk.” But, not filtering all reality through the framework of “patriarchy” or “male privilege,” they didn’t see it as disqualifying.