Hillary Clinton has a long list of people, places, and things that she holds accountable for her stunning 2016 election loss. She blames the Russians, the FBI, Facebook, and the press. Anyone but herself, naturally.
She even blames white women, who she says only voted for Trump (by a nine-point margin, according to exit polls) because they were pressured by men.
“[Democrats] do not do well with white men, and we don’t do well with married, white women,” she said this weekend during an address at the India Today Conclave 2018 in Mumbai.
She added, “And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”
Keep in mind: This isn’t even the first time that she has posited this theory. In September 2017, she made the exact same slur against the white women who voted for her GOP opponent.
In case you didn’t think this was silly enough already, the Washington Post published an article this week suggesting Clinton’s version of events is correct.
“The former Democratic presidential nominee is correct that white women usually choose Republicans in presidential elections; they’ve done so since 2004,” the Post notes, specifically citing a recent Political Research Quarterly study. “And most white women without college degrees have backed the Republican in every presidential election since 2000.”
“And, like it or not,” it adds, Clinton’s claim that white women were pressured by men “may not be wrong. … there are studies that show that how white women vote, especially those who are married, is highly influenced by the politics of their husbands.”
One of the Political Research Quarterly study’s co-authors, Oregon State University assistant professor Kelsy Kretschmer, claimed last year: “We know white men are more conservative, so when you’re married to a white man you get a lot more pressure to vote consistent with that ideology.”
The Post also highlights Julie Kohler, the senior vice president for the Democracy Alliance, who wrote in February for the Nation that, “Systemic influences like marriage and evangelical Christianity interact with white supremacy to influence white women’s political behavior, through the explicit ideologies they propagate and the more insidious ways they reflect and perpetuate other structural inequalities.”
Well, okay then.
There’s a lot more in the Post report about how white women voters have economic anxieties following President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, and so on. But the author seems to forget that correlation is not causation. And so here are some crazy thoughts:
What if the white women who voted for Trump did so because, you know, they’re loyal Republicans? What if (gasp!) it isn’t at all a coincidence that they happened to marry men who were loyal Republicans as well?
What if the notion that women’s votes somehow belong to Democrats by default was always the product of leftist self-delusion and nothing more? What if these women voted for Trump of their own accord, in part because like many of the people who actually did vote for her, they were turned off by Clinton’s obvious and easily detectable insincerity and inauthenticity?
Lastly, let’s not avoid the fact that the Post’s analysis relies on a sanitized version of Clinton’s remarks.
The article’s headline reads, “Like it or not, studies suggest that Clinton may not be wrong on white women voting like their husbands.” But that’s not what the former secretary of state said. Clinton said specifically that women were pressured by their husbands, sons, etc. to vote for a certain candidate, which is a very different sort of theory.
All this work to defend an incomplete version of her comments.
That white women voted a lot like their spouses does not prove or even support Clinton’s theory that a certain voting bloc was “pressured” into voting against her. What a sad joke for the Post and those framing these studies to suggest otherwise.
