“It’s a bright new dawn for rapists in America,” was my first thought on Wednesday morning.
Horrifying? Yes. Wrong? No. An overwhelming number of white and Latino men joined with a majority of white women to elect Donald Trump to a second presidential term, even though he has been found guilty of sexual battery in a court of law. Another 28 women have come forward to allege that they were groped and sexually harassed by him.
Trump himself admitted in a taped conversation that he is powerless to not sexually assault women. It’s like his thing.
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Sadly, none of this is news. And none of it mattered. Apparently, Republicans didn’t care that Trump is an adjudicated rapist. Elon Musk and Joe Rogan didn’t care that he’s an adjudicated rapist. The Fraternal Order of Police, which endorsed Trump, didn’t care that he was an adjudicated rapist—as well as a convicted (but not yet sentenced) felon.
One silver lining, at least for Hillary Clinton, is that after she fell short of the presidency in 2016, both the media and Democrats heaped blame on her for assuming Wisconsin was in the bag. But a visit to Milwaukee in the final week of the campaign didn’t change the outcome in 2024 for Kamala Harris.
So the experiment is over and the results are in: the United States of America hates women. Thanks to the election, we even know which groups hate women the most. These percentages will shift some with final tallies, but there’s a clear winner in the race: white men. They voted 59% for Trump. Hispanic/Latino men came in second with 54% for Trump. And last, but not least, white women voted 52% for Trump.
White supremacy was always the “wink wink” in Trump‘s the “Make America Great Again” slogan. The counter-argument—”We‘re Not Going Back!”—tried to sell a negative instead of promoting a positive. Accepting the Harris campaign’s view here meant acknowledging that the past had been unfair, not great. For some, that message resonated. For others who have internalized the sexism they’ve been soaking in for their entire lives, it probably sounded like whining.
The self-own is hard to grasp, but it’s an inevitable product of our culture and our institutions. Why would so many white women choose a strongman over a strong woman? Maybe it’s because Trump said he would protect women while Harris campaigned on protecting women’s rights. The former is more visceral. A case can also be made that these white women voted Republican for their children, particularly the boys: A vote for Trump meant they could secure the same historical privileges for their sons that their grandfathers enjoyed.
This sense of maternalism fed right into the patriarchy. (Let’s not forget the rise of “Trad Wives” on social media.) It‘s also why the Democrats’ commercial suggesting wives lie to their husbands about their choice for president also missed the mark. Women want to be seen as supporting their families, not voting their own self interests.
So far, the loss this time around isn’t being pinned solely on Harris, which feels a little like (a little) progress. Still, we’re left wondering what happened to the ten-plus million Democrats who showed up for President Joe Biden in 2020 and not this year. This massive shortfall can’t be attributed to a lack of effort on the part of canvassers, donors and postcard writers. A blue army worked hard to remove the stain of racism and misogyny in our nation. But, in the end, that stubborn stain didn’t just remain. It spread.
So now we enter the coulda-shoulda-woulda stage. The questions swirl. Should the Democrats have had an open convention? Should Harris have picked a different Vice President? Should she have gone on Rogan? But it seems to me that the one thing she should have done is something she could not have done: had a penis.
Ideally, it would have been a magnificent one, worthy of widespread acclaim in the locker room showers—like, let’s say, Arnold Palmer’s.
