President-elect Donald Trump. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Never underestimate the anger of women who have been degraded, disrespected and subjugated by patriarchal idiots, they said.
The gender gap in the 2024 presidential election had grown into one that could tip the election, they said. The disgraced ex-president who ended half a century of reproductive freedom in the country — with an ongoing toll of unbearable suffering and preventable deaths among young women — faced challenges with female voters, they said.
In the first presidential election since the U.S. Supreme Court stripped women of abortion rights, female voters would retaliate, they said. Women would not reward Trump — the braggart accused by dozens of women of sexual assault and harassment and found liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll — with four more years in the White House, they said.
But they – the experts and pollsters – were wrong. Although a majority (53%) of American women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, there were gaps in that support. Only 35% of non-college-educated white women voted for the female candidate, compared to 57% of college-educated white women.
Early exit polls in Ohio showed Trump with a slight lead among female voters, with a clear racial divide. According to early data, white women voted for the Republican presidential ticket by 57%, while black women supported Harris by 95%. Ultimately, Trump won Ohio by a larger margin than in 2020, and Cleveland.com reports that his support grew in nearly every county in the state.
The much-discussed gender gap in the 2024 election was large, but historically unremarkable. Experts and pollsters now theorize that concerns about the economy were more important to women than the promise of subjugation by patriarchal assholes with a Project 2025 to-do list. That may be true, but inflation is falling, food prices in the grocery sector are finally falling, gasoline prices are down, wages are up, we are near full employment, and the stock market is at record highs.
But the reality of an objectively strong economy has been turned upside down in politically polarized America. Trump relied on “alternative facts” of an economy collapsing under his opponent. Harris focused on strengthening an improving economy for people living paycheck to paycheck, with an emphasis on price gouging, affordable housing, health care, etc.
Identity politics won, not substantive policies to lower the still-high cost of living on Main Street. It didn’t matter that 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists urgently warned that Trump’s proposals to slap massive tariffs on imported goods, deport millions of migrant workers and erode the Fed’s independence would drive consumer prices sharply higher. A majority of citizens drowning in rent increases, utility bills, car payments, insurance spikes and more bought what he sold.
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They were betting on a known con man and pathological liar who never stopped lying about winning an election he lost. Some, I suspect, just wanted an excuse to send their rough bandit back to Washington. Trump and his soulless running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, gave millions permission to rage against everyone and everything they hated.
Trump focused his enmity on the defenseless. He targeted transgender people trying to live their lives in peace and hardworking legal immigrants revitalizing America’s communities. There was no bottom to the dehumanization that Trump carried out. He added his own “enemy within” list of expendable human beings, closing his campaign with suggestions that former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) should have guns “pointed at her face” and as the media Being shot ‘I don’t’ doesn’t mind that much.”
During Trump’s retaliatory tour, the humiliation of women was a real crowd pleaser. The degradation continued on election eve, when Trump called Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi an “evil, sick, crazy, bi…it starts with a B,” and Vance called the vice president “trash.” Throwing insults at powerful women was a feature, not a bug, of the Trump-Vance enterprise.
Vance’s apparent disdain for women who didn’t fit his breeder/babysitter ideals was creepy. Trump’s misogyny was disgusting. Harris was reduced to a prostitute with ‘pimps’ and the ‘Antichrist’. Campaign shirts calling the first female vice president a “hoe” sold out. But the candidate who bragged about getting rid of Roe and who a few months ago expressed support for a national ban on abortion convinced enough women to believe otherwise. To trust him.
Ohio’s Trumpy senator-elect, Republican Bernie Moreno, belied Trump’s bluff to protect women “whether they like it or not” with a party-line embrace of national abortion restrictions and insinuations that women, especially those over 50, are get over it. Expect more of that, as medication abortions (which make up 63% of all procedures) are the first to disappear under the Trump-Vance administration, followed by national restrictions on all abortions later.
At the start of Trump’s first term, half a million women (and men) marched in the largest single-day protest in American history against the threat he posed to reproductive, civil and human rights. We were joined by hundreds of thousands of others protesting in sister marches across the country and the world. A second Trump term will test the mettle of that opposition.
But never underestimate the rage of women confronted with dystopian hell. They will regroup, resist and never retreat. This fight for equal and inalienable rights will be epic.
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