One Weird Trick To Lose The 2016 Election: Alienate Women

[BlueMTexpat]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-sexism-women-2016-election/

538 discusses Trump's "Women Problem." This is long, but a good read.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Greetings, all! With no debate or election this week, let’s consider a longer-term problem: Trump and women. The Internet spent the past week picking over a startling fact: Women (and I’m talking Republican, Democratic, unaffiliated, etc.) disproportionately don’t like Trump. We’ll get to why in a moment, along with what it means electorally, but first question: The data has shown for a while that Trump has less support among women than among men — why all of a sudden the media interest?

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I think it’s a few things. First, because there are no elections or debates this week, the media is looking for new ground to cover. And with Trump ahead in the delegate count, the pivot to the general election is obvious. Second, I think the whole Heidi Cruz picture thing really put the issue at the forefront. Even Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter are having a tough time defending Trump on this.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): One answer is that the media is mostly dudes. But this is part of a broader issue also, which is that the media has only just now started to write how terrible a general election candidate Trump might be. Trump’s favorables among the general electorate might have gotten a bit worse, but they’ve been epically terrible since he launched his bid (actually, since before he launched it). Women are a big part of that, of course.

I mean, it literally took nine months for the conventional wisdom to recognize that someone could be astoundingly popular with a plurality of the electorate and extremely unpopular with a majority of it.

[yallerdawg]

1. The 'quiet revolution' has their candidate!

micah: So if 70 percent of women dislike Trump on Nov. 8, he’s basically guaranteed to lose, right?

clare.malone: More women vote than men, that’s for sure. According to our friends over at Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics, American women have cast between 4 and 7 million more votes than men in the last couple of presidential elections.

[complain jane]

2. I'm starting to wonder

if maybe Trump really is trying to throw the election to Hillary

[sarae]

3. It's hard not to think that's the case.

He's a textbook example of how to repel women and minorities.

On one hand, I'm glad about it. But on the other hand, I'm dreading the nastiness he'll come up with before the election in November.

[complain jane]

4. Wives are to blame for

cheating husbands and we'll never have to worry about debt because we can just print more money. I'm going to raise taxes on the rich but lower taxes on the rich though, and I'm raising taxes on the rich but when you negotiate it down they go lower. Down. Up. Corn. Right foot. Believe me. Moon. Cow. I have the best words.

[sarae]

5. LOL!

The BEST words...

[Haveadream]

6. Thank you, Nate Silver and thank you BlueMTexPat

Love Nate Silver!

Stunning how there are people, particularly in the media, who continue to ask what might be going on with women. Or, why (with a straight face and no sense of irony at all) "other than Trump's obvious misogyny, racism and xenophobia", he is still an unsuitable candidate?! As though those views are minor personality quirks or something. That tells us everything we need to know about how horrifically desensitized the privileged are to bigots and their victims and just how routine discrimination is in all of our lives.

Love how Nate says,"

natesilver: Yeah. Apart from the fact that Trump’s misogyny is really gross, it’s also really dumb as an electoral strategy.
... Yeah, a Machiavellian could argue that demonizing blacks or Hispanics or Muslims or gays is a winning, if incredibly cynical, electoral strategy for the GOP. That doesn’t work when you’re talking about 51 percent of the population. Furthermore, the fact that Trump doesn’t realize this suggests either that (i) he’s just making shit up as he goes along instead of being some sort of brilliant tactician; (ii) he’s a sexist down to his core and can’t help himself; or (iii) both.

I truly hope that this election is another one in which, like Obama's in 2008 and 2012, women and minorities form a coalition to vote against the banality of that evil. In those elections, 'white men' were the only demographic that Obama lost across both party lines. This time around they have found the perfect candidate in the uber-bigoted, poster boy for privilege, Trump. We will just have to keep pushing back against that status quo and defeat it again.

Thank you Nate Silver for explaining to the media what is so obvious to millions of people

[BlueMTexpat]

7. Thanks, Haveadream!

And I believe that Trump is (iii) both.

[Haveadream]

8. Yes, he is!