Let’s Talk About the White Woman Problem

The blame game has amped up in the past 48 hours and everyone is a target. Moderates are blaming the left, the left is blaming moderates. We are all talking about the men who were influenced by Trump’s podcast blitz.  But no one is getting more heat right now than the white women (the majority of white women) who voted for Trump. 

We’re seeing a lot of stories like this from the LA Times.

Trump secured a majority of white women voters for the third consecutive presidential election. Exit polls indicate that 53% of white women voted for Trump, while 45% supported Kamala Harris. 

On the View, host Sunny Hostin had this to say:

"What we did not have is White women, who voted about 52% for Donald Trump – uneducated White women is my understanding. You have Latino men actually voting more for him… So why do you think that uneducated White women voted against their reproductive health freedoms and why do you think Latino men invited in favor of someone that says he’s going to deport the majority of [their] community.”

The exit polls vary a little bit depending on what source you look at, but they all generally paint the same picture. Looking at the numbers in terms of education:

White women without a college degree: 64% voted for Trump, 35% for Harris.

White women with a college degree: 40% voted for Trump, 59% for Harris

White women without a college degree are 20% of voters. White women with a college degree are 17% of voters. Out of white women without a college degree (which we can assume Hostin meant by uneducated) 64% voted for Trump. This compares to 69% of white men without a college degree.  And 40% of white women with a college degree voted for Trump, compared to about 50% of white college graduate men. That is millions and millions of white women with a college degree voting for Trump. 

There are a lot of hot takes about how this could have happened, how women could have voted against their self interest, how we are actually living in a country of Karens all hiding in plain sight. (The LATimes piece says this outright).

And I'm not here to defend anyone voting Trump or knock people trying to protect their mental health in a difficult time. This is a post about how we fix this problem. Because I’ve seen a lot of coverage about how we need a Joe Rogan of the left (see, eg: this Taylor Lorenz piece.), but none about how we need an Alex Clark or Brett Cooper of the left.  

As we make a plan to move forward together I want to talk about whether this shaming and guilt is productive for us. Is alienation going to get us the outcome we desire next time around?

Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in The Atlantic a plea for women who voted for Harris to talk to young men and boys. “For mothers and aunties of young men and boys: You may not be able to control what they are reading on the internet, but you can combat it, through conversation and counterprogramming…Minds can be molded by the internet and its algorithms, yes, but minds can be changed by conversations as well.” 

We also need to be talking to our fellow white women. I was served up these on Instagram from Megan McCain and TheGirlNamedBlake this morning.

And look - I have conservative men in my DMs telling me I should die (and worse!) every day. The problem of personally targeted vitriol is not uniquely democrat-led by any means. And I can already hear you thinking to yourself…but Meghan supports policies that are directly harmful.  Okay! Yes! 

However, liberals over the last decade have developed a social norm of forced ostracizing. Both cutting off communicating with Trump supporters themselves and those who try to talk to them. And again, you do you and protect your mental health. This is a big picture argument and not directed at you, dear reader, personally. 

Ostracizing and alienating conservative curious white women, the wellness girlies the scared girlies and the econ voter girlies won’t get us votes. I’m not going to give some big speech on empathy here right now because that’s not the entire answer either. I’m talking about the need to be the big tent and to spend time reaching out and persuading these women. Shame and scorn does not win votes.  My DMs are full, FULL, of women who assure me that Trump will not enact a national abortion ban, and they are very mad at being accused of supporting someone who would.  I believe that they think this. Truly.  It is, of course, wrong. And a justification they are using to vote for a Republican whom they liked for other reasons.  We need to be better at talking to these women and the party needs to leave space for them to be targeted in a way that actually persuades them.  

This is work to be done by us, the white women who voted for Harris. The Black women and men showed up for her. It’s up to the 45% of us to figure out what went wrong here and find a collective path forward. Blame isn’t the answer. Sending outraged texts to friends about hating those Karens has to be the beginning, not the end, of your engagement.  

There’s no talking about white women without talking about Instagram and the fact that democrats have been ignoring it for years. 

The biggests political accounts on IG that my followers like are non-partisan.  Or they are celebrities who also post political content.  And I’m not saying there isn’t a place for those, but it’s not everything.  There’s a reason the right spent years funding Alex Clark. 

They saw her as an aspirational path directly into the hearts and minds of white women. Back in the day she posted about politics and pop culture. She’s a big Swiftie. And she did fine with that. But she really blew up when she pivoted to wellness and women’s empowerment this year and that’s when the Republican investment in her took off like a rocket. They had spent years building that weapon and the investment paid off.

Alex delivered the kinds of answers that her audience of largely white women wanted. How can they be healthier and how the government is trying to make them sicker. How can they own their own stories, how are they actually strong and brave and empowered just like Barbie. 

Republican women do not see themselves as victims here. Alex Clark and her brethren brand them as warriors. Wellness warriors, mama warriors, party warriors.

But Dems try to paint them as victims, all of them subjugated by their husbands. Even if this were true, that's not how these women see themselves and it isn’t going to convince them to switch their votes.

And it’s not just Alex Clark, there are many many, many conservative influencers who earn a full time living from this work. I haven’t seen the numbers, but what I know is that Turning Point USA (run by Charlie Kirk) has figured out how to get billions of views, and I imagine they are doing the same with their female influencers. 

The biggest liberal political white women influencers are on Substack, YouTube, podcasts and TikTok. Those are all places where you can earn money for posting, unlike IG.  And being an influencer means that your personality, your life, your identity are part of the program. The core of the psychology of persuasion is interpersonal relationships and the right has cultivated those relationships between white women influencers and white women voters perfectly. And they are doing it where the white women are, on their home turf - Instagram.

Conservatives figured out that you could make everything political.  They made the Supreme Court political. They made education political. And they have made influencing political. The influencer marketing industry is a multi-billion dollar industry for a reason. Because it works. And if Dems want to get those white women votes, they are going to have to start playing in it. 

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