After the election, the rage against white women

How quickly things change. At the start of this week, women voters were being feted as the voice of reason in America’s ‘gender-gap election’. To the Democratic elites, it was inconceivable that women would back Trump over a ‘joyful’ woman of colour. They assumed all they needed to do was remind women that in the privacy of the voting booth they alone choose who to endorse and the votes for Kamala Harris would come flooding in. It’s now clear that plenty of women took this advice to heart. But they voted for Trump, not Harris. As I wrote on spiked before the election, the idea that women would win it for Kamala was always likely to be ‘more hype than reality’.

With most votes now counted, we know this week’s result was not even close. At time of writing, Trump has almost five million more votes than Harris and has convincingly won both the popular vote and the Electoral College. This feat would be impossible without the votes of a huge number of women. Exit polls suggest the gender gap did exist but – at around 10 per cent – was far lower than Team Harris had expected. Women split 53 per cent for Harris, 45 per cent for Trump. This means that a smaller proportion of women voted for Harris this election than voted for either Clinton in 2016 or Biden in 2020. Younger women were more likely to have voted for Trump this time around than they did in 2020 and Hispanic women swung massively towards Trump. But there’s another group that backed Trump decisively: white women. More white women voted for Trump than Harris.

Now looking to apportion blame for Harris’s defeat, Democrats have these white women in the firing line. The very same women they courted so assiduously just days ago are now being chastised and insulted. The overarching sense is one of disappointment. Bloomberg contemplates with an almost audible sigh the ‘irony of women voting for abortion rights’, in many state referendums held on the same day as the national election, while also voting for Trump. ‘For millions, it didn’t matter that he was the man who bragged about overturning Roe vs Wade’, its columnist concludes. ‘White women doomed Kamala Harris and the Democrats – again’, notes the New Republic. The LA Times has the same take: ‘Democrats keep expecting white women to save them, and they keep getting burned.’ In other words: typical white women, always letting the side down. The ‘free to vote for who you like’ message did not age well.

The ‘white women who voted for Trump’ phenomenon has, inevitably, led to the rehabilitation of ‘Karen’ – the slur reserved for middle-class soccer moms. ‘Karen’s latest act of aggression in service of protecting her own self-interest? Voting for Donald Trump’, thunders the LA Times. Such is the apparent stupidity of these Karens, ‘53 per cent of white women voted for an adjudicated rapist whose previous actions in office laid waste to Roe vs Wade’. In a courageous act of service, the paper breaks the news to innocent readers: ‘These weak sisters exist – and persist.’

The insults just keep on coming. Sunny Hostin, host of popular daytime television show, The View, explains to credulous viewers how disturbed she is at the power of ‘uneducated white women’ to shape the future of America. It took Britain’s very own feminist lawyer, Charlotte Proudman, to pounce on the ‘internalised misogyny’ claim that did the rounds after Trump’s first election success back in 2016. She tweeted: ‘44 per cent of female voters left their homes and made their way to the ballot to vote for a rapist to take charge of their freedoms and reproductive rights. If that’s not internalised misogyny then I don’t know what is.’ So, definitely not agency then? Or a carefully thought-through decision? How feminist, Ms Proudman!

White women who did not vote for Trump now seem to be having a collective meltdown at the actions of their sisters. One suggestion doing the rounds on social media is that female Harris-backers wear a blue bracelet so that they can identify one another and distinguish themselves from Trump voters. Elsewhere, women wanting to punish men for voting the wrong way are proposing a ‘sex strike’ and pledging ‘no sex, no dating or marriage and no having children with men – for the next four years’. And these women fancy themselves as feminists? It’s like the sexual revolution never happened.

No matter how many women don blue bracelets or refuse to have sex, Donald Trump will still be their president. It’s called democracy. So-called feminists can cry all they like about Harris not making ‘history as the first female president’. They fail to understand that voters do not want a ‘female’ president, they want a good president. They want someone who addresses their concerns, whether with the economy, inflation, men in women’s sports and changing rooms, gender identity and sexuality classes in schools, or immigration. Women voted for Trump not because he is male but because they weighed up the two candidates put before the public and decided he was the best choice. Those currently shouting ‘Karen’ and ‘internalised misogyny’ might not realise it, but women vote with their brains, not with their genitals.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary.