The year of the woman

Eight years ago I wrote: Prediction Trump.

On election day morning, 2016, the polls and consensus opinion were clear: Hillary Clinton had it in the bag. I published my prediction anyway.

Click: 2016

I saw an enthusiasm gap between Trump and Hillary. I saw the Archie Bunker/George Wallace blue-collar appeal that Trump had with voters who didn't write opinion columns for newspapers. I observed male college classmates at a reunion 20 days before the 2016 election take me aside. They quietly told me -- out of earshot of female classmates who were enthusiastic about Hillary -- that they thought Trump wasn't that bad. I made a guess that there was invisible, un-polled support for Trump from people uncomfortable with Hillary's brand of elite feminism. It was a lucky guess.

I don't know who will win this election. No one does. I put Year of the Woman as the headline because I think this year we will see a resurgence of female power. 

This election more women will be voting their gender, not their social class or race. Trump made a decision, I suspect based on his gut and personal history, that men were tired of being pushed around by the attitudes and mores of modern feminism. Men aren't allowed to lust after women anymore, not even in secret, and certainly not in the workplace. Trump was old school. Men were men and hot women are prey. That's how he thought and how he lived his life. Trump's campaign turned his instincts into strategy and brand. Therefore JD Vance for VP. Therefore teleprompter speeches belittling Kamala Harris. Trump didn't make her an ogre. He made her subservient. He couldn't pronounce her name; he called her low-IQ and mentally disabled. His campaign circulated memes that (snicker, snicker) she gave blow jobs.

I am prepared to see that Trump won this election but my prediction goes in the other direction. Two things have emerged since 2016. The Dobbs decision on abortion enabled red-state legislatures to ban abortion, ban abortion pills, endanger IVF, and ban travel to seek an out-of-state abortion. Put together, it comes across as a war on women by legislatures and courts. It looks like an effort to rewind the clock back to a time when girls went to college to get a husband, not an education. When girls were supposed to have babies at 20, not 30. When men were the default "head of household" and when that term made any sense at all.  It was old fashioned. It is the chimpanzee-style society I described in yesterday's post, where powerful males beat down females. Many women are okay with it, but fewer now. 

The second thing is hinted in the screen shot of my 2016 post. I described Trump as a "whistleblower." That wasn't sarcasm and it was correct when I wrote it. He was the outsider. He said he would "drain the swamp" and it seemed plausible at the time. He blew the whistle on the plutocratic GOP and its financial elites, saying that corporate wealth did not trickle down to the working man when jobs went overseas. He criticized Hillary Clinton and the over-civilized cultural elites of the progressive left. He was the anti-elite, common-man candidate. It wasn't exactly true, but it was a plausible brand.

That changed. He soiled his brand as a whistleblower reformer out to protect us from financial and cultural elites. Now it's just cultural elites. He hangs out with billionaires now, openly and publicly. Elon Musk has the bad-boy iconoclasm vibe, motivated in part because a son made a gender transition. But Musk and the other politically-active billionaires have an agenda and Trump is in league with it. It isn't pushing money down to the "forgotten man." He openly tells oil companies he wants a billion dollars from them for his campaign, but not to worry, he will cut their taxes and they will make it back many times over. 

This will all be lost on most voters, especially ones so un-engaged that they are still undecided swing voters. Fox News viewers hear none of this. Trump is their hero. But this is an election that will be won or lost because of a few voters in a half-dozen states. On the margin, the difference in outcome will be a few extra women who decided that Trump isn't on their side, after all. In the past it was plausible that he was. Now he isn't.

 

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]