Democrats tried to counter Donald Trump's nastiness toward women with condescension

On election night, my mother used to take out her Singer skirt marker and put it on the coffee table in front of the television while we watched the results. Then she took off her shoes and climbed onto the table. Hemlines change every four years or so, and raising or lowering skirts is such a boring chore that it's the kind of thing best done while watching TV. But it also requires quite a bit of attention, squinting to thread a needle, tie a knot and tuck your tail into a seam, so it's best done while watching something on TV that doesn't really interest you. My mother liked the idea of ​​not having to keep track of time, liked the indexing of hemlines every four years, but, as to what could best serve as a calendar reminder, she thought it was either presidential election, the Olympic Games, and the Olympic Games that she would not have wanted to miss.

My mother died during Barack Obama's first term in the White House, but her views on the American presidency stuck in my mind this week because she was an original secret voter, the woman who keeps her opinions to herself, l Kamala Harris campaign voter. hoped they would come out en masse and lead the vice president to a surprise victory. From Liz Cheney to Michelle Obama, everyone reminded women that their vote was secret.

My mother was a registered independent and she made it a point to never tell anyone how she planned to vote, or how she had voted, and that certainly included my father. He was an Eisenhower Republican who never kept his vote to himself. He voted for Kennedy, out of sympathy for Catholics. Other than that, he has never voted for a Democrat. But my mother? She was a mystery.

Yet my mother was not, as this year's Democratic messages seemed to suggest about women voters, a battered woman, too shy to speak her mind, afraid of my father. Abortion, not party loyalty, divided my parents: he supported it, and she did not. Before and after Roe v. Wade, my father, a high school guidance counselor, would take students to have abortions, even though he was breaking the law. My mother, a devout Catholic, was deeply opposed. They found it unbearably painful to talk about it.

“You women think a lot about a lot of important things,” said a woman who looked eerily like my mother in the first television ad aimed at women voters, in 1956. The real question is whether ads aimed at women in 2024 were less condescending. In the only place in America where women still have the right to choose, Julia Roberts said in a pro-Harris ad, you can vote however you want and no one will ever know. I don't think women, no matter who they were likely to vote for, needed anyone to tell them that. They didn't need Post-its on public restroom doors. And they didn't need Democratic campaign ads that treated them like they needed to be saved from their own marriage.

The Singer Skirt Marker is a twenty-four inch wooden ruler that you can glue to a weighted base, something like a clipboard. Attached to the ruler is a small plastic pot that you fill with powdered chalk. When you want to mark a skirt or dress for hem, slide the pot up or down the ruler to the desired hem length and press a squeezer onto the top of the pot. He draws a chalk line. My mother, standing on the table, made a circle with her socks, twirling in slow motion, while I blew the chalk. We started just after an early dinner, when the polls closed at 6 p.m. Spin. I fluffed, then pinned the hems, pulling the pins from a red pin cushion that was supposed to look like an apple or a tomato. Sam Donaldson or Peter Jennings would announce the results at 7 p.m. My mother would disappear and come back in a new outfit, and we would start again. Blow, twist, blow, pin.

Of course, some days you wish you had more stability. But then the sun hits the trash can just right, and you find an almost full container of chicken, and you think, Wow. It's living.

Cartoon by Sofia Warren

It's stupid, my mother said, the tyranny of the hem. But there are things you just have to do.

Donald Trump has been more vicious toward women in 2024 than he was in 2020, when he was more vicious than he was in 2016. Liberal Democratic states make citizens, I argued earlier this week; the artificial state in which Americans now live makes trolls. If Trump had called Harris an asshole live on television on Election Day, it would hardly have qualified as news. But Democrats were hoping for a pink wave, a double-digit gender gap in favor of Harris, which appears to have been washed away by the red sea.

Between 1920, when American women gained the right to vote, and 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected, women were more likely to vote for Republicans than Democrats, but only slightly. That changed with Reagan's GOP, which abandoned the Equal Rights Amendment and pledged to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Equal Rights Amendment failed in 1982 because educated feminists underestimated the sincerity of the political commitment of the women who opposed it. Democrats reduced a much broader campaign for women's rights to the fight to defend abortion; in 2022, they lost that fight too. The premise of the Democratic strategy in 2024 was that abortion would bring women to the polls and somehow, miraculously, that would result in a vote for Harris. This is not the case. Abortion protections passed in seven states and lost in three. As has been the case in opinion polls since the early 1970s, Americans voting in 2024 favor abortion during the first trimester but not beyond. About half of Trump voters, like about half of Harris voters, believe abortion should be legal in most cases, according to a CNN exit poll. Women went to the polls and voted to protect the right to abortion, within limits, and then, because of a thousand other concerns, two out of five of them voted for Trump.

Democratic campaign strategists have condescended to women, something both parties have done for a century now. But the parties are now evenly divided by class and on abortion, and much of the Democratic messaging involves college-educated women telling women who never went to college how to think about their own bodies or to their own very real American dreams. Trump liked to say that as president, he would protect women whether they liked it or not. The Harris campaign said the same thing, but with more celebrity endorsements. None of this is good for women, nor for children, nor for men. The Dobbs-era patchwork of unequal reproductive rights is a disaster, a public health crisis that will only worsen under a second Trump term.

On election night, I thought about my mother, but I also thought about a friend who was in Alabama for work last year when she began miscarrying. She rushed to the emergency room, but doctors told her there was nothing they could do for her: she was given an adult diaper and advised to get on a plane and travel thousands of kilometers to return home, to a state where she could recover properly. medical treatment. She lost the baby. This year, she went to the polls with a new seven-month-old baby. He tried to eat my ballot, she told me on the phone. She sent me a selfie of them leaving the polls, the baby with a sticker on his sweater: Future Voter. She wasn't wearing a skirt.

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