Women Aren't Responsible for Hillary Clinton's Defeat

The media has created a misleading narrative in a rush to assign blame for the outcome of the election.

Women failed Hillary Clinton—and none more so than white women. That idea has congealed into conventional wisdom in the aftermath of the election. Vanity Fair published an article titled: "Why Hillary Clinton Couldn't Win Over Female Voters" while Time ran a story headlined: "Why So Many Women Abandoned Hillary Clinton." Slatedeclared: "White Women Sold Out the Sisterhood and the World by Voting for Trump." Samantha Bee had harsh words for white women, too. "A majority of white women, faced with the historic choice between the first female president, and a vial of weaponized testosterone said, 'I'll take Option B. I just don't like her,'" she said, scathingly, in an episode of Full Frontal. The accusation leveled at women voters is clear: They didn't just betray the woman who tried to shatter the ultimate glass ceiling, they also failed each other.

The problem is that accusation is misleading at best and inaccurate at worst. To start, assertions that Clinton did not win over women voters are simply not true. A majority of women backed Clinton over Donald Trump, 54 percent to 42 percent. Exit-poll data indicates that 94 percent of black women and 68 percent of Hispanic women voted for Clinton. "If only women voted in this election [and no one else], Clinton would have won," commented Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. "I think that this narrative about Clinton failing to win white women really overshadows the strong support she had among all women, and women of color in particular.

It is true that Clinton did not win a majority of white women voters; Trump did, with 53 percent support. But a closer look at the data, and historical context, suggests that far from failing to convert white women to her cause, Clinton actually succeeded in winning the votes of at least some white women for whom support for the Democratic candidate in the election was never a given.

According to Pew Research data, most women identify as Democrats, but white women are more likely than not to identify as Republican. That suggests that white women did not abandon Clinton, since many were likely to vote for the Republican candidate regardless of who ended up as the nominee for either party. Yet even so, Clinton still managed to win 51 percent of college-educated white women to Trump's 45 percent—a partisan reversal from the 2012 election when then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney won 52 percent of college-educated white women while Barack Obama won 46 percent.

Clinton lost non-college-educated white women, winning only 34 percent to Trump's 62 percent. But that data point requires context as well. In a post-election analysis titled "No, women didn't abandon Clinton, nor did she fail to win their support," Dittmar points out that loyalty to the Republican Party has intensified among that portion of the electorate. "Among white women without a college degree, Republican party identification has grown over the past 24 years," she writes. "With this knowledge, it's far less surprising that Trump outperformed Clinton among this demographic. Party identification is the key indicator of vote choice, and there is no evidence that gender affinity would buck that trend."

The split among white women may also highlight the potential power and limitations of Clinton's historic bid to become the first woman president. The fact that she won college-educated white women while losing white women without a college degree suggests that her campaign had more success winning over Republican-leaning women who fit a similar demographic profile to the candidate herself: white, highly-educated, and affluent.

Reprinted from The Atlantic

November13, 2016

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November 15, 2016