November 7, 2024 - 11:50am
Towards the end of the US presidential election campaign, Republicans seemed resigned to losing white female voters in exchange for non-white men. “For every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement,” Republican Representative Matt Gaetz said at the beginning of this year.
As it turns out, this was a false choice. Donald Trump made historic gains among Hispanic men in 2024 and still won white female voters by eight points nationally. He led by seven points with this demographic in 2020 — a considerable uptick from his two-point lead with white women in 2016. White women were the largest subgroup of US voters this year when broken down by race and gender, comprising 40%, compared to the 35% represented by white men.
The win among white women had little to do with campaign outreach. The Trump campaign focused on ensuring turnout from its predominantly male and low-propensity base, with the former president appearing on numerous male-oriented podcasts in recent weeks, including The Joe Rogan Experience, while giving little focus to female voters. Trump was invited onto the female-hosted Red Scare podcast, but no interview ever materialised.
Some conservative commentators preemptively blamed white women for an expected Trump loss, and in the wake of the GOP victory liberal commentators made similar arguments. MSNBC’s Joy Reid argued that Kamala Harris lost because “black voters came through for Harris and white women voters did not”, adding that white women missed their chance to “change the way that they interact with the patriarchy”. Meanwhile, New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones accused white women of “enforcing a white ethnocracy” by not voting for Harris.
Sensing an opening, Democrats hammered the abortion issue throughout the campaign and targeted white and married women. One ad portrayed two white women voting for Kamala Harris and hiding it from their husbands, and other ads focused on abortion — despite the issue consistently polling well below inflation and immigration among voters’ priorities. In a recent NYT survey, white women listed inflation and the economy as their top issues, followed by abortion.
The abortion issue had seemingly little impact on Republicans’s performance with white women in this cycle. Trump’s lead for this group was the same in 2024 as it was prior to Roe’s overturning; in red states considering abortion ballot measures, Florida and South Dakota, the former president still won both the female vote and the white female vote. In the swing state of Arizona, where abortion was also on the ballot, Trump leads the white female vote by nine points and the total female vote by one point.
In part because of the abortion issue, white suburban women were long seen as a promising group for Democrats to make up for the loss of working-class white men. Sen. Chuck Schumer claimed in 2016 that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” That expectation did not come to pass in the 2016 election, nor in 2024. The enduring Republican tendencies of white women have proven difficult for Democrats to combat.
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SubscribeThe article is begging a question – how does abortion as an issue play out if you’re a mother with daughters? Is it actually a universal vote winner among women?
May be white woman have realised that in the new world that the Democrats want to fashion they will be lower down the pecking order than the imagined and possibly not even at the top table.
What was that about white women’s tears?
So white women are more robust and able to think for themselves than the neoliberals give them credit for? Who knew.
They possibly see the trans issue and its avid supporters as deleterious to women’s rights and see abortion up to birth as infanticide.
The idea that all women are pro-abortion is absurd and always was. However, even those who are pro choice have other concerns that influenced their vote. The Democrats arrogantly assumed that women were interested in nothing else but abortion.
Funny how I never heard that particular detail – that Trump won the majority of white women’s votes – from the exit polls mentioned in the election night coverage on a single TV or streaming channel.
In fact, the coverage led you to believe the exact opposite. So much so that I was reluctant to believe the report here until I checked the exit poll page for myself.
Yet more “news by omission” from the so-called experts in the media.
And I’m quite certain that the media will continue to push a distorted view of the truth. Just as they pretended that Wales didn’t support leaving the EU, when a small majority in Wales actually voted Leave in 2016.
Another electoral analysis in which any acknowledgment of objection to gender ideology is absent. Sensible women of all races care about the preservation of female sports and spaces, a casualty of the Democratic party’s capture by “woke” ideology. I’m no fan of Trump, but it’s Republicans, including him, who will protect Title IX and roll back the insane supplanting of biological sex with nebulous “gender identity” in federal law and policy. Meanwhile, abortion rights are being decided — and gaining ground — state by state, which Trump (believe him or not) has said he will let be.
Trump has said this many times. He will not support a federal abortion bans and it is up to the states to vote and decide. He fully supports abortion especially for rape, incest and the life of the mother. He does not support late term abortion.
In fact, his position is aligned to that of a majority of Americans. So it is unsurprising that the abortion issue failed to win Harris the election.
Late term abortions are very rare, and they are usually because the fetus is dead or the mother’s health is at risk. These abortions are tragic, because the babies were wanted by the parents. Viable fetuses are saved if possible. It’s unfair to judge parents who are devastated.
Early c-section or induced labour is used in such circumstances. Abortion specifically involves the demise of the infant.
The embryo can’t be seen with the naked eye, it’s not an “infant” or a “child”. And what business is it of yours? If you’re against abortion don’t have one.
Nothing (save the gleam in her parents’ eye), and then… zygote, morula, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, newborn, baby, infant, toddler, child, pre-schooler, kid, grade-schooler, pre-teen, teen, young adult, adult, middle-aged, senior, retired, elder, deceased.
It’s a pretty generic progression, but a progression nonetheless.
And nowhere in that growing-up is the human being ever the equivalent of, let’s say, a Snickers Bar…as in ‘Have her, don’t have her, no one cares; it’s entirely your choice’. The truth is, you already have her; she’s already there; already a new and separate life, formed as the natural (though far from inevitable) result of an act of love. The choice has already been made.
Would we make the same argument for the euthanasia’d ‘abortion’ of the declining and increasingly inconvenient aged? If you’re against it, don’t kill Great Grandpa, but don’t tell the rest of us what to do? Or would we object because, indeed, we can see Great Grandpa (drooling over there in the corner) so therefore he’s not killable without consequence?
These so-called arguments over what is and is not a qualifying condition that allows the conscious and deliberate murder of children are but masks, empty husks, draped clumsily over the bloody Truth. Abortion is the execution of an innocent human being.
Those who support the legalization & normalization of such an act as the ‘reproductive right’ of the Mother simply should embrace and accept that grotesque truth.
Instead they tell us, it’s just a clump of cells (like the wart growing on my big toe). They say it’s not even naked-eye visible (if you catch it soon enough). They say it’s non-viable (given today’s technology). They say it’s unwanted; or they tell us (per Ilsye Hogue) ‘I wanted a family, but it was the wrong time.’ And of course, some even go so far as to say: so what if it’s visible…so what if the heart’s beating…so what if it looks like a tiny little girl, curled up in her mother’s womb: I have bodily autonomy, I can kill her when I wish.
The fact that the in-utero daughter also has bodily autonomy doesn’t matter in the least.
So let us own the entirety of the argument and state it quite bluntly: We believe we have the right to kill our children whenever we want, for whatever reason. Admittedly, of course, the vast majority of those so arguing would limit that freedom to the first 9 months of their life (or less)…but c’mon, that’s just an arbitrary hashmark on a timeline which measures the human life in question. Why stop there? Why stop anywhere? A right, after all, is a right.
As for WHY the cold-blooded murder of the innocent is anyone else’s business? We really don’t need to explain that do we?
Bring forth the people casting negative judgement upon the women suffering the tragedy of the scenarios you describe and are understood as “stillbirth”.
In return, I offer you an information source actually examining abortion beyond viability, including *elective* abortions in the 3rd trimester.
https://secularprolife.org/laterabortion/
https://secularprolife.org/2018/09/even-third-trimester-abortions-are-done/
Right, here I go with another one of my “if I was American” comments:
This white woman despised the Democrats for all of the vanilla-flavoured reasons that you can read these days in most sane publications (too much wokery, countries do need borders etc. etc. etc. etc.). She despised Kamala for being utterly inept and cleaving to the stereotype of the “silly, incapable woman” that I have been fighting in the office (and, yes, the home) my entire life.
But that’s all before we come to the abortion issue. This white woman came to the conclusion (by dint of watching many, MANY episodes of Megyn Kelly) that it was just better to leave this issue with the states now, i.e. the situation post Dobbs.
The hullaballoo about “Trump’s abortion bans” was rubbish, as was any talk about passing a federal law allowing abortion. Even raising the question of removing the filibuster in the Senate was proof that the Democrats were either talking even more unrealistic BS, or were dangerously incapable of thinking things through in terms of what risks that could entail.
By souping this issue up to a deciding factor in this presidential election, the Dems were treating me (and all other women) as the stereotypical silly women.
They can go to hell.
I get that, but how could any woman vote for a self-confessed, legally confirmed, sexual predator, and also presumed serial adulterer?
The USA was better for all under Trump and worse under Biden. I vote for policy not person. The Dems would have been a disaster.
But Bill Clinton, friend of Epstein was OK with you?
I always found it puzzling how women who accuse Democrats of sexual assault are not to br trusted but if the accuse Trump or other Conservative after 30 years they are virgin Mary’s always to be believed even if the dates and location wrong by months.
This was part of post election discussion in London bar yesterday and woke pro Labour and Democrats women were fine with Clinton but were called Trump rapist.
Delusional useless cows .
I am sorry I replied to you, UnHerd Reader.
I wanted to reply to Tony Price but message was:
“Replies to unapproved comments are not allowed”?
What is this nonsense about?
Good question. I’ve experienced the same thing. I suspect it’s because some comments (for whatever reason) are NOT immediately posted and lurk, instead, in some indeterminate limbo awaiting ‘approval’. Sometimes, it seems, we can see them in that limbo condition.
But if we try to post a response to them while ‘limbo’d’, I’m guessing that’s what generates the ‘not allowed’.
Just my guess.
That’s a separate question I’ll leave you to wonder about! Maybe because the other issues Trump hits on matter to them in their daily lives more?
Harris is married to ont too.
Let’s ask the women who twice voted for Bill Clinton.
Or JFK for that matter.
Remember when the charges made against Bill Clinton for his randy behavior (including in the Oval Office) were dismissed by Democrats as irrelevant because they were “just about sex?” Oh, and Hillary forgot to “believe all women” to defend him? The accusations are real, but politics always seems to prevail.
Being a philanderer is different than being a rapist.
Are you talking about Bill Clinton?
….With delusions of grandeur. He claims he will stop all the wars, make everyone wealthy, deport all immigrants part the seas, and walk on water.
We don’t vote the person, we vote the policy.
And the policy choice was overwhelmingly clear.
If you believe men can’t ever become women, even if they click their heels, 3 times, together… If you believe a nation should be at least as secure as every home, when we lock the doors and choose who and who not to let in…. If you believe in free speech, even if that speech makes people feel bad, or contains content that someone, somewhere might describe as ‘disinformation’… If you think I should pay you back when I borrow money from you… If you believe that my groceries shouldn’t cost 21% MORE now than they did 4 years ago… If you feel as though you should be able to buy whatever car you like…and shower as long as you like…and flush as much water as you like…and buy whatever light bulbs you prefer… If you are sure that Government Agencies should not have dictatorial rights to impose whatever rules they wish… If you know that Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity are Anti-Quality, Anti-Excellence, and kill all incentive in an increasingly destructive spiral of mediocrity that leads to nothing but an Idiocracy…
Well then, you vote for the Party that believes essentially the same exact thing. And if the individual at the top of that Party, behind the Big Desk has orange hair, says crude thing, and behaved badly somewhere along the way… so be it. There is no other sane choice.
She despised Kamala for being utterly inept and cleaving to the stereotype of the “silly, incapable woman” that I have been fighting in the office (and, yes, the home) my entire life. ———–> First, this may not have been a stereotype with Kamala but let’s say that’s true. To what end? My first boss – way back in 1982 – was a woman. Nothing silly or incapable about her; she knew her stuff and was quite capable. I had other female after that. All but one were the same – bright, capable, easy to work for, etc. My experience is not unique. Merit matters. It always has. Kamala was an affront to the DEI case of identity over ability be failing to show even a modicum of competence.
Well, lucky you. My employed career has been in Austria and you can take a look at the executive board of any large company or bank here and do the math. It’s better now than it was 20 years ago, but this is still a very male-dominated land. Hence my *slight* frustration on the matter.
I just found this interview in English which illustrates my point. It was in 2019, so a little dated but the basic issues have not changed and I think the interviewee hits a lot of nails on the head about life in the private sector in Austria for women.
https://executiveacademy.at/en/news/detail/a-conservative-male-dominated-society/
There are a lot of American women who need to see this, the ones who still insist the deck is stacked. Women here far outnumber men on college campuses and rare is the profession that is closed to them. Unfortunately, this was accomplished through a zero-sum approach that elevated women at the expense of men. As such, there are numerous social media videos of 30ish professionally successful but personally empty and alone females insisting, through bitter tears, how happy they are.
I think the most important thing that comes out for me in this interview (and which explains a lot of my ire against Harris) is that the difficulties you encounter in your working life as a woman can only be overcome if both sides do the work.
I absolutely stick with my view that traditional, conservative male attitudes are a hurdle to women’s advancement. But it’s on us girls too, we need to change how we think and act too! I’ve heard so many women in my surroundings complain about male-domination in the workplace but then stay stuck in traditional female patterns of thinking and acting that do just as much to hold them back.
This is why I look at Harris and think: God help us, if you’ve got a woman of such prominence confirming literally everything bad that you could think about women in high-ranking positions, we’ll get set back 10 years. Contrary to what the left/DEI warriors seem to think, the simple fact of her being a woman DOES NOT HELP. If you can’t put up a woman with the right competence, do not do it at all.
(P.S. I know I’m going to have several really “interesting” conversations with my female friends in the coming weeks if the election comes up and I say what I think. It won’t go over well.)
Misandry is alive and real.
You should see the demographics of high paying government jobs in Canada – like a female Benneton commercial. We haven’t hired a white man in YEARS.
Well, it’s Canada innit? Justin is the love child of Fidel Castro and his rock-and-roll groupie mother. Explains everything.
It seems like a desirable place to live.
Can’t land a man, eh? That’s what cats are for.
It was her cackle wot done her in.
Amen.
They just rejected the world of DEI and being talked down to, it just wasn’t their game, and it’s wildly exciting to see the possibilities for all cultures and politics in the West, post identity politics, Which we can hope is what has transpired with this historic result.
I commented last week that by this point, the world may just have turned another degree on its political/cultural axis.
Badenoch won the Tory leadership.
Trump won back the Presidency.
The world continues to turn.
Badenoch! LOL! She won’t last a year and has literally zero chance of ever being prime minister.
You’re reach there, our kid!
You’re talking crystal balls again, Chumpagne.
Oh, you were a Jenrick supporter?
Perhaps the answer is right there. For many women this silly nonsense is both dated and alienating. It sounds like something from another age.
You can’t perform a meaningful analysis of white women voters without including the cross-cut of marital status. Single women break heavily left. Married women vote more like men. The Progressive message that woman and men live in a state of antagonism, and men are oppressing women through “the patriarchy”, doesn’t resonate with women who love and live with their husbands and sons. Even single women with sons, are much less likely to drink the leftist Kool-Aid.
The win among white women had little to do with campaign outreach. —-> this is true. Turns out that white women buy groceries more often than they contemplate abortions; they are rarely in need of hiding how they vote from their husbands; and they’re not enthused about the sexualization of their kids. Some also remember Trump being president before and things being okay. Lastly, more than a few saw Harris’s “interviews” with friendly media and decided to avoid the train wreck.
As a white woman from the US I couldn’t agree more.
I am so tired of hearing about the “patriarchy° and how oppressed women are. I have been surrounded and supported by incredible men throughout my life. My husband and I’s relationship is one built on trust and understanding, so even when we do have differing points of view, I feel no need to hide anything from him. I have seen my cart size shrink while the cost continues to rise. I have witnessed firsthand the negative impacts of ideological and hypersexualized content on my school age children and their peers. I still have rights for reproductive health, no one is telling me what I must do with my body. As an adult, I don’t need them to. I value my body and have practiced safe sex, so the concern of being able to access an abortion as easily as I can buy a pack of gum is far from the top of my list. I have seen working age, able bodied & minded adults receive financial assistance from the government who brag about how they do not have to work, while senior citizens and veterans barely receive enough to get by for all their years of service and contributions to the workforce.
I do not blindly support or give my allegiance to either party. I do not think either candidate is without flaws, but it is clear as day that something has to change. If that means voting for someone half the country views as abrasive, so be it.
Apparently, more people care about groceries than saving democracy. It’s a hell of a choice to have to make.
Saving democracy??
Why that’s exactly what most Americans just voted to do! A freely made majority vote which generated a majority of Electoral College representatives who will elect Trump as the next President of the United States.
That seems like the very definition of Democracy in action, doesn’t it?
Rejecting the ‘he’s a fascist’ lie (heck, the vast majority of the individuals who adopted that hiccup of a response couldn’t define the word if their lives depended upon it)….rejecting the unreality which is Transgenderism… rejecting the sexualization of young children… insisting that loans taken must be repaid…. believing in the absolute value of free speech, even if it’s speech that makes you uncomfortable, or contains content that someone somewhere might identify as ‘disinformation’…. adhering to the Constitution… not seeking to expand & pack SCOTUS…. not pushing to redefine DC as a state with it’s 93% Democratic voting record…. de-weaponizing the DOJ and every single government regulatory agency which heretofore acted like feudal kingdoms… respecting the 2nd Amendment… Killing DIE and all the associated racist/sexist policies thereby derived… Once again defining the border as a border which must be controlled & protectd… All these things seem very ‘democratic’ in nature, don’t they?
It’s never a good idea to blame the voter for your electoral loss. They tend not to like that.
Is this mostly a left wing thing? I don’t recall the Tories blaming their voters in this years election.
I think it’s mostly a radical progressive thing. Trump is actually more aligned with pre-Obama Dems than Republicans. The progressives are always right about everything – they’re on the right side of history – so anyone who challenges their narrative is fundamentally flawed.
Exactly right.
When you’re absolutely confident — for absolute sure — that you know best what’s best for everyone. When you’re convinced that the arc of history bends towards you. When there is no doubt that you are on Right Side of Everything (the same side occupied by Science, for goodness sake), then obviously, when the majority of the voting public — millions and millions of people — don’t validate those ultimate truths by which you live your life……… well then, clearly they are deplorable idiots & racist, sexist, patriarchal garbage, still clinging to their guns & religion.
As Kam herself said, ‘the fight goes on’ (to convince all us fools that they really do know best, what’s best for EVERYONE)
The Tories definitely lost because of the voters though.
It’s usually the voters’ fault though (unless you are in Venezuela).
As Twitter has been saying:
Turns out women buy groceries more often than they get abortions.
They still want to know they can get an abortion when they need one though, which is why even Red States have been putting appropriate measures into their State Constitutions.
I know this is a gender stereotype, but it is true, women of all colours are the ones most responsible for buying groceries and putting meals on the table. Could what has happened under Biden / Harris to the price of groceries have been a big issue for them? Additionally Women of all colours know they can’t feed themselves and their families with word salads, which is all Kamala ever served up on any issue.
Although Trump did not poll well with Black or Latino women I believe he did better with them than any other Republican has.
I may be misunderstanding the abortion issue, but Trump has been very clear that it is an issue for individual States so if any women does have an issue then they need to take it up with their State and not the Federal Govt. The Kamala line on what Trump would do was as false as her line on him being a Nazi.
And would women really be.ieve that Kamala could magically go back to Dobbs and Roe v Wade? Her powers really wouldn’t stretch that far as to order the SC to change its mind, or force Congress to legislate on the subject.
Or Trump to stop all wars.
As a white woman, I am disappointed. But the surveys I read had abortion as women’s main concern, and women in seven states voted to preserve women’s right to control their own bodies. Those states, which include Republican states, are: Arizona, Missouri, Colorado, Maryland, Montana, New York and Nevada. Nevada is weird, because people have to vote on it again in 2026. Abortion rights failed in: South Dakota, Nebraska and Florida. These are blood red states so no surprise. (Kanas, another blood red state, did vote to add abortion rights to the state constitution shortly after Roe was overturned.) Anyway, I’m pleased with the results, and women—and men—did turn out support women’s rights.
I think any Republican would have won. Economy innit.
Hey maybe they just didn’t fancy being r@ped by a Venezuelan gang member.
Is getting raped by a fat New York property developer better?
I don’t think Trump was accused of rape.
Unlike Bill Clinton.
Trump was accused and found guilty in civil proceedings.
You mugs have accused Clinton of everything under the sun – all pure fantasy on your part of course!
Clinton didn’t rape anyone. Please fact check.
Good one!!
Here’s a thought!
Maybe white women actually think, and behave not like gendered automatons running on programmed algorithms…but like actual, full-grown adults? Maybe they spend time & focused effort truly weighing choices, balancing pros & cons, making significantly considered decisions, given their well-established short & long term priorities? Maybe they take into account their children’s needs (both sons & daughters), their family’s needs, the needs of their neighborhood, their town, their nation… and then try to determine which party’s platform actually comes the closest to providing the necessary, buttressing support?
Perhaps they even look at reality and ask: can men really become women? Are babies born carrying either an account payable or an account due because of the color of their skin? If I borrow money from you, is it really reasonable to expect and even demand that I must repay it?
Is the planet really going to die with a 1.5 degree temp boost? Should the state righteously tell me what car to drive, how much water I want to use in shower or toilet? Or what light bulbs I must buy?
If I lock my own front door to keep the uninvited out, is it asking too much to expect my country to do the same? Does that really make me racist? If I don’t vote for someone with a vagina because ‘It’s their policies, stupid’…does that mean I lose my ‘Woman Card’? (Will Madeleine Albright force me to go to that “special place in hell”?)
Should people really be held accountable for the choices they make (even if the consequences of those deliberate, conscious choices make their bellies feel all woosie and give them ‘bad feelz’?)
Do mothers really have a God-given right to kill their own children?
Hmmmm.
Maybe White Women, Black Men, Black Women, Hispanics, Asians, Young & Old, Short & Fat, Tall & Thin, Fast & Slow … maybe all these demographic blocs actually woke-up from being WOKE, decided they didn’t all think and act alike, and voted like honest-to-God rational adults with a suitcase full of responsibilities, hopes, and dreams?
Far fetched, I know…. but I’m thinking that just maybe, finally, possibly it’s real?
Why should people in the news media expect female reproductive issues to trump every other problem in this complicated and dangerous world?
They didn’t.
It was a classic failure of identity politics and almost an insulting wilful blindness to what has happened over some decades to the income of the average American.
Trump ‘got it’, at least insofar as he could channel it for electoral advantage. Addressing the trend on income imbalance in the US not something though he’s going to do anything fundamental about.
It’s worth remembering the old adage “You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer”. We shall see ..
The rich will get richer, it’s happened already, the day after the election results. If you think Trump actually cares about the poor, dream on.
What a shame Trump didn’t go on Red Scare. That would have been a hoot!