Vote Like a Woman

What is a “woman’s issue,” when it comes to state and national politics?

I have watched in astonishment as the Democrats, over the past 20 months, have systematically thrown away what has in our lifetime been their primary treasure: that is to say, the women’s vote.

Presidents Clinton and Obama won solely due to the advantage that the DNC has held, for decades, with one demographic: white suburban women — and especially, the white college-educated suburban women who traditionally vote over 80 per cent for Democrats. The advantage this gave President Clinton was a gender gap in his favor of up to 11%. [https://cawp.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/resources/ggpresvote.pdf]

That shrunk to 6% for President Obama, in some metrics, but it still made the difference in electing him. [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/28/a-closer-look-at-the-gender-gap-in-presidential-voting/]

No matter how many ways you do the math, Democrats simply cannot win a national or state election without this population’s support.

Yet they are enacting policies and producing messaging that burn up that advantage. And indeed this demographic is abandoning the DNC ship.

My own specialty, as a former political consultant, was in advising the Democrats how to appeal to, and formulate policies for, this crucial demographic. For a number of reasons — the fact that pollsters, consultants and candidates, were mostly men in their 50s and 60s — both parties tended (and still tend) to be tone-deaf about “women’s issues”, except for those issues that hit even the most entrenched patriarchal dinosaur over the head, such as “pay equity,” rape and domestic violence, and abortion rights.

But — what is a “women’s issue”?

As a feminist, it has amazed me that the gender politics of what has happened to us over the past two years has gone virtually un-analyzed. Lockdowns and medical coercion, vaccine mandates, the masking of children, the closures of small businesses by force — freedom itself, for Lord’s sake — are all, obviously, “women’s issues.”

(As CEO and cofounder of a non-partisan platform, I cannot tell you for whom to vote. But I can remind you what freedom looks like; and as a feminist, I can certainly do what I have done for decades, and urge women to vote “like women.” The conclusions you reach when you think about how this issue is at play now, may surprise you.)

Who was disproportionately harmed by lockdowns? Masking? Forced mRNA injections?

Women and their children.

Lockdowns are women’s issues.

Who was expected somehow to fullfil their obligations to their bosses — while overseeing the wellbeing of school-age kids suddenly confined to their rooms, isolated without friends, and chained cognitively to screens? Women.

I’ve been on panels for 35 years about how to solve the conundrum of women’s needs as workers, versus requirements for parenting small or school-aged children; and never would I have imagined that this stubborn puzzle would be “solved” by the proposition that we simply chain both mom and kids to separate computers in a single family home, with zero social contact or support, for six to eight hours a day, for months at a time.

That ‘“solution” — one crafted by those tech companies who benefited (as I explained in my book The Bodies of Others) from the digital-only world — is the most misogynist, and anti-child, “solution” ever, in the history of human moms and kids.

Now imagine this situation as a single mother — with no respite at all, via a partner, from caregiving. Now imagine that you are a “frontline worker” single mom — with no one to watch your child locked at home. Some stats, via the United States Bureau of the Census:

More