Saturday, March 26, 2016

Why It Matters How Donald Trump Loves Women


A clarification to my post below.  Imagine this:

It is 2016 and the front-runner of the Republican presidential primary thinks women are cheese sandwiches.  It has taken until now for the media to fully address that fascinating aspect of the race.  How would president Trump's decisions affect more than half of the US population, given his opinions on women?  How many women would his cabinet have?  Would they be picked on the tits-waist-butt measurements (and for being yes-women for Trump in everything) or based on actual relevant ability?

None of this is new, of course.  Just watch the rules Fox News uses on how to select female talking heads for their programs.  It's obvious that  a beauty pageant is part of the entry requirement into those jobs, but only for women.  Men can look like a sheep's butt-hole as long as they otherwise make sense.

The point that escapes Trump and others who think like him is that those cheese sandwiches have votes.  Indeed, women don't like Trump very much:

Though Trump continues to outdistance Cruz in the delegates that will decide the GOP nomination, recent polls have shown the billionaire's favorability on the decline, particularly among women.
In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 70 percent of women had a negative opinion of Trump. Nearly three quarters of women overall, and 39 percent of Republican women, had an unfavorable view of him in a recent CNN poll.
"He already had a gender gap prior to all this," said Republican pollster David Winston. "The potential for that to be bigger now looms on the horizon."
But even that message doesn't hit home with him.  He just utters, once again, how much he loves and respects women, that weird species that's created to give him sex and adulation.  Not votes, I guess.

Now imagine a general election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton!  We are going to have such fun, us cheese sandwiches*.

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*  In terms of gender politics.  But Trump might keep his loud mouth closed about wimminz and we would still get gender politics.

One study of New Jersey voters suggests that men support Trump over Clinton much more strongly when primed with thoughts about who takes how much money home in their families.  A reverse, though much weaker, shift is seen among women who are primed the same way.  See here for the tables.  Note that the shift doesn't happen in the Sanders v. Trump comparison.  That supports the idea that this is about gender.