Revenge of the Karens
Explaining White Suburban Women voters
The midterm elections are not looking good for Democrats. While it’s very normal for the president’s party to lose votes in midterm elections, next week’s election is different. Polling data shows that people might elect candidates who have ties to Donald Trump and are election-deniers. Election deniers should not be issued a driver’s license, nevermind given entry into the halls of government.
The other strange thing about these midterm elections is that one surprising demographic will be pushing the Republican ticket — white, suburban women.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that their poll of 297 white suburban women (admittedly not a huge sample size) found that they favor Republican candidates by 15 percentage points. The big issue, according to this WSJ poll, was the economy, not abortion. “54% of white suburban women think the U.S. is already in a recession and 74% think the economy is headed in the wrong direction.” Their support for Republicans candidates, including Donald Trump, has jumped significantly just in the past couple of months.
There have been a lot of hot takes on white suburban women by people who are not white suburban women. How about I take a stab at unrolling these statistics?
Now, I’m a Democrat, and that won’t change even though I have been plenty mad about school closures during the pandemic. I won’t vote for a party that shelters Donald Trump. I also have a kid with special needs, so I’ll always for vote the party that does a marginally less shitty job of caring for people with differences. Other issues are important to me, too, but we’ll just mention those two issues now. My friends in my neighborhood have other priorities.
The polls clearly show that the economy matters to women. And it does. Women tend to do the grocery shopping. They buy the soccer cleats and prom dresses. They know when there’s not enough money to send their children to the better summer camp. When a mom can’t take her family to the brick oven pizza restaurant and get a night off from cooking, it hurts. As the family spenders, women are more tied to the economic barometer than men.
The president has very little control over the economy, but always takes the blame or the credit for its performance. In the past, presidents have weathered a bad economy without too big of a hit on popularity by refraining from passing expensive legislation that benefits one segment of the population and by appearing to care about the problems. There’s a way of handling the public perception of a bad economy; let’s just leave it at that.
A number of my friends are also super worried about crime. We live in a commuter town for New York City. Just a 30 minute drive from midtown (on a good day), many of us work in the city, visit for entertainment, or have children who attend college there. One friend’s son is a student at Fordham and has regular stories about him being held up at gun point in the Bronx; she’s hoping he doesn’t get shot before graduation. Others say that they are skipping trips to the museums and zoos, because they fear subway pushings and other acts of random street violence. Now, statistically, crime might not be much worse than usual, but it feels bad to suburban moms.
Now, schools might not be an issue in this election. The kids are back at their desks and learning without masks. Around here, the culture wars are not a factor at school board meetings, so I can’t speak to that topic at all. While the last election in NJ and VA may have had a strong education vibe, the pollsters say that it’s not a factor this November.
However, I do think that schools are having a subtle effect on this election. As any parent or teacher will tell you, schools have still not recovered from the pandemic, and now, inflation is killing school budgets. There are no new gifted and talent programs or Spanish teachers for the elementary school. The sixth grade class can’t take a trip to Boston, and the football field looks patchy. The teachers aren’t hiding their exhaustion.
Schools are the center of suburban life, and when they falter, people feel it. High school graduation is the highlight of the year. When their families feel pain, women going into momma bear mode and start fighting.
Our downtown looks bad, too, with empty stores up and down the street like a Jack-o-Lantern’s smile. Many stores closed during the pandemic with the rise of online shopping. Inflation and rent prices have pushed out more in the past year.
The limping schools and empty stores and dire stories about subway platforms is super depressing. It’s like the pandemic ran a tractor through our lives and everything is still turned up and fallow.
At the same time as these suburban women are feeling afraid and vulnerable in the post-pandemic world, they also feel under attack. When they turn on CNN or open social media, they feel shamed for the concern for their families. Organized during school closures, they share notes on Facebook pages and social media. They don’t appreciate being mocked for their waist lines and wrinkles. They don’t feel like the Democrats care about their issues, so they’re going elsewhere. While they might not care about Donald Trump, they are revenge-voting.
Now, what should Democrats do to win back white suburban women, who make up about 20 percent of the voting electorate? These women want respect, not mockery. They want to make sure that their downtowns are clean and safe. That want their kids resume the same quality of education that they received just a few years ago. They need some control over the price of supermarket staples. I don’t think Democrats can win elections without this important voting block, so new strategies are needed. Because the outcomes in November will be huge.
LINKS
My disability newsletter retells the story of how I got my autistic kid to talk.
We had our first Halloween driveway party this week. Big fun. Also, date night picture.
Emily Oster says we need to declare COVID amnesty over all the bad moves that we made during the early months of the pandemic. Nah. People wrote off kids like mine and never actually provided the high dosage tutoring or other restorative measures. I’m not over it.
Emily Hanford’s ongoing story about a crappy reading curriculum spread throughout our schools.
This old Atlantic article about the two genomes of rats in New York City came up in my timeline. Steve and I talked about this on Saturday’s date night.
Super sad story about a juvenile detention center in Louisiana.
Some work done by relief agencies and non-profits in New York City. The beneficiaries need more than gift cards and occasional hand-outs. They need high-end social services under one roof.
Cooking: Quiche using the Enchanted Broccoli Forest formula.
Watching: Derry Girls, Andor, Rings of Power (#boymom)
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Agree with a lot of this. Especially the mocking of women's concerns, which seems to have spiraled into the idea that if you're worried about crime you're a racist at worst, and at best just some kind of idiot overracting. Being told that as a taxpayer (and voter) you have no right to expect the authorities to keep you safe - and in fact that it's wrong for you to ask! - is pretty galling.