For all its erratic twists, including regicide of a sitting president by Democratic bosses, one thing has been consistent and clear in this election. It is that men and women are now divided into hostile camps.
The race stayed tight because Democrats’ popularity among women matched the party’s alienation of men. A USA Today-Suffolk University poll found a horrific chasm between the sexes on Halloween. Kamala Harris was disfavored 53% to 37% among men but was up 53% to 36% among women. This unprecedented “gender gap” bodes ill for social harmony.
There is a silver lining, which is that voters are not split along racial lines the way Democratic propaganda suggests they are and tries to persuade them to be. Leftist efforts to balkanize America into racial groups are failing. Black and Hispanic working-class men increasingly identify with white men of the same class rather than with black and Hispanic voters in classes higher up the income scale.
This is because they share interests and don’t fixate on race as leftist activists do. Minorities, particularly minority men, are veering off toward Donald Trump, whose policies and style appeal to them. They decline to be corralled into the caste preferred for them by Democrats.
When Trump, still wearing his white shirt and trademark red tie, dons a McDonald’s apron or a garbage worker’s reflective vest, he appeals to working-class voters — not by falsely implying “I’m the same as you” but authentically by demonstrating “I am with you.” This is the opposite of former President Barack Obama or Harris, who engage in awkward convivial slumming by rolling up their sleeves, dropping their Gs, or changing their accents depending on whom they are talking to.
Democrats have pried the sexes apart with fabrications about abortion, but at the same time, Trumpeters have played up an ugly pastiche of manhood with such vulgar displays as Hulk Hogan’s rip-roaring strip at Madison Square Garden, which was surely off-putting to civilized members of both sexes.
In the last days of the campaign, Harris lured women voters with an ad that, though more restrained in tone than Hogan’s chauvinist clowning, was just as ugly in its assumptions and messaging.
In it, a conservative husband, apparently a Trump supporter, cajoles his wife to vote “the right way.” The wife decides in the voting booth, “the one place in America where women still have a right to choose,” to vote secretly for Harris.
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The ad induces a cringe because it valorizes marital division and, more, because it utterly misunderstands and misrepresents conservatives, as social science data show that liberals generally do. The husband calls his wife “honey” in a patronizing way, and she calls him “honey” ironically. A marriage involving conservatives, or at least a conservative man, is depicted as presuming sheepish wifely obedience in which she can vote her conscience only because “no one will ever know.” It’s as though she expects a beating if hubby ever finds out.
Democrats falsely suggest, not just by pointing to abortion, that Republicans are hostile to women. But the big electoral divide has opened between the sexes in truth because Trump let working men know he’s with them, while Democrats have told women this means he and the Republicans are against them.