Gender And the 2016 Elections. Part I: How Did Women And Men Say They Voted?

This is the first of three posts, a mini-series on sex differences in voting behavior, on the possible impact of sexism or misogyny as one of the motivating forces for some/many voters and, finally, my own views on how Hillary Clinton's run was framed in much of the media.

I'm beginning with the CNN exit poll data.*

Here is the table which shows how men and women in various ethnic and racial groups said they voted in the 2016 presidential elections:

And here is the corresponding exit polls table from the 2012 elections:

What would first strike you about those two tables?  Do you notice how similar the two sets of exit poll results are?  How it is the whites who constitute the vast majority of the Republican Party?  How it is the blacks who overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic Party?

How in every racial and ethnic category men are more likely to vote for the Republican candidate than women?**

And, of course, how close the various numbers are to each other.

There are differences, too.  Hillary Clinton got a lower percentage of votes than Barack Obama in every single sex-race-ethnicity category except that for white women, and third party candidates got more votes in 2016 than in 2012.

All that is a useful reminder, something to keep in mind while the media chews and chews and will not swallow the topic of angry white working class people in the swing states***:  The overall picture suggests that Americans voted fairly closely the same way in 2016 and in 2012, though Barack Obama was better liked than Hillary Clinton.

And that is the shock, of course, because whatever nasty things one might say about Mitt Romney, he is not a carnival barker like Donald J. Trump, who has already broken many of his campaign promises.  Neither was Mitt Romney famous for pussy-grabbing or for calling Mexicans rapists or for wanting to erect a wall against the Mexican border. ****

For what it is worth, here is the table on how much grabbing women by their pussies bothered voters in 2016:

I don't want to exaggerate the similarity of the 2012 and 2016 exit poll results.  As I already noted, Clinton was less popular than Obama, and third party candidates played a larger role in 2016.  The tables on voting by gender and marital status also show differences.

Here's the 2016 table:

And here's the 2012 table:

Note the very large drop among unmarried men from the Democratic column and also the fairly large increase in the number of married women in that same column.  The overall effect in 2016 exit polls is to leave the married men as the only group which shows a strong preference for Trump.

What caused these changes, assuming that the exit poll figures are a good measure of actual votes?

Your guesses are as good as mine, though it's interesting that the unmarried men's loss in the Democratic column didn't benefit only Trump but also third-party candidates.

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*  All the 2016 tables in this post are from this source, all the 2012 tables from this source.

Exit poll data should be treated with some caution, because it might not create a representative sample of all votes cast, for various reasons.  Note, also, that these polls are for the whole country, not just for the swing states.

** The same pattern can be found in this table which looks at party-membership and gender in voting (2016):

*** I get the focus on the swing states, but they are the swing states because of the overall patterns of voting in the country, so those overall patterns matter, too.

****  My impression is that those Trump utterances didn't matter very much, but I may be mistaken.  For example, that Latinos and Latinas in the two sets of exit polls stated that they voted for Trump roughly at the same percentages as they voted for Romney might not mean that they weren't bothered by Trump's nasty comments about Mexicans.  The alternative explanation is that they were troubled by that hostility, but that their demographic groups are becoming more conservative over time and thus more likely to vote for the Republican candidate.  From that angle Trump may have lost some of their votes.

What Trump Is Giving To His Angry Working-Class Voters This Christmas

Several beautifully wrapped up huge packages, some of which I peeked at in an earlier post.  But Trump is the gift that keeps on giving.

Here is Steven Mnuchin (hold your nose and sneeze to get that said), a Wall Street insider, who is Trump's pick for the Treasury Secretary:

Mnuchin is a Wall Street veteran who spent nearly 20 years at Goldman Sachs before starting his own hedge fund, Dune Capital. He leapt into the banking industry when he led a group of investors in the purchase of lender, IndyMac, during the financial crisis. That bank was eventually bought by CIT.
His financial industry experience has heartened Wall Street insiders, but left some Democratic lawmakers and progressive groups crying foul. Mnuchin "made himself enormously wealthy by cashing in on the country's financial collapse," Take on Wall Street, a progressive group calling for Wall Street reform, said in a statement.

Mnuchin is planning to relax those awful regulations which keep the financial industry from happily gambling the world into another Great Recession!

You know gallows humor?  Well, that's what makes me giggle right now, because Trump repeatedly preached about crooked Hillary and her Wall Street connections in his rallies, and then there is this, from the donaldjtrump.com, posted before the elections, I presume:

Hillary Clinton talks a big game on lending a helping hand to regular Americans, but her revenue stream suggests that she’s actually holding her hands out to big banks on Wall Street. Over the years, the Democratic nominee has accepted $3 million in paid speeches and $17 million in campaign contributions. Collectively, it is estimated that the Clintons have pulled in around $69 million in political contributions from Wall Street.
But the Clinton corruption didn’t stop at wads of Wall Street cash and big bank-friendly policy. Individuals from Wall Street and Big Tech were also rewarded with positions in Bill Clinton’s White House. The Clinton cartel has been auctioning influence in Washington for decades, and the starting bid has only increased over the years.

Bolds are mine.

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PS This Fortune article points out that Mnuchin will be the 77th white man to run the Treasury.  Here is the list of the previous guys.  Fun stuff.

The Demolition Derby Administration Keeps Shaping Up: Tom Price To Wreck Health Care.

Tom Price has been selected to get rid of Obamacare.  Getting rid of Obamacare will be a great victory for this angry Trump-voter:

“I went from the guy who smoked $50 cigars in his hot tub, to the guy who was doing everything he could just to stay afloat,” Chris said. Taxes alone on his new home were $20,000 a year. The lien against it was more than $1 million. He sold everything he could – his Lionel train collection, his vintage guitar collection, his restored cars.

His lawyers said he should declare bankruptcy, but he felt it was “like wearing a scarlet letter” and refused. Trying to save the house became his first priority, so he let other things lapse, and when his family health insurance reached $3,900 a month in 2012, from the $900 it had been three years earlier, “I had to do something I swore I would never do,” he says, and he dropped his coverage.

He put his children on New York state’s low-income program, a “handout” that “I used as a safety net — some people don’t, but I actually did.” He and his wife, in turn, refused to apply for Medicaid and just “sucked it up. And if we had to see a doctor, we paid cash.” And when he didn’t have the cash? Ultrasound to break up his kidney stones would have cost $8,000, he said, “so I pissed blood for weeks instead.”

Same when he broke his arm and ankle in a motorcycle accident. “I splinted and wrapped it and had a friend who is a vet X-ray it,” he said. “I took it easy, and it healed. I got through it with no government help.”

Eventually, he did become insured again — under an Obamacare policy.

Emphasis is mine.  But the whole story is an interesting one, from the rage at losing the gilded paradise to the rage at having to depend on "government handouts."   And do read the whole thing for his use of the term "cunt" in social media.

Well, now those who voted for Trump for other reasons can relax, because Obamacare indeed will be repealed and millions of Americans, once again, can try to figure out ways to save enough for their health care expenses.  A week in intensive care?  Set aside several hundred thousands, in case you might ever need that care, because the Trump alternative focuses on just that:  the old-time Health Savings Accounts.

Tom Price is a gift that keeps on giving, not only for the working poor of all races and ethnic groups, but also for women in general.  He is strictly opposed to abortion, he fought against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act and he opposed the mandatory coverage of birth control in the ACA for religious reasons.  He is also opposed to same-sex marriage.

A Good Ole Boy, in short.  And just the kind of man we might expect if Trump was all lies about how he is an outsider who will drain the Washington swamp.

Watching this administration develop would be great fun (the popcorn and beer kind of fun) if we were sitting in comfortable chairs on some other planet, far far away.

A Chess Genius Or A Two-Year-Old Prone To Temper Tantrums?

Which best describes our Dear Leader-Elect?  You decide!  And you don't have to base that decision on any facts or observations, because our new era is one of emotions!

I know that sounds surprising, given that it's women who are prone to hysteria (as is widely known in the manosphere and white supremacist websites*).  Luckily we narrowly missed that frightening bullet of being ruled by the petticoats!  But nevertheless, this is the era of Emotions As Information.

This makes writing political satire an immensely tricky exercise.  While reading obituaries (sad to hear about the passing of Ron Glass), I noted an odd new feeling in me, one that I have never associated with obituaries, and that was envy.  At least those who have moved on cannot be harmed by the coming Trump Reich.

Sigh.

Onwards and upwards.  The Green Party recount efforts made Trump answer, in his typical two-year-old-who-wasn't-allowed-to-eat-his-toys manner, that Hillary Clinton's massive lead in popular votes was caused by millions of people voting illegally.

That there is no evidence of that doesn't matter at all.   Our Dear Leader-Elect has spoken.

Oh, but there IS evidence, you might mutter, if you live in that alternative reality where we lefties are all sock-puppets of George Soros (George, where is my check?), because the Pew Center published a study about errors in the voter registration lists.  You need to read that study to find out that it is not about illegal voting but about the state of the voter registration lists which often include deceased people or wrong addresses for people who have moved and so on.

But that study is the one the conservatives cite to support Trump's tweet (we have a president-elect who tweets everything that comes into his head so enemies can read it!) about all those illegal votes:

 

So was that tweet the masterly move of a chess champion who can predict the million moves his opponent might make in the future as a response to any one of his moves? Some Republicans believe so:

But the RNC member ― who like most in the RNC was not originally a fan of the New York City businessman ― said he has come to see that Trump is a master of reading the national landscape and manipulating it to his own ends.
“It’s clear to me, at this moment, that he understands the public, the media, and the left better than I ever imagined,” he said, adding that “the left’s” push for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were designed to weaken Trump. “He is concerned that weeks will drag on with discussions about the legitimacy of his presidency. ... So once again he changes the discussion.”

Or was it just the reflexive response by someone who cannot stand the idea of losing in anything at all, someone who will lash out at every perceived insult?

I guess he could be both a chess genius and a two-year-old lying on the floor, screaming with a red face and kicking his heels against the carpet, if we define the former as someone who knows his reality show audience, someone who understands that now you can go as low as you wish and those who criticize the pussy-grabber-in-chief are just sore losers.

Somehow I prefer sore losers to a sore winner who is anything but presidential.

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*  For instance:

Spencer readily admits that women make up a small portion of the alt-right, but he has also said that most women secretly crave alt-right boyfriends because they want "alpha genes" and "alpha sperm." He also believes women are unsuited to some roles in government: "Women should never be allowed to make foreign policy," he tweeted during the first presidential debate. "It's not that they're 'weak.' To the contrary, their vindictiveness knows no bounds."

Vindictive bitches!  Compare that to how calmly Donald Trump takes insults.

And:

Gamergate and the broader anti-feminist crusade known as the men's rights movement have percolated throughout the alt-right. Yiannopoulos often denounces feminists and Black Lives Matter in the same breath. Cernovich, who made a name for himself as a Gamergate instigator, is a staunch defender of white-male identity politics: Political correctness prevents discussion of obvious truths, in his view, whether it's the innate "neuroticism" of women or the criminal proclivities of certain ethnic groups.