Roseanne Could Be a Turning Point for Conservative Women
Women had a lot of reasons to vote for Trump, starting with Hillary Clinton. She’s not running now, and his flaws—and those of many of his supporters—are becoming harder to ignore.
KELI GOFF
05.31.18 4:49 AM ET
One of the many reasons people were shocked by Donald Trump's election is that they couldn’t fathom that women would vote against a competent female candidate in favor of a man facing very credible allegations of misogyny and harassment. (For the record, I have written that the lingering allegations against Hillary Clinton’s husband certainly complicated things, but Bill Clinton still wasn’t on the ballot in 2016.)
While the most common media narrative became that white women voted for Trump en masse because they were racists, the truth is much more complicated. Thanks to Roseanne Barr’s racist rhetoric, among other high-profile conservative missteps, Republicans are likely to find out just how complicated these women voters are — and to face a real reckoning at the voting booth.
Plenty of my liberal friends were shocked that any woman could cast a vote for Donald Trump, I wasn’t because I had some conservative friends (and yes they are still my friends) who had done just that. Their reasons came down to the issues that were most important to them, like abortion. For those that consider it murder, they were willing to vote for whichever candidate would nominate justices and push policies to end it – even if that meant holding their nose and closing their eyes in the voting booth. And guess what? For those voters President Trump has delivered, from nominating conservative stalwart Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, to reinstating the global gag rule, which prevents international organizations receiving US Aid from discussing abortion options. (The White House is exploring a domestic gag rule as well.)
There were other reasons women voted for him that many of us may not fully understand, but those women didn’t need us to understand because their reasons made sense to them. For some, they were willing to vote for a qualified female candidate — including a Democrat — but not for Hillary Clinton. They didn’t like her, didn’t trust her and never would. And while they surmised it was possible that Donald Trump engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior, they already knew Hillary Clinton’s husband had and that she defended him. So in their eyes that made the 2016 election essentially a wash. You could either vote for the guy that you knew was a jerk but who you actually agreed with on tax policy or immigration policy or vote for the woman you may not agree with, because she’s a woman, but she’s a woman married to another jerk. Trump and Clinton were the two least popular presidential nominees on record.
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/roseanne-could-be-a-turning-point-for-conservative-women?ref=home
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