The conservative, white, female Trump voter
by digby
Yes, it’s another story from the New York Times about Trump voters. This time the focus is on the women who worship the pussy-grabbing miscreant.
Standing in an airplane hangar in the mid-autumn chill awaiting the arrival of President Trump, Joan Philpott said she was angry and scared. Only Mr. Trump, she said, can solve the problems she worries most about.
“He wants to protect this country, and he wants to keep it safe, and he wants to keep it free of invaders and the caravan and everything else that’s going on,” said Ms. Philpott, 69, a retired respiratory therapist.
Ms. Philpott was one of thousands of women who braved a drizzle for hours to have the chance to cheer Mr. Trump at a rally here on Thursday. While political strategists and public opinion experts agree that Mr. Trump’s greatest electoral weakness is among female voters, here in Columbia and places like it, the president enjoys a herolike status among women who say he is fighting to preserve a way of life threatened by an increasingly liberal Democratic Party.
“He understands why we’re angry,” Ms. Philpott said, “and he wants to fix it.”
As Republican candidates battle to keep their congressional majorities in the midterm elections on Tuesday, Mr. Trump is crisscrossing the country to deliver a closing argument meant to acknowledge — and in many cases stoke — women’s anxieties. At rally after rally, he has said that women “want security,” warning of encroaching immigrants, rising crime and a looming economic downturn if Democrats gain power.
Some of Mr. Trump’s female backers initially supported him only reluctantly or do so now in spite of reservations about his bawdy language and erratic behavior. But they shared in his victory after the bitter and partisan battle over the confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. And many believe the president when he reminds them during each of his hourlong pep rallies that the world they know — largely Christian, conservative and white — is at stake on Tuesday.
They are evangelicals. That is the heart of Trump’s base.
These women have been opponents of everything I believe in for as long as I can remember. If you have ever done any abortion activism these are the people with whom you most like lock horns. They are hostile to feminism on every level. They are very, very conservative.
I have them in my family. They are the “poorly educated” as Trump called them. They like Trump for the same reason all those evangelicals love Trump. He is the leader of their tribe, he hates all the people they hate and tells them what they want to hear. And they love patriarchy and their place in it. Trump, to them, is a rich alpha-male who makes hem feel all warm inside.
They are unpersuadable. Unlike like the white men who love Trump, they are also a minority of white women.
Clinton won 47% of white women in 2016, the largest margin in history. We’re going to see if Trump has finally driven a majority to the Democrats. It was happening anyway, but he may have super-charged it.
But don’t kid yourself. There are always going to be a large number of conservative white evangelical women who vote with their conservative white male leaders. Being a second-class citizen (what they think of as being “put on a pedestal”) is fundamental to their worldview. They don’t break away. And there are a lot of them.
Update: LOL! Now HERE’s a REAL Trump follower:
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