Women talk. I mean, they really talk to each other. A lot. All the time.
They talk to each other in the grocery checkout line, in coffee shops, over lunch, at the spa, at the doctor’s office, while waiting for their kids, at the gym, over drinks after work, on coffee breaks, at the Xerox machine, at the hairdressers and nail salons, at the kids’ soccer, T-ball, Little League, basketball, and football games, at Church, over friendly card games, at bingo, over the hedges with neighbors, at the bowling league, at the car wash, at union meetings, at work in the office, at professional conferences, at political rallies, at School Board meetings, in hotel kitchens, in locker rooms, filling up at the gas station, in the restroom, at the PTA, even while playing golf. Just to name a few places.
And we haven’t even mentioned the cell phone, landlines, and office phones.
Women communicate. They talk with friends, intimates, acquaintances, strangers, and folks they just met. They exchange views, thoughts and feelings, apprehensions, and hopes and fears. They are in turn honest, closed off, open, wary, suspicious, friendly, distant, engaged, confiding, misdirecting, uncertain, angry, furious, jealous, caring, revengeful, generous, calculating, loving and hateful.
Like an enormous body of liquid water, the sum of their communication interactions can penetrate into every crevice, niche, crack, and gap, span river banks, overflow creek beds, fill mountain gorges, plunge over waterfalls, flood caves, surround islands, and occupy oceans between continents.
It can freeze or boil. It exists in all three physical states: solid, liquid, and gas. It can bring a desert to life with plants and flowers and help sustain life for all God’s creatures.
Woman to Woman communication can be gentle or harsh. It can reanimate life with gentle showers. It can flood a river valley and sweep away all life and man-made structures in its way. It can be sudden like a hurricane or geologically slow like the wearing away of the Grand Canyon. It can be chaotic or still running. It can roar or flow silent and deep.
Part of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon (Arizona)*
It obeys its own laws, and in the end does not heed rules imposed by mortal men who want to confine its course to a prescribed artificial channel. Those arrogant enough to try eventually wind up high and dry or washed out to sea.
Woman to Woman comm networks can sense distain, desperation, deception, deceit, and fear like some magical form of E.S.P. The power is hard-wired. The networks are full of practical information. It works for sensing men, too.
O.K. Female communication is powerful, potent, even irresistible.
What has all this to do with the Presidential election in 2016?
Some Basic Electoral Math
Facts are stubborn things. The 2016 election is about Woman. That’s right.
Watch Helen Reddy sing “A Am Woman” (Midnight Special February 2, 1973)**
The data just below are from the fabulous source Presidential Exit Polls published by the New York Times, which provides a generous and valuable non-partisan public service for voters. These good journalists support our American democracy with part of the information we all need in order to make well-informed choices between those who ask for our precious votes.
Women make up the majority of U.S. Presidential voters (54% in 2004, 53% in 2008, and 53% in 2012). This is not temporary and not dependent on party affiliation. We’re not talking about poll numbers, or preferences, or loud shouting. We are talking about folks who get off their behinds and show up to cast their Red, White, and Blue actual votes, like they are supposed to. Women outvote men 53%-47%, a 6% stable difference.
The 2016 Woman Card (in Burgundy raiment)
A credit to their gender, and a tick against the menfolk who just can’t be bothered. Not to mention the significant additional voting hurdles women may face, like single moms with childcare responsibilities, women providing nursing care for aging relatives or sick dependents, women who face restrictive or discriminatory time-off policies at work, etc.
What about the percentage of women who have voted Republican since 2004? In 2004 it was 48%, in 2008 43%, and in 2012 44%.
The breakdown for women voters by party identity is also fairly stable since 2004, with Independents at 29%, Republicans at 32%, and Democrats at 38%. Other studies have indicated that self-identified Independents lean Republican in the voting both about half the time. For our purposes then, 47% of American women identify themselves as Republicans or leaning Republican.
Over the last 15 years, Republican women have made up approximately 47% of all women voters, while women made up 53% of all voters, and all women have actually voted Republican about 45% of the time.. So latterly Republican candidates (since 2004) have mildly underperformed their expected share of the women’s vote (may we say Women’s Card) by about 2%. Not so bad, but not a glorious path to election victory and political dominance either.
Now let’s turn to actual voter numbers. In 2012 there were 127.24 million votes for President in the U.S. In 2008, there were 131.47 million people who voted. In 2004 the number was 122.3 million. In 2000 it was 105.43. The only other time in American history the total vote was more than 100 million was in 1992 when 104.43 million voters had their say.
As an aside, neither Reagan twice in 1980 and 1984, nor Bush I in 1988 ever hit 100 million total voters in their elections. There have been five presidential elections with more than 100 million voters, four of them since the year 2000. Republicans have won two of the five elections; Democrats three.
How did Republicans fare in the Five Biggies (More than 100 Million Total Votes): In 1992, they had 39.1 million votes (Bush I); in 2000, they had 50.46 million (Bush II); in 2004, they had 62.04 million (Bush II); in 2008, they had 59.95 million (McCain) and in 2012, they had 60.93 million (Romney). For archeological interest, how did St Ronnie perform? He received 43.90 million votes in 1980, and 54.46 million votes in 1984, in his smashing victory.
So, the Republican Hall of Fame is Romney All-Time Number One (2012), followed by Bush II (2004) at Number Two, then McCain (2008) for Number Three, and Reagan (1984) at Number Four, rounded out by Bush II (2000) at Number Five.
The Republican best there’s ever been list thus consists of Romney, Bush II (twice), McCain, and Reagan (dead). It makes any rock-ribbed Republican loyal to the party for more than Ten Minutes wonder why Trump would deliberately alienate and trash-talk four of the party’s all time Champion Vote Getters? And the only other one on the list (Reagan) is dead. Even more, the most recent, and highest rated all-time Republican Voter Turnout Champ is Mitt Romney, whom Trump repeatedly insults and calls a ‘loser”. Republican Unity is a mangy unicorn in Trump’s imagination.
Silk And Wool: No Mange on this Magnificent Medieval Creature (Flanders about 1500)
The Lady and the Unicorn Tapestry (Cluny Museum, Paris) (2013) from the New York Times
The Republican best there’s ever been list thus consists of Romney, Bush II (twice), McCain, and Reagan (dead). It makes any rock-ribbed Republican loyal to the party for more than Ten Minutes wonder why Trump would deliberately alienate and trash-talk four of the party’s all time Champion Vote Getters? And the only other one on the list (Reagan) is dead. Even more, the most recent, and highest rated all-time Republican Voter Turnout Champ is Mitt Romney, whom Trump repeatedly insults and calls a ‘loser”. Republican Unity is a mangy unicorn in Trump’s imagination.
Since 2004 there has been a significant jump in voter participation, from about 100 million through the year 2000, to 120 million in 2004, and most recently to 130 million in 2012. This rather substantial spike can be largely attributed to massive and persistent new voter registration drives state by state, rather than increased turnout rates for long-time registered, but dormant voters. Both major political parties have invested money, technical resources, and tremendous amounts of volunteer and staff time, alongside the more traditional non-partisan efforts (civic clubs, the League of Women Voters, and educators at schools) to accomplish this welcome trend of greater participation.
Taking everything into account, in 2016 one would predict then at least 130 million votes will be cast. Given the intense media attention to the race, the controversies already laid bare, evidence for another well-funded massive voter registration effort underway, and despite nasty and persistent voter suppression efforts in too many states (reduction of early voting days, closing of polling places, repeated foul-ups with privately-contracted voting equipment, complicated and unnecessary voter I.D. requirements for long-time established voters) we may easily see 135-140 million votes cast on November 8th.
The change from 2000 to 2004 was 15 million more voters, about 14%. A similar change from 2012 to 2016, adding 15 million votes, would make the projected total 142 million votes. Let’s be conservative and say we expect about 135 million votes for President in November, to keep it real.
However, for my money, the more the merrier for advancing American civic freedoms.
A Sketch of an Outline for the Fall Campaign
The broad outlines of the fall campaign have already been rather firmly set. African-American voters are lost to the Republicans and Trump. Less than 10% will vote for him. Earning increased support from Hispanics as a group was the clarion call of the national Republican party after the 2012 loss. That hope has been burned to the ground by Trump’s overt disdain and direct attacks on Mexicans, immigrants, and anybody looking and sounding foreign, including his fatuous mantra about a Beautiful Wall, which by the way will never be built.
At high tide Republicans might reach 20% of the Hispanic vote this year, based on 2016 polling. This is a significant drop from 2012 when Romney and McCain got about 30% of their votes, or 2004 when Bush II gained the support of 44% of Hispanic votes, even as the eligible Hispanic voter population mushrooms, particularly in the contested Battleground states. But then none of these other Republicans deliberately trashed an entire ethnic group.
Republicans have cornered a strong majority of non-Hispanic white males for some time (62% for Romney in 2012). This is essentially the same proportion as Reagan received in 1980, Bush I in 1988, and Bush II in 2004.
From David Bernstein in Politico on March 4, 2016:
So what happened? Between Reagan and Romney, the white male share of the total vote had dropped from 45 percent to 35 percent. The two biggest factors: From Reagan to Romney, Hispanics’ share of the national vote soared from 2 percent to 10 percent; and women, post-feminism, jumped from casting 49 percent of all ballots to 53 percent. Winning the same percentage of white men got the party less and less. And those changes have continued. It will get the GOP even less this year. That’s why Trump needs to jack the number up so high.
Non-Hispanic white men are now 31% of voters in 2016. Their relative influence on the election outcome will continue to decline through sheer weight of numbers. It would require an historic performance not achieved by any Republican since the civil rights era began in the 1960’s to swing the overall vote for Trump based on his pumped up appeals to non-Hispanic white males. There just is not enough realistic upside. *** The RNC recognized this reality after 2012, and nothing has changed in their reality based calculus.
For Trump to win he must solve the Woman Card Problem. And that means producing a crushingly good performance among Republican and Republican-leaning Independent women. They are the biggest and most critical swing group in 2016. The biggest prize of persuadable voters.
Trump can’t win without them. In large numbers.
The Republican Woman Pie
There are 135 million 2016 voters anticipated. 53% of them will be women. 47% of women voters have a Party identification as Republican or Republican-leaning Independent.
Voila! The pool of Republican women to be wooed, persuaded, convinced, appealed to, threatened, or muscled is 33.6 million votes. The last three Presidential elections resulted in popular vote margins of 4.98 million (2012), 9.55 million (2008), and 3.01 million (2004) for the winner, an average margin of just under 6 million votes in each election.
So the body of women voters who name themselves Republicans is almost 6 times larger than the entire victory margin in the last three elections. Women have voted 2% less Republican than their party I.D. would imply, a party shortfall of about 670 thousand votes, if the status quo were to repeat. That sort of historical differential is not helpful for Republicans, but not lethal either.
That is, if Trump can somehow persuade the vast majority of Republican women to vote with him (say 85%-90%), while simultaneously goosing a substantial additional number of his core non-Hispanic white males to come aboard.
But the Republican P.N. is Donald Trump. He has a woman problem. A very serious problem. Since polling began for this election in July 2015, he has been reliably underwater with women voters. The problem has worsened with time, as he has made a number of truly cringe-worthy remarks, insulting and demeaning women of all stripes about defects he perceives in their physical appearance, disgusting bathroom habits, blood from their wherevers, and lack of professional competence; his opposition to family-friendly policies for day care, family leave, and a minimum wage increase; his public display of his peculiar sexual proclivities and fantasies; and his proposals to meddle with 40 year old court guaranteed women’s reproductive rights, among other things. Not an exhaustive list.
He continues to regularly step in it, and then obliviously track it inside. His wife and daughter defend his conduct, saying they don’t see it.
As a consequence, and despite his campaign’s attempts to rehabilitate his soiled reputation and woo back the female army of doubters, his support among women continues to suffer greatly.
According to Gallup, as of April 1, among all women, Trump currently sports a 23% approval. This is 6-points worse than his position in July 2015, at the start of polling. More troubling for Republicans as a whole, his unfavorable numbers rose over the same period from 58% to 70%., which means undecided women are making up their minds, and not in a good way for Trump.
Even this isn’t the really bad news. Democratic women voters can’t stand him. His favorable numbers are 7%, unfavorable 89%. Only 4% are on the fence. Near universal rejection. By 53% of 53% of all projected voters, i.e. the Democratic women out there.
The gloomy bright spot for Trump with women is that among Republican women his favorable rating is a whopping 49%. The tarnish is that since Republicans have counted on 45% of all women to vote for them, Trump is sadly underperforming. His projected total as of April 1 is 8% of the 53% Democratic share of women voters plus 49% of the 47% Republican share of women voters, or 27% of the total women’s vote, or Women’s Card, if you will.
Republican candidates since 2004 have won 45% of the women’s vote (the majority block of all voters) on average, and yet they have lost the election 2 out of 3 times. Trump sweeps the trash clean in the Republican political establishment with his huge, better new broom, and promptly delivers an 18-point (40%) collapse among women voters expected to support the party in just 6-months time. That’s a potential starting gate loss (13.4 million voters) nearly equal to the grand total of all new voters that can reasonably be imagined to register for both parties this entire year. And since 2004, Democrats have consistently registered more new voters than Republicans in presidential election years.
Further, as of May 15, both the Democratic party and HC’s campaign independently have many more staff operatives and much more money in hand already working on voter registration drives than the Republican party (Trump has none on his own dime), all over the country, but especially in the 11 or so Battleground states. This is what the Trump campaign has taken to calling a catch-up opportunity in progress now that Trump has turned his mind away from breaking other Republican candidate’s eggs in the primary contests (as he famously told the Washington Post recently).
There is another smoldering glitch in a Trump based calculus for women. Trump has been hampered by the fervent support of white supremacists and other groups he is slow to disavow, but does not openly welcome. America, sadly, has not achieved a color-blind nirvana, despite having elected and then re-elected the first African-American president. It is perfectly clear that some proportion of whites, both male and female, voted more against a black man than in favor of either Romney or McCain. How many? It would be impossible to tell.
Embedded in the cross tabs from 2012 are the data that while Romney won 44% of the overall women’s vote (about what was expected historically), he actually won 58% of the white women’s vote, a much higher percentage than normally observed. Trump would not benefit from a similar racial disincentive against either Clinton or Sanders as Democratic nominees.
The Democratic nominee this year will be white, just like Trump. Part of the malign feeling in this country for the last eight years will dissipate (how fast who can say), and make some hostile voters persuadable again. A run by Clinton as the first female nominee of a major American political party is an historic event, win or lose, for all American women. There is likely to be some cross-over support for her from Republican women on the basis of gender, just as there was some cross-over support from usual Democrats to the Republican nominees against Obama because of his race. No one wants to talk about it too much, but facts is facts. How many? Who can tell? But any amount cuts against Trump’s chances.
Trump does not have clean hands here, however much he deflects the issue. He was a vocal and obnoxious instigator of the failed Birther movement in 2011 and 2012, refusing to accept even the long-form Hawaii birth certificate of the President when it was released to the public. Trump was shamefully wrong. Voters chose the Kenyan-born Muslim with the foreign sounding middle name, not once but twice, straight up. It still sticks in Trump’s craw.
Hillary has no racial millstone around her neck.
Watching from the gallery here in May, Trump’s Woman Card hand looks like a pair of deuces and nothing bet on the biggest pot of the evening.
Republican women, the last bet is to you. You decide.
End Note Story
Trump’s woman problem brings to mind a story, recycled many times, in both P.G. and N.S.F.W. versions.
The first one I found is from the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup (1933):
The famous phrase “Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” is often referred to as a Groucho Marx quote, but it was actually delivered by Chico, in his characteristic Italian accent, in Duck Soup (1933) , playing the character Chicolini while impersonating Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho).
Chico dressed as Groucho (The President of Freedonia) says to Margaret Dumont:
Mrs. Teasdale:
Your Excellency, I thought you’d left!
Chicolini:
Oh no, I no leave.
Mrs. Teasdale:
But I saw you with my own eyes!
Chicolini:
Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?
The second version of the story is from stand-up comedian Richard Pryor (1982).
Be forewarned. Not Safe for Workplace (NSFW) viewing. This clip contains crude language and explicit sexual references. It is intended for adults. It is also brilliant comedy by a very sharp American social commentator.
Richard Pryor (1982) in a Red Suit and Gold Shoes. Priceless!
From Richard Pryor’s concert show “Live on the Sunset Strip” (1982) in a routine titled Emotional Feelings. The story is delivered in the first 35 seconds of the video clip. Pryor nails it here. In fact, the entire show is brutally honest and side-splittingly funny.****
Richard Pryor’s bold fashion statement here is part of the show. Compare to the burgundy 3-piece suit with matching burgundy patent leather shoes Trump wore on New York Streets while he was wining and dining the ladies in the 1970’s (which has been written about in books and magazines). Pryor’s flashy choice works. Pryor is a showman and social critic. Trump wants to be the President.
It is so very hard to keep your eyes clenched tight to believe the fairy tale again, when it’s the nth time you’ve heard it all.
You know what to do. Throw the bum out. And change the locks on the door.
*The Grand Canyon is truly one of the natural wonders of the world. I last visited the National Park during an extended auto trip in 2004 from Louisiana to Los Angeles and back to handle a sad family obligation. The view from the top of the gorge can induce vertigo. The scale and grandeur of this natural outdoor cathedral is enough to inspire a belief in God. For me anyway. A leisurely visit to the Park and environs should be on every American’s To Do Before I Die bucket list. Please go, but tread lightly to preserve it for our great-great grandchildren and theirs to come.
**From the Wikipedia entry about Helen Reddy’s song ”I Am Woman” (!971):
“I Am Woman” is a song written by Australian-American artist Helen Reddy and singer-songwriter Ray Burton and performed by Reddy. The first recording of the song appeared on Reddy’s debut album I Don’t Know How to Love Him, released in May 1971, and was heard during the closing credits for the 1972 film Stand Up and Be Counted. A new recording of the song was released as a single in May 1972 and became a number one hit later that year, eventually selling over one million copies. The song came at the apex of the counterculture era and, by celebrating female empowerment, became an enduring anthem for the women’s liberation movement.
In a 2003 interview in Australia’s Sunday Magazine (published with the Sunday Herald Sun and Sunday Telegraph), she explained:
I couldn’t find any songs that said what I thought being woman was about. I thought about all these strong women in my family who had gotten through the Depression and world wars and drunken, abusive husbands. But there was nothing in music that reflected that.
The only songs were ‘I Feel Pretty’ or that dreadful song ‘Born A Woman’. (The 1966 hit by Sandy Posey had observed that if you’re born a woman “you’re born to be stepped on, lied to, cheated on and treated like dirt. I’m glad it happened that way”.) These are not exactly empowering lyrics. I certainly never thought of myself as a songwriter, but it came down to having to do it.
Reddy’s own long years on stage had also fueled her contempt for men who belittled women, she said. “Women have always been objectified in showbiz. I’d be the opening act for a comic and as I was leaving the stage he’d say, ‘Yeah, take your clothes off and wait for me in the dressing room, I’ll be right there’. It was demeaning and humiliating for any woman to have that happen publicly.”
In the year that Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine was launched in the US and Cleo in Australia, the song quickly captured the imagination of the burgeoning woman’s movement. National Organization for Woman founder Betty Friedan was later to write that in 1973, a gala entertainment night in Washington DC at the NOW annual convention closed with the playing of “I Am Woman”. “Suddenly,” she said, “woman got out of their seats and started dancing around the hotel ballroom and joining hands in a circle that got larger and larger until maybe a thousand of us were dancing and singing, ‘I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman.’ It was a spontaneous, beautiful expression of the exhilaration we all felt in those years, woman really moving as woman.”
When Reddy’s performance of the song at the 1981 Miss World contest infuriated feminists, she responded: “Let them step forward and pay my rent and I’ll stay home. What I’m doing is advertising a product I wouldn’t use.”
Reddy had been quoted as saying, “To this day I get mail from women who say, I went to law school because of your song. But I would hate to think out of the wide spectrum of things I have done in my career, that’s all I would be remembered for. “But in her autobiography, The Woman I Am : A Memoir, she recalls a 2000 encounter with a friend’s high-school-aged nephew who said that “in his assigned Modern American History textbook, in a section on the rise of feminism in the 70s, I was mentioned along with the printed lyrics to ‘I Am Woman’.”
Reddy’s description of the “typical DJ reaction” to the song is quoted in The Billboard Book of Number One Hits: “‘”I can’t stand this record! I hate this song! But you know, it’s a funny thing, my wife loves it!”‘”
The No-Wall building constraint is only partly because construction would defy basic principles of civil engineering design and construction practice along the 1,255 miles of the U..S. Mexican border that happens to run right smack down the middle of the Rio Grande River, subject to God’s plan in altering the river‘s course. It would also abrogate a number of international Treaties, such as the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which established the border, and which are not under the unilateral control of the U.S., much less the executive control of el Presidente to Be Senor Trump. Of course, DT wouldn’t know any of these pesky details. He has a definite concept, or suggestion, about his beautiful wall, to use his new phrasing lexicon.
In graduate school, we learned a rather general concept which frequently applies to complex problems in business, economics, pollution control, various engineering fields, medicine, and environmental sciences. It is called the 80/20 Rule. The technical name for the concept is the Pareto Principle.
***From the Wikipedia entry:
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who, while at the University of Lausanne in 1896, published his first paper “Cours d’économie politique.” Essentially, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; Pareto developed the principle by observing that 20% of the peapods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.
It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.” Mathematically, the 80–20 rule is roughly followed by a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution) for a particular set of parameters, and many natural phenomena have been shown empirically to exhibit such a distribution.
A Simplified Graphic Representation of a Pareto Principle Curve
An application of the Pareto Principle might go something like this. You get 80% of the benefit of a project by spending only the first 20% of the budget. To achieve the last 20% of the benefit of a project requires you to spend 80% of the allowable resources. Variable and diminishing marginal returns.
Republicans already have achieved capture of 62% of the non-Hispanic white male vote. They have benefited from the high return per dollar portion of the Pareto distribution. To raise that number any worthwhile amount higher would cost more resources than they can provide (money, expertise, volunteers, paid staff), or alternatively take longer than they can afford to wait, in 2016. An increase in the male white vote for Trump has a very limited practical ceiling between now and November, without distorting all the other work the campaign must perform.
****Listen to the full audio album released for Pryor’s “Live on the Sunset Strip” (1982) show.