We are finally at the end point. On Tuesday, November 5, 2024, we will begin to have an inkling of what kind of country we will be living in come January 20, 2025. It will be either a Democracy or an Autocracy. We will have our first Black/Indian Woman president, or we will have an adjudicated rapist who has multiple convictions, including 34 felonies, as president. As I wrote last week, this election is not about his character, it is about ours.
But to go even further into the electorate mind, this election, the fate of our future, rests on the votes of a majority of white women. In 2020, this voting block went for Trump by roughly 54% to 43%. These numbers were a factor in how close the vote was based on the electoral college vote, not the popular vote. The number of white women voting for Trump from 2016 to 2020 grew by about seven percentage points, the largest increase of any voting block. Read that again, grew by seven percent!
This is why it is my belief the future of our democracy rests at the feet of white women living in our great country. If they swing for Trump again in the same or increased numbers, Trump and Project 2025 will become the law of the land and our democracy is lost for who knows how long, maybe forever.
Try as I can, I can’t wrap my head around their thinking in a vote for Trump. This is a man who:
- Is an adjudicated rapist
- Believes it is okay to grab a woman by the pussy (and has done so)
- Walked in on teenage beauty pageants contestants who were changing during a competition
- Went on several trips with Epstein to his island—Epstein is a known pedophile and child-sex trafficker
- Mocked a disabled person
- Swindled people who attended Trump University
- Used funds illegally from his charity
- Encouraged people to drink bleach to cure Covid
- Through his picks for Supreme Court Justices, overturned Roe v Wade, which is now causing the deaths and sterilizations of women across the country due to lack of reproductive health care
- Incites violence, including the January 6 insurrection
- Insults women on the daily
- Tells lies upon lies upon lies
- Most recently stated a woman who disagrees with him should have nine rifles pointed at her face
This is the man, a man who believes women are his playthings because he is famous, and that if someone doesn’t agree with him then they are the enemy, deserving of punishment.
This is the man 54% of white women want as the leader of our country, someone who supports white supremacists.
It is, in my opinion, the crux of it, that Trump supports white supremacists as the reason 54% white women have, at least in the past, voted for Trump. Although it may not be blatant, maybe not even a conscious decision, but race plays into that 54% of white women’s vote for Trump.
I have come to this thinking, which is hard for me because I have many white women in my own circle and family who are Trump supporters, that it seems implicit bias for white supremacy that is driving this group of white woman voters at the polls. This did not occur to me until after reading the book, Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson. Wilkerson lays it out quite succinctly that, when many of us can’t understand why someone votes against their own best interests (abortion, reproductive rights, social safety net, increase in minimum wage, etc.), it isn’t because they don’t understand these are at stake. No, they will vote for their tribe, for their perceived privilege, their whiteness over all other things. They will suffer the consequences of losing things as long as they don’t lose their white privilege for, not necessarily themselves, but for their children. As another put it, their boys.
So, it comes down to a choice. To me, as a white man, I’m voting for my daughter and her rights and a place in society as an equal, not a plaything or less than of any man. White women, those 54% must also make a choice, a choice between their daughter’s and granddaughter’s futures or their whiteness. I know this is very blunt, but we are living in blunt times in which the stakes are such as they have never been before.
I urge all of us, especially those 54% of white women to vote for the other women and girls in your lives, to vote for Democrats up and down the ticket. Don’t throw our country away, your rights away, my rights away, for a man who does not deserve a place at your table let alone the presidency of the United States of America.
We’ll know soon enough how you have chosen. We’ll know soon enough if we live in a democracy in which freedom for all stands. Or you will know soon enough the consequences of Project 2025 when it becomes the law of the land. The former offers hope for a better tomorrow, the later offers pain and hardship.
I know which I’m choosing. How will you?
As November 5 dawns on us, please keep the following in mind as you vote:
Personal Reflections of a Middle-Aged Man 