Washington Post Thinks Anti-Trump Women Count More

The Washington Post pronounced “big” trouble for Donald Trump with female voters on Thursday.

Reporter James Hohmann looked at The Post’s own tracking poll, conducted alongside ABC News, and saw that Donald Trump is losing college-educated white women by 27 points. Judging from his coverage, he barely seemed to notice Trump is leading with non-college-educated women by 28 points.

“She’s just not the kind of woman who is acceptable to The Washington Post.”

Hohmann posits the college-aged female demographic is very important, especially to Republicans. He writes that in 2012, polls found one in five voters in 2012 were college-educated white women.

And Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney won them by 6 points, according to exit polls.

Hohmann reasonably implies that could be the reason Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is ahead in their poll by 2 points. He could be right.

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But he downplayed to the extreme the fact Trump is overperforming, as the pollsters say, with women who don’t have a college degree. He also downplays the fact that Clinton, despite being the first female presidential candidate, is winning women overall by 11 points — the same margin President Obama won by with women in 2012, according to the Roper Center.

The ABC News/WaPo tracking poll found “Trump is running up his margin among white women without college degrees. They favor him by 28 points, 61 percent to 33 percent.

Dan Gainor, vice president of Business and Culture at the Media Research Center, mocked The Post’s article.

“That’s a ridiculous story, just more of the media’s claim of the Right’s War on Women,” said Gainor. “Nowhere in that recitation of liberal talking points does it discuss how Hillary treated her husband’s victims like dirt. Instead, it just sets up straw men to boost women voters against Trump. Major media are running a get-out-the-vote campaign for their candidate now.”

Despite The Post’s little dig at Trump on his past statements about women, there are plenty of reasons for women — college-educated or not — to support Trump.

Trump says he will add millions of jobs to the economy. Trump says he will renegotiate bad trade deals. Trump says he will upgrade and stimulate the military, which employs many soldiers but also employs many factory workers, indirectly through defense contracts, at high-technology, high-wage plants.

And women without a college degree are more vulnerable to the highs and lows and even the small movements of the economy. Just as are men without a college degree.

If power costs at a steel plant go up, they get laid off.

If there are cuts in the military budget, they get laid off.

If consumer demand or confidence drops, they get laid off.

It all explains why Trump has done so well with blue-collar voters. The economy and jobs trump other issues that the media and Beltway pundits are so fascinated by. Being outraged at Trump because CNN is outraged doesn’t help pay the bills in middle America and the flyover states.

From a political point of view, of course it’s important to win college-educated white women.

The Post points out why: “But the preference for Clinton among college-educated, white women matters a great deal because they habitually turn out to vote at higher rates than almost every other group of voters, including less-educated women. So, in an election with lagging enthusiasm, this constituency packs a bigger punch.”

But Clinton is the one with the enthusiasm problem.

And the Census Bureau indicates that 32.7 percent of women have a bachelor’s degree. Most women don’t — so Trump’s gains there could offset what the GOP candidate has lost with college-educated white women.

If you swap that demographic for a larger one among white women, that seems to be a major offset. NPR noted on Sept. 13 that white working-class voters were fleeing the Democratic Party, based on a Pew Research study.

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“When Pew sliced the electorate into different demographic groups, they found that white men and white people without a college degree have made a remarkable recent swing from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party,” wrote Danielle Kurtzleben.

But that’s not the story, of course. The story is always Trump’s woes. And nothing he does can right it. Hohmann notes with cynicism that Trump is sending his daughter, Ivanka, to New Hampshire and Detroit suburbs.

“One particularly oddball comment is how [the article] treats Ivanka Trump as one of the people who ‘might not be the best surrogates to woo the kinds of college-educated women Trump needs,'” Gainor writes. “Ivanka is successful in her own right. She graduated from Wharton [Business School at the University of Pennsylvania]. And I’ve heard her speak long before election time and she electrified an entire convention. She’s just not the kind of woman who is acceptable to The Washington Post.”

Some women are just naturally more equal than others it seems — in The Washington Post’s world.