If more than seven decades of American political history is any guide, most white women who vote in next month’s elections will probably cast ballots for Republicans in races nationwide that will ultimately decide control of the House and Senate.
They will reject the party that wants to codify abortion rights, ban assault weapons, and restore voting rights. They will support the party of insurrection and its sympathizers which manufactures grievance, condones racism, and ardently clings to the lie that the 2020 presidential election must have been stolen because Donald Trump lost.
Oh, and they will protect white supremacy.
When 47 percent of white women who voted in 2016 cast their ballots for Trump, there was a lot of confusion. How could Hillary Clinton, the first woman nominated for president by a major party, lose her own demographic by two points to a bombastic oaf accused of sexual assault and misconduct by more than 20 women? A man who, only weeks before the election, was heard on rediscovered audio boasting about kissing women and grabbing their vaginas without their consent?
Of course even with Clinton facing a Republican nominee as terrible as Trump, history was never on her side. Only twice since 1952 have a majority of white women who voted supported the Democratic choice for president — Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton.
White women voting for Trump was business as usual, even if few pundits wanted to admit it. Instead they concocted excuses, saying that white women voted in lockstep with the men in their lives. This not only sounded like “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” it was also untrue.
In 2019 I talked to Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers about her book, “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South.” Dating back to the colonial period, what emerged was a “racially divided social order where whiteness has a value that being a woman just does not have,” Jones-Rogers, an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “I see time and time again in my research that when white women are given a choice, they overwhelmingly choose to be empowered by whiteness, and to embrace white supremacy.”
It’s a convenient excuse to say that white women who support Republicans vote against their own interest. It’s also wrong. Their interest is protecting whiteness and access to power structures that, even though dominated by conservative white men, benefit them in ways their gender does not.
What happened in 2016 was not an aberration. An even larger percentage of white women voted for Trump in 2020. One should never underestimate how desirable white supremacy is to people who would never consider themselves to be white supremacists but eagerly reap its ill-gotten rewards.
Now with democracy under assault as never before from enemies within this nation’s borders, we’re on the precipice of what could be the most consequential midterm elections of our lifetimes. Nothing less than this nation’s founding political vision, along with the civil and constitutional rights of millions, is on the ballot.
And while there have been numerous stories in recent weeks about the importance of Latino voters during this election cycle and whether Democrats are taking Black voters, their most loyal constituency, for granted (again), there hasn’t been much analysis about what white women will do at the polls. They’ve largely gotten a pass as this nation slides toward the abyss.
It’s as if the shock of 2016 has degraded into tacit acceptance that white women voters will lean into the benefits of their race and assume their whiteness alone will shield them from the worst Republican policies that target women’s rights and agency.
From Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado to Kari Lake, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Arizona, white women have increasingly become the public face of Trumpism — which is the Republican Party. They are 2020 election deniers. They embrace dangerous white Christian nationalism. They threaten democracy every time they refuse to say whether they will accept a losing outcome in their November races. And they will faithfully do the bidding of the twice-impeached one-term former president who fired up a deadly insurrection against democracy and could do so again.
In the 2018 midterms, a slight majority of white women backed Democrats, helping them to regain control of the House. As the days to this year’s elections tick down, the overriding question remains whether a majority of voters in key states will spurn the cesspool of Trumpism and white supremacist hate to preserve America’s incomplete but lofty principles.
On Nov. 8, our democracy is on the line. But in a much more polarized nation, don’t count on white women to save it.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.