By Emily Zanotti
Friday, November 07, 2014
Republicans are jubilant after their electoral victories
Tuesday night — but it might be that Democratic losses tell a more complete
story than GOP gains.
While voters almost uniformly backed conservative
candidates, they also supported ballot measures out of sync with the
traditional Republican party platform. Sure, marijuana legalization — which
passed in the nation’s capital and in Oregon — can be chalked up to a rise in
libertarians (me included), lurking at the margins of the GOP like the
outsiders we’ve been since high school. But voters also approved non-binding
hikes in the minimum wage in four states and three major cities. That’s hardly
a hardline conservative position. So what gives?
The easy answer is that Americans are, on the whole,
idiots, who tune into elections at the last possible moment, when they simply
can’t avoid it any longer. Hence the increase in television commercials the
last two weeks, as the parties compete to see who can more effectively convince
voters that the other guys are more likely to murder their grandmother, child,
puppy, or cable television package — whichever they might find more important.
The hard answer is that Americans, though they might be
the world’s most notorious audience for reality television and professional
wrestling, don’t take kindly to being treated like they’re stupid.
Enter the War on Women, and its condescending notions of
what female voters value. Across this great nation, Democrats entered the
midterm arena eager to talk about one thing: how Republican control of Congress
would lead to inevitable bans on chemical birth control, forced pregnancies,
condom shortages, and mandatory uterus registration. Even now, noted experts on
conservative ideology Sally Kohn and Lizz Winstead claim that the GOP’s gains
have empowered Republicans to chain millions of women to stoves and fertility
monitors — though most longtime supporters know the fractious Republican party
could never accomplish anything so ambitious.
The fact is that women weren’t as enthusiastic as
Democrats thought to hear about imaginary Republican Congressmen hell bent on
their oppression. They showed up at the polls, instead, with other things on
their mind: foreign policy, the economy, immigration, and Ebola. Handing out
free birth control like candy might have worked when voters had nothing else to
worry about, but after a summer of cable news meltdowns, women were more
interested in how candidates proposed to handle bloodsucking terrorists and
rare, foreign communicable diseases. As with many voters, in times of great
trouble and limited trust in their fearless leaders, women shifted their focus
to more pressing matters. And while they weren’t sure the Republicans weren’t
going to make a mess of things once they were handed the baton, they certainly
didn’t trust the Democratic Party. Dems simply missed the message.
It didn’t help that the War on Women morphed into an
improv comedy sketch. In Colorado, where Democrat Mark Udall lost his Senate
seat to Republican Cory Gardner, the campaign ended with a radio ad suggesting
that the GOP would ban birth control, which would cause a statewide shortage of
condoms, which would force the state’s nameless girlfriends to rely on their
boyfriends for condescending political advice. Cosmopolitan magazine, which has
made giving questionable information to its readership an editorial policy,
launched a campaign aimed at educating low-information single female voters,
starting with a complaint about terming young women "Beyoncé voters"
paired with a kickoff graphic of Beyoncé, and ending with a party bus full of
male models carting college students to the polls. Wendy Davis, the candidate
who was going to finally give late-term abortion the platform marquee it so
richly deserves, shied away from any mention of women's issues on the campaign
trail, preferring instead to lampoon her opponent’s disability.
What happened? Mark Udall ended up looking like a
creeper, more concerned with his constituents sex lives than with their
concerns. Wendy Davis lost women by a wide margin. Sandra Fluke, the patron
saint of the contraception mandate, couldn't even get 40 percent of the vote in
her California state senate campaign. And despite Cosmo's best efforts, male
strippers didn't make an impact on the female youth vote. At least, not an
electoral one.
The left put the feminists in their vanguard, and the
whole mess went off a cliff. Women got the message that all the Democrats think
about is their vaginas (when they think about women at all).
Republicans should take this disaster to heart — along
with the understanding that in many places where they made miraculous gains,
those gains were won by ladies. Joni Ernst, Elise Stefanik, and Mia Love all
made history on Tuesday. And while they may not believe it was because they are
of the female persuasion, there's no denying that the Republican caucus will
look very different come January.
Perhaps this trio can keep reminding the Republican
caucus how to speak to women — and let the Democrats keep rolling on the uterus
express.
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