One month later, liberal elites are still processing the stunning outcome of the 2024 presidential election—and in particular, exit polls showing that women voters gave Donald Trump his margin of victory.
Trump the felon. Trump the womanizer. Trump the sexist, racist, fascist. Trump the threat to democracy who orchestrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Trump—with his “childless cat lady”-shaming running mate—once again standing athwart history against America’s first woman president. This is who American women just sent to the Oval Office? How could they?
Very easily, it turns out.
In 2024, Trump improved on his 2020 showing with women overall, young women, Hispanic women, and Asian women. He did better among black women than he did in 2016, despite a black woman leading the other ticket. He won an outright majority among white women, and won “bigly” (63 percent) among white women without college degrees.
Inside the woke bubble—where left-wing donors, activists, and media cheerleaders craft the narratives they believe drive public opinion—this closing of the political gender gap seemed impossible. (One of the few demographic groups that moved markedly leftward over the last four years was college-educated white women: the Party of Karen.)
In the real world, where the vast majority of American women actually live, this shift was inevitable. Most American women are turning to the right because the elite left has turned against most American women.
According to exit polls, women voters’ top concerns in 2024 were the economy and “threats to our democracy.” By contrast, Democrats’ top campaign messages were “abortion-on-demand” and “Orange Man Bad.”
Those issues certainly flattered affluent, credentialed liberal women. But they alienated the rest of us.
Abortion-on-demand is a luxury political cause. It is meaningful primarily to women so economically secure that four years of Bidenflation did not hurt them. The ladies of The View have no idea how much eggs or milk or gasoline cost. They have no notion of living paycheck to paycheck, let alone at a time when prices are rising faster than wages.
Every issue the left promotes reeks of this same privileged insulation from reality.
To elite liberal women, open borders make housekeeping and kitchen renovations more affordable. To everyone else, it means crime, violence, and suppressed wages for working men and women.
To elite liberal women, President Joe Biden’s “forgiveness” of student loans was a fitting reward to Josh and Caitlin for getting their master’s degrees. To the rest of us, it was an unconscionable, illegal transfer of wealth from working people who didn’t go to college to privileged kids who did.
To elite liberal women, woke fanaticism is a wellspring of cheap grace—and for some HR executives, almost unimaginable power. To normal women, it’s more like tyranny. Their teenage daughters are being forced to shower with sexually confused boys and lose out on roster slots and athletic scholarships to biological males. Their kindergarten-aged sons are being subjected to shaming for their “privilege.” Their husbands are being investigated by Biden’s FBI as suspected terrorists for going to church too often.
This does not even cover the spillover effects of the Great Awokening on Democrat policymaking: The fetid public disorder in blue cities, local politicians masking kids and closing schools without scientific justification, the surge of anti-Semitism on our college campuses, the normalization of giving kids puberty blockers without their parents’ consent. Not to mention, the vast, left-wing conspiracy to hide President Biden’s mental decline from the public.
It is tempting to look at the ferment of the last few years and say, “The world just went crazy.” Except it didn’t. It was the elite left who went crazy; then, they weaponized public institutions to censor and punish dissent. And when the public noticed, they denied any of it was happening.
There is no cancel culture, they said. Social media algorithms do not “shadowban” content that isn’t politically correct. Critical race theory is not taught in American classrooms. The border is secure. America’s economy is better than it has been in forty years.
Meanwhile, the other side of the Democrats’ campaign message—“Orange Man Bad!”—only reminded Americans that life was actually better when Trump was president. Whatever his faults, during Trump’s first term America was at peace and the border was secure. Before the pandemic, wages were rising, prices were stable, and Trump was probably heading toward re-election.
Polls consistently found these commonsense impressions—that the country was in bad shape, out-of-touch Democrats were to blame, and Trump was an acceptable alternative—all year. A handful of earthbound Democrats, from James Carville to Joe Manchin to John Fetterman, urged their leaders to drop the woke jihad and focus on kitchen-table issues.
But the Party of Karen knew better.
At every turn, they answered skepticism about their outré messaging with condescension and anger—like the proverbial American tourist abroad who thinks that if he yells English loud enough the stupid natives will understand him.
First they tried gaslighting us about Biden’s fitness for office; then they tried to make Kamala Harris cool. But “brat summer,” “Momala,” and “joy” wouldn’t bring down the price of bacon. So they went for harder sells: Trump will ban IVF; Trump will ban birth control; Trump is literally Hitler. But they refused, seemingly on principle, to acknowledge women’s concerns and try to address them.
Instead, they made a Julia Roberts-voiced commercial reassuring swing-state women that in the privacy of the voting booth, they could secretly vote for Harris without their MAGA husbands and boyfriends knowing about it.
The ad is the perfect coda for the elite left’s 2024 humiliation. After four years of inflation, crime, war, border crisis, abuses of power, censorship, and government-sanctioned child predation, liberal elites called on American women to finally stand up to those vicious, bullying thugs.
They did.
Rachel Bovard is vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
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Image by Gage Skidmore, provided by Flickr, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
