livingston
20×102mm Vulcan
How Women in Media Missed the Women’s Vote
The election of Donald Trump has shaken identity politics to its foundations. Appealing to minorities, women, and the LGBTQ population—the so-called “coalition of the ascendant”—was supposed to guarantee Democratic rule into something like perpetuity. Yet more than one in four Hispanics apparently voted for a man who has promised to build a wall to prevent other Hispanics from coming illegally to the United States. An angry, isolated Rust Belt working class flipped the race card, placing a successful bet on its own sense of group grievance. And 53 percent of white women preferred a Mad Men-era womanizer to the would-be first woman president.
That last fact especially should be prompting a serious reckoning among Democratic political consultants and in liberal-media conference rooms. How many times did we hear that women—more than half the voting population, remember—would thrill to the prospect of breaking the “highest, hardest glass ceiling?” How many articles chronicled the disgust women felt for the sexist comments and stories of groping by the Republican candidate? The mismeasure of the women’s vote couldn’t be because men were driving the conversation. Over the past few decades, women have filled campaign staff rooms, press pools, and media opinion pages.
No, ironically, the problem is that women in media have spun their own cocoon.
How Women in Media Missed the Women’s Vote
The election of Donald Trump has shaken identity politics to its foundations. Appealing to minorities, women, and the LGBTQ population—the so-called “coalition of the ascendant”—was supposed to guarantee Democratic rule into something like perpetuity. Yet more than one in four Hispanics apparently voted for a man who has promised to build a wall to prevent other Hispanics from coming illegally to the United States. An angry, isolated Rust Belt working class flipped the race card, placing a successful bet on its own sense of group grievance. And 53 percent of white women preferred a Mad Men-era womanizer to the would-be first woman president.
That last fact especially should be prompting a serious reckoning among Democratic political consultants and in liberal-media conference rooms. How many times did we hear that women—more than half the voting population, remember—would thrill to the prospect of breaking the “highest, hardest glass ceiling?” How many articles chronicled the disgust women felt for the sexist comments and stories of groping by the Republican candidate? The mismeasure of the women’s vote couldn’t be because men were driving the conversation. Over the past few decades, women have filled campaign staff rooms, press pools, and media opinion pages.
No, ironically, the problem is that women in media have spun their own cocoon.
How Women in Media Missed the Women’s Vote
