Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Politics In General CIA Analyst: Given Russian interference, President Election must be done over

If you actually bother to look at the numbers you will see that I'm not sexist, just very disappointed in them. I think you will be too.

The accusation leveled at women voters is clear: They didn’t just betray the woman who tried to shatter the ultimate glass ceiling, they also failed each other.

The problem is that accusation is misleading at best and inaccurate at worst. To start, assertions that Clinton did not win over women voters are simply not true. A majority of women backed Clinton over Donald Trump, 54 percent to 42 percent. Exit-poll data indicates that 94 percent of black women and 68 percent of Hispanic women voted for Clinton. “If only women voted in this election [and no one else], Clinton would have won,” commented Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “I think that this narrative about Clinton failing to win white women really overshadows the strong support she had among all women, and women of color in particular.”

To understand that kind of calculation, consider how one white woman voting for Trump explained her support to New York magazine ahead of the election:

There isn’t any perfect person on the planet. I heard that he said something about groping women, and I’m thinking, Okay, No. 1, I think that’d be great. I like getting groped! I’m heterosexual. I’m a woman, and when a guy gropes me, I get groping on them! I grope them back. Groping is a healthy thing to do. When you’re heterosexual, you grope, okay? It’s a good thing. Try it.

.....suggests that far from failing to convert white women to her cause, Clinton actually succeeded in winning the votes of at least some white women for whom support for the Democratic candidate in the election was never a given.

According to Pew Research data, most women identify as Democrats, but white women are more likely than not to identify as Republican. That suggests that white women did not abandon Clinton, since many were likely to vote for the Republican candidate regardless of who ended up as the nominee for either party. Yet even so, Clinton still managed to win 51 percent of college-educated white women to Trump’s 45 percent—a partisan reversal from the 2012 election when then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney won 52 percent of college-educated white women while Barack Obama won 46 percent.